Stray Kitten - Happy Ending

A couple of weeks ago, our 14 year old granddaughter came over to ask if we had seen a small kitten.  She had seen it beside their house (next door to us), but it ran away when she approached it.  She was concerned and asked us to keep an eye out for it.  

After she left, I retrieved the SD card from the game camera we have set up in our pole barn.  We feed a couple of stray cats over there and like to keep an eye on what comes and goes.  Here are some pictures from the camera.

The poor little thing was having to run in and grab a little bit of food whenever the adult cats weren't looking.  We set a trap that night and caught it.  However it must have been a scary night for the little thing because of the other critters that come in there looking to clean up what the cats left behind.

I wouldn't be surprised if the large black cat was not a relative.  It is a tom cat that is a frequent visitor.

We transferred the kitten to a carrier and took it to the vet.

She is a little female weighing 2.5 lbs.  The vet estimated her to be about 4 weeks old.  She is FIV negative which is wonderful news.  FIV is the feline equivalent to HIV in humans.  After being treated for fleas and worms and having the first round of immunizations, we brought her home.   

I visited with a couple of people involved in animal rescue about how to "tame" her.  I was told that if you can capture a kitten before 6 weeks of age, then there is a much better chance it can be tamed and make a good pet.  I was also told that you should handle the kitten several times a day, particularly before you feed it.  If it seems it might scratch or bite, then handle it with a towel.  Slip your hand under the towel and stroke it.  It will associate being handled with getting fed.

This approach worked exceptionally well.  After just a couple of days, she would come to the door of her crate and obviously enjoyed human contact.  My granddaughter came over to check on her once or twice a day.  She asked if her parents would let her have the kitten, would it be okay with me. I said sure.  She was elated and immediately named the kitten Luna.

Meet Luna and her happy new owner.

 

Vegetable Broth

While cooking a meal, I normally have a bunch of veggie "scraps". Examples are carrot peelings, celery leaves, beet stems, parsley stems and onion peels. Of course, you can put the celery leaves in a salad or chop beet stems and saute them. But, I decided to make vegetable broth from these simple ingredients, plus some garlic cloves. It was easy!

I tossed everything into a large pot, filled it with water and set it over low heat to cook for a couple of hours. I also added some roasted green pepper that I froze last year in snack bags (an excellent way to preserve any pepper).

It looked like this when finished.

At this point, I just needed to strain out the vegetable remains.  These went into my compost.  I didn't need the broth right then, so I froze it. These are the tools I used. 

It turned out beautifully and is in the freezer waiting for my next pot of vegetable soup.

You don't have to use the same ingredients I did. Use your imagination. Why buy vegetable broth when you can make it free!

Baby Birds

This spring we were honored to have a pair of Eastern Phoebes select our front porch as a nesting site.  Phoebes are small flycatchers.  They have short, thin bills used for catching insects.  Their calls seem to say their name "Fee Bee".  I love these little birds!

(Photo courtesy of Epi Shemming and Cornell Lab of Ornithology)

We frequently see them perched on a fence post or other low perch from which they make short flights to capture insects, often returning to the same perch.  They like to use a shepherd's crook plant hanger near the porch where the nest is.

The nest is made of mud, straw and grass.  It is an amazing feat of engineering which was built in about 2 days time.

The female laid 4 eggs in the nest.  There were five, but apparently one of them got broken.  You can see shell remnants clinging to one of the other eggs.  This picture makes the eggs look much larger than they actually are.  In fact, they are only about half an inch long.

After a couple of weeks, four chicks hatched.

The parents were kept busy feeding them and they grew quickly.  After 3-4 days, they looked like this.

Before long, they outgrew the nest and were sitting on the edge.

And then early one morning they fledged.  I was able to get this picture of two of them before they were gone.

It was an amazing experience to watch this cycle of life unfold right in front of our eyes.  It has been about three weeks since this brood left the nest for the big wide world.  Today, I noticed the female phoebe was back on the nest.  So, looks like we are in for another brood to hatch in a couple of weeks.  

Cornell's All About Birds website is a great resource for identifying and reading about birds.

All About Birds

Spring Things

Back in March I wrote about the way we are starting seeds this spring.  After we downsized and moved to our new house, we lost our little green house and are using our garage.

https://windyacresnaturalfarm.blogspot.com/2020/03/gearing-up-for-gardening.html

This has worked well for our smaller garden.  Most of the plants you saw in that post have been transplanted into larger pots and moved to another area.

This week I selected a few small sweet potatoes from last fall's harvest and put them in jars of water.  In a few days they will begin to grow roots and send up leafy shoots called "slips".  When the ground is warmer, these will be transplanted directly into the soil where they will grow into mature plants and form sweet potatoes.

The  parsley that I grew in our cattle supplement tubs last year is beginning to send up flower spikes. Parsley is a biennial plant. It grows the first year it is planted producing the leaves we love so much. The second year it makes flowers and seeds.  This plant is from last year.  I will let this plant make seeds which I will harvest and plant next year. By the way, native pollinators love the flowers.

A Phoebe built a mud nest on our front porch.

