Saturday Revels

Most people look forward to the weekend. When they return to work on Monday, they regale each other with tales of their adventures. 

I bet few of them will say they spent their Saturday washing kittens.

I discovered, much to my dismay, that our three little white kittens were infested with fleas. These are outdoor cats so they are not held to the hygienic standards of house pets. But when we can see the little black specks fur swimming and occasionally jumping off to bite a human, then something has to be done.

We're 11 miles from the nearest store and on a tight gasoline budget, so a trip to find flea powder would have to wait for a regular errand run. I turned to the internet; a Dawn bath was suggested.

I was not going to try to bathe cats by myself so I enlisted Tom's aid. He brought the victims in one by one.

I put a ring of Dawn around the kitten's neck. Fleas will run towards the head when they suspect you're out to get them so the soap necklace served as a barrier. Then we soaked the poor cat in the extra bubbly water.
 

Once the fur was wet, you could see how many fleas there were. Ugh! We tried to comb them out but we don't have a flea comb so that didn't work. We picked out as many as we could be most wouldn't budge. We can only hope the soap killed most of the critters.

When we felt we had tortured each feline enough, we rinsed them off and Tom towel dried them.

They were amazingly cooperative; we didn't get scratched once. Their mom, Dale, also has fleas but I draw the line at trying to wash a full-grown cat. 

They're out in the sun now, complaining to each other about how horrid humans are to helpless kittens.

What did you do this weekend?

Steady on the tiller

This post was going to be a rave review of the cordless Black and Decker Front Tine tiller, and it is a good machine...but you know us and mechanical tools (see  My Generator Rant)

I sold all of my bee equipment and decided to use the money to buy a tiller. We have always dug our garden by hand but I felt like that was getting to be too much for such senior citizens. I knew we could never cope with a gas powered machine and the finicky maintenance so, after tons of research, I decided on the Black and Decker.

I placed the order with Amazon and within a few days the tiller arrived. It required a lot of assembly but it went together fairly quickly. Then I tried to charge the battery. This should take 20 hours the first time but the charger was saying "done!" in 10 minutes and the unit didn't start. I called Black and Decker and they said "bad charger" and sent a new one. Same thing--no charge. So we packaged it back up and ordered a replacement.

At this point, our long suffering UPS driver knew the drill. He claims we are trying to give him a hernia but Tom helps him load the heavy packages so we're forgiven.

It didn't take long for the replacement to arrive. This time the battery charged as advertised. Then we took it for a test run in the garden.

It started right up and immediately bogged down. There was no way I could get it to move and Tom was exhausted after shallowly tilling two rows. We both agreed that it would be less tiring to use a shovel.

I know lots and lots of people happily puttputt down the garden tilling merrily away. I have to believe they have stronger arms than we do or are prithy to some esoteric tiller secrets that we'll never know.

Make no mistake. This is a good tiller, reasonably priced, free from dependence on cords or gasoline. But it doesn't work for us. I have come to the overdue conclusion that most machines are not for us and will not be ordering any more heavy, engine-driven products; maybe I'll spring for an extra shovel.

Our UPS driver will thank us.

Clear Saling

On the way into town the other day, we saw a sign proclaiming "Community Lawn Sales, 10 miles, Saturday". 

I always intend to go to lawn sales but rarely follow through. I don't like getting in and out of the car, driving all over town, and most of these sales consist of children's toys and clothes. But this sounded promising so we headed out early Saturday down West Walnut Road towards a lot of nothing.

It was a lovely ride, lots of hills and trees, and finally a sale. Our arrival coincided with that of two women and two children in an Amish buggy--luckily there was a shaded area to park the horse and the side of the road for us. 

We perused the goods--hmmm, children's toys and clothes. We popped back in the car and drove on. The next two were several miles down the road--some broken down chairs and tools and, yes, children's toys and clothes.

Back in the car. The next sign was at a Firehouse. This at least offered a rest room along with the toys and clothes. At this point we both remarked "If this were New York, there would be a bake sale along with the toys, or at least coffee and donuts."

We had to laugh when we saw the sign for the next sale "Yard Sale and Bake Sale." Finally, something that appealed to us. So we bought our only purchase of the day--cookies and a can of  Big Red.

Big Red is a midwest phenomenon. I had never tried it and decided this was a good time to sample a bit of hometown soda. The flavor is very "red", it's supposed to be cream soda with lemon and other flavors but it tasted like cherry bubblegum to me. I think this is a case, like poi, that you have to have grown up with to enjoy. 

