Digging In for the Autumn

Having at last gotten some rain, I could resume my soil improvement efforts. This compulsion to turn over the ground must be a basic survival instinct that has atrophied in sensible people.

The former strawberry bed is one of my recent revitalizing projects. I had plywood pieces over it all summer to kill the invasive but not productive strawberries and the dock, chicory and red clover. The chicory didn't die, so had to be dug up with a shovel. I read that they are great for the soil, but they are not a lot of fun to wrestle out of the earth.

They bring up nutrients from deep in the earth, possibly from China. I read up on how to use chicory for coffee but it sounded like more effort than I cared to expend on ersatz coffee.

This small part of the old strawberry patch required me to loosen the dirt with a shovel, separate the many roots from the soil clinging to it and later till the area. I added broken-up cow manure, pelleted gypsum and limestone, tilled it again and planted it to a cover crop of pinto beans.

The rusty grocery cart is upside down to protect a volunteer cantaloupe from critters. Volunteers usually don't ripen in time, but I'm a sucker for holding out hope that this will be the year that they make it. One year, I did have good luck with growing the vines up through the cart, making a modern cornucopia. 

Cultivating this spot  was a tremendous amount of work but will no doubt be worth it when it can once again be used for garden crops. It was part of the no-topsoil stretch left by the former owners. Apparently weeds care not if they have topsoil or adequate rain.

Meanwhile, my efforts at making Terra Preta in the top tier have paid big dividends. After just a year, that soil is so rich and loamy that I was able to dig the last of the potatoes with my fingers. I added more cow manure and limestone and buried a bucketful of kitchen garbage. Nothing to do now but await fall rains and spring.

The nearby sweet potatoes are being left in the ground until frost, since I read that they develop the biggest tubers late in the season. I read that last year right after I dug them up a tad too early. My daughter Izzy started these for me in the early spring and they have done well with lots of watering.

The next project was to run the big tiller over the once again failed Remote Garden. Like other farmers in the area, I have to rely on summer rains to grow crops up there. If the rains fail to show up, we try again the following year. 

The remaining tomato plant finally started growing after some rain, but it was too late for it to amount to anything. Left to possibly mature in the middle of the plot were some sweet potatoes.  I pulled up a lot of these weeds to allow the soil to dry out slightly. 

After making a few fixes to Big Red (the few that were fortunately within my scope) I worked in a tub of cow manure (that had to be carried up the steep path) and achieved this marvelous tilth. Later, I have plans to incorporate leaves and more manure. That's as soon as my muscles get over being so stiff I can barely walk.

Peep Show

It wasn't good timing for me to need a bag of scratch grains for Betty and Rupert.  The farm supply store was having Chick Days again. Cages of peeping chicks are too adorable to pass by. Lissa encouraged me to get two. I took home three, a Barred Rock, a Buff Orphington and a Rhode Island Red.

They peeped all the way home, in their tiny box on the front seat of the car. They settled into their new cardboard box nursery, where they soon were tuckered out and fell asleep. That was the last time they were quiet in the daytime.

Betty never got broody, so it was up to me to raise some more chicks while the weather was still hot. Chicks are a good entertainment investment, changing daily as they grow to big hens. One morning, Buffy caught a moth. It was good for an impromptu game, with each chick snatching it from the other until it was finally gobbled up.

Every few hours, their water needed to be changed because they scratched pine shavings into it.The new heat lamp wasn't needed for the first nights because we were having an awful heat wave. The babies were safe from the cats and raccoons in the workshop at night. In the daytime, they went out for fresh air in the shade, with a secure old fan screen on the top of the box.

My chicken adviser, Lissa, told me they needed room to exercise. Now that they are a few weeks old,they are taking flying hops around the U-Scratch cage I made for Betty Hen. She turned out to be a lot of trouble to transport and the rooster was left alone in the run, crowing all day long for his lost love.

The chicks, Babs, Buffy and Beatrice, regard me with fear, despite all I've done to make them happy. Getting into the cage to collect them for the night is lots of fun. I found that having the Pet Taxi on end was much better for containing them until they could all be rounded up. Okay, I only found that out after they kept popping back out the door. It did make me laugh. They are the only hysterical critters on the place, resisting my soothing efforts to tame them down.

They are still fascinating, learning new things daily. There are lots of young dandelion greens in the cage that they finally learned how to eat. I was digging the soil nearby, which reminded me of when my own babies were small. I took them out in their baby seats to watch me work in the garden. Isabelle and Lissa, who have March birthdays, enjoy gardening, but Chris, who was born on Halloween, too late for gardening, does not.

Maybe these chicks will turn out to be great garden weeders. Probably not.

Astronomy Cats

Last night when I was stargazing on the back deck, one of the feral cats got brave and came up to eat from the cat food bowl by the telescope. "Midnite" is very wild. I can't leave food out for the cats all night because it attracts raccoons and possums. They attract Beau, who keeps vigil at the sliding door. He goes berserk and wakes me up in the middle of the night.

When I lived in a little town, I went out at night in the snow with my new telescope. I had to rig up a poncho on the clotheslines there to block out some of the many stray lights. It didn't, however, block out stray cats. I had a lawn chair to sit on and found it occupied a lot by Wild Thing, the first of the feral family I called The Wilds.

They lived in an abandoned barn about a block away. The mama cat, Sweetie,  brought me two kittens to feed the following spring, Funny Face and Oreo. Oreo was still young when she encountered something that got hold of her tail. The vet said it was probably an engine belt. It was an expensive operation, and she had to be kept in the garage while she recovered from her tailectomy. Returning from work in the late evening, I would take a book out there and sit with her so she would tame down.

Later, I introduced her to the house cats. Little Mittens was accidentally hit  by Lissa one night. She thought he was dead and took him in her truck to bury him. He revived on the way home and surprised her by being extremely wild. She recovered from her injuries, tamed him down, got him neutered, then brought him to me.

Stormy was a tiny kitten I found in the front yard after a big rain.

When I got to move to the country, I loaded all six fixed cats into carriers and drove them here. Sweetie managed to get out on the long drive and spent the trip on my shoulder, complaining loudly. They all took to the place at once and lived in the playhouse that had a cat door. Sadly, all but Oreo died or went missing in the years that followed. She has always been the most wary, which has kept her alive. Also, sleeping in bed with me, Iris and Bogie is not too dangerous and she is fairly safe from predators on the couch.

Fluffy was even more of a miserable specimen when I first glimpsed her. It's hard for a long-haired cat to live in the wild. Several times, Beau chased her up trees. She did look like a raccoon. This spring, she shed her mat of fur and got much better looking, but hasn't been seen in a while. This was one of her rare daytime visits.

So, my advice for taming wild cats is take up astronomy. Cats trust fellow nocturnal creatures.