Phoebes are in a class of birds called "fly catchers". In Oklahoma, we are all familiar with our state bird, the Scissor-tailed Flycatcher. Well, there are other less showy birds in this same category. We had a pair of Phoebes at our old house. They returned year after year to build a nest above a light on one of our outbuildings. Many times I watched one of these little birds sit on top of a post or some other structure on the lookout for bugs. Suddenly it would take off and catch some unfortunate insect in mid-flight. I've not been able to get a good picture of one of these birds, so I copied this one from allaboutbirds.org.

Finally, we are beginning to get some early produce from the garden.  A couple of days ago I pulled these radishes out of the ground.  They are a little small, but I just couldn't wait!

Happy springtime everyone!

Gearing Up for Gardening

We gave up our small greenhouse when we moved to our smaller place.  However, that doesn't mean we cannot continue our gardening activities on a smaller scale.  In my last post, I showed the new raised beds we were working on.  These will be easier to maintain.  If you missed it, here's a link:

New Raised Beds

In this post, I'll talk about how we are starting seed in our garage.  First, here's a picture of our "mini" greenhouse.

I know it isn't much to look at and is a far cry from the basement in our old house that we used for seed starting.  But, it works very well.  Curious about what's inside?

We started with these little discs that we ordered online.

When you soak these in water they absorb a huge amount and pop up like this. There is a shallow indentation in the middle that makes a small hole when hydrated where you can place your seed.

If needed, I use a toothpick to make the hole bigger, place the seed in it and cover with a little of the surrounding soil.  I then set them in containers on heat mats inside the mini-greenhouse.

I put a different variety in each container.  After a few days, tomato seedlings will begin appearing.  It takes a few days longer for peppers.

In a week or so, they will  begin to grow their second set of leaves.  In the picture below, the 2 Early Girls in back of this container are at this stage.  Actually, there are 3 plants.  If the seed is old, I usually put 2 seeds in each plug.  Tomato seed is viable for several years if stored in a refrigerator.  

Now,  they can be transplanted into larger pots.  I like to remove the outer fabric even though the roots are supposed to grow through it into the surrounding soil.

In our old "life", when we were growing for the  farmers' market, we would have had 10-12 flats of tomatos and peppers.  But, this one is plenty for now!  More later.

New Raised Bed Garden

2019 was a dismal gardening year here.  The reason:  too much rain!  The ground stayed saturated for weeks at a time and, because our main garden is on the lowest part of our land, we had to plant most crops at least twice and sometimes 3-4 times before they came up.  Several of our tomato plants died and the ones that survived were stunted and never produced much fruit.  The only exception were plants that were in a couple of raised beds we built before we moved to the new house.

For this reason, we have built additional raised beds on higher ground and closer to the house.  We have spend a lot of time working on these beds. 

Here's a view from the opposite direction.

On this day, the head gardener was filling the black tubs with soil and planting blueberry bushes.  If you are not familiar with blueberries, they need a more acidic soil than most other garden plants.  So, we decided to grow them in these tubs where we could control the soil acidity better.  Most Oklahoma soils are too alkaline for blueberries.

He works so hard!  

Here's one of the bushes. 

The bed below contains asparagus.  Not much to see yet.  You normally do not plant asparagus from seed, but from "crowns".  Basically, these are one-year-old roots of asparagus plants.  As the season progresses, the crowns will send up "spears" from which the foliage of the plant grows.  You normally cut and eat the spears when they are about 8 inches long, but you shouldn't harvest them the first year because the plant needs time to get established, produce foliage and grow strong.  The foliage takes sunlight and provides photosynthesis to feed the roots helping them store nutruients to produce next year's plant.

You may have noticed in the first picture that we put cattle panels down the middle of several of the beds.

We will use these as trellises to support tomato plants and for vining plants.  It is still very early in the season and lots of work ahead.  But, I'll keep you posted on our progress.  I like to say that gardening is an "ongoing creative endeavor".  You learn from your mistakes and, if something doesn't work out this year, then you can try again next year.

Happy Gardening!

Cats and Raccoon

Last fall we started feeding a couple of stray cats in the pole barn.  I have hopes of getting them tame enough that we can catch them and get them spayed/neutered and vaccinated.  But, in the mean time, we are hoping they will help to keep the rodent population down around the chicken pen.

Here are some pictures of them.  I call the first one Smokey because he/she is gray and white.  This cat usually comes during the day. 

Then there is Pretty Boy (or Girl).  This one comes to eat both in the daylight and at night and usually comes around several times each day. 

And here we have Monster Cat.  At first glance, he looks a lot like Pretty Boy, except he has shorter ears and a LOT more hair.  This cat only comes around at night and usually only shows up once.

As expected, other wildlife eventually found the cat food.  Not sure you can see it, but there is a little mouse by the big food bowl.  Where are the cats????

The raccoons found the food last week and have turned out to be pretty entertaining.  This guy looks like he is posing for the camera.



In the following two pics he seems to be taking it easy, just lolling around after eating.




He's acting like he is a meercat here.  I've never seen one stand up like this!

He seems to have decided to climb the wooden frame (which happens to be a wooden frame that forms a pen used on warm days to put young chicks in to get them used to being outside and scratching in the grass).  

 I guess he decided he needed company because he showed up with a buddy one night.

We don't want to waste cat food on raccoons, so we only put the cat food out in the morning.  The cats are starting to learn that they need to come during the day or early in the evening and usually there isn't a lot left by the time the raccoons show up.