On to the next sale. And there were the Amish ladies again. We all agreed that the pickings were slim at these sales; they were at the limit of their horse and about to turn around but we pressed on, deciding to take a different route home. We did stop at one more sale but the snacks were indeed our only expenditure.

Hills and trees, buggies, cookies, and soda--one of our more enjoyable shopping excursions.

Hay there!

One of my favorite bloggers, Suzanne McMinn, just posted about transporting 55 bales of hay in her car and she and her daughter loading it into their barn Hay the Hard Way 

Our hay story is a bit different but just as hard!

Dennis, the nice gent who owns the picturesque barn across the road, just mowed the field around it.

  
It's been hot, hot, hot, so the hay dried thoroughly in a day.

Tom went over and started raking. He brought over several loads in the lawn cart and I went over later and did several more.

Then he had a brainstorm.

 Why not use one of our gigundo tarps?

He raked several piles into it.

Dragged it across the road, past the garage, and to the shed.

We pushed and shoved and got it inside to unload.

The shed is now partly full of lovely, FREE hay. There's plenty more left and if our backs recover and the heat lets up, we'll be over there raking it up.

Chickens in the Road gets it done with woman power, we do what we can with old people power!

Animal Husbandry?

I will never understand why men are in charge of the human world, on the farm, females rule.

To raise rabbits, we have 3 doe rabbits and

just one buck.

To produce lambs we keep two ewes and

one ram.

We have five hens but 

just the one rooster--and the ladies don't even need him to give us eggs.

Even when I kept bees, it was thousands of females to a handful of drones. And when the guys had served their purpose and were not contributing to the winter hive, the worker bees shoved them out to fend for themselves--there's a lesson there, ladies!

The females provide meat and eggs, milk and honey. The males provide sperm. That's it.

A farm is a matriarchy; maybe we should rename it animal wifery.

Magic Beans

It starts with the names:

Jacob's Cattle, Bumblebee, Black Turtle, Vermont Cranberry, Tiger's Eye, Ying Yang. So evocative and alluring.

And the pictures--blacks and whites, reds, swirls and dots. A visual feast.

Vermont Cranberry, several generations removed from the seed company.

Dry beans.

We don't eat a lot of beans. Chili, baked beans, and bean soup are the sum of the recipes we use. But every year, I'm sucked into dreaming about growing all of the different varieties.

And for a lazy gardener like me, dry beans are the perfect crop.

You plant them like any bean, chuck them in the ground after the soil is warm. They'll grow under the worse conditions and neglect. And repay that neglect by adding nitrogen to your soil.

Then you just wait. With dry beans there is no pressure to harvest young for continued production as there is with green beans. Dry beans you want to grow old and mature on the vine.

In New York State, it was late September until beans were ripe and dry on the vine. Here in Indiana, I just picked my first ever crop of Jacob's Cattle.

Jacob's Cattle is an old bean of unknown provenance. It is supposed to be especially good in baked beans which is why I decided to give it a try.

I planted 2 ounces on May 27, marked the plot and basically forgot about them for the summer. Yes, I did weed once or twice but that was it.


Harvesting dry beans couldn't be easier, just pull up the entire plant.


This is what I gathered today.

And this is what it looks like shelled--9 ounces. 

Not a great yield, but enough to save some for seed for next year and make a small batch of baked beans.

Which brings up two more benefits of dry beans: saving your own seed is as easy as picking the ripe pods and dry beans are ready for your larder-- you pick, pod, and that's it! Ok, clean up the debris a bit, but then you just pour them into a jar--no boiling, no peeling, no canning necessary. They will last for years and years, looking pretty on your shelf and ready to warm your tummy on those cold, winter days.

Make room in your garden next year for a variety of dry beans. Or two, or three...

A rabbit by any other name

Meet our new rabbit buck, Mr. Nutterbutter. He's a lovely Dutch bunny and a proven sire.

Obviously, we did not name him and I can't blame this one on the grandkids. The breeder I bought him from had saddled him with this moniker and I see no reason to change it.

First, because he's used to it and second, because I won't be using it anyway.

Sometime this past year, I have given up on naming the livestock. Ok, we did name the sheep and will probably name the kittens

as soon as we can discover a way to tell them apart. 

But by and large, most of the animals around here are just "Sweetie."

"Hi, Sweetie, how are you this morning?"
"Here ya go, Sweetie, nice, fresh water."
"Thanks for the egg, Sweetie, it's beautiful."

Simple, easy to remember, gender nonspecific, and nondiscriminatory. Kind of my farm version of a waitress's "Hon."

Would you like a warm up, hon, and thanks for reading my blog, Sweetie.