The Barn Cat

This current setup cannot continue for very long. But if it's nice out, he'll be out here. And I don't blame him, so. . . Hi there, yo, folks. I'd Charlie's been in the background of a lot of our different videos. We've had this cat for about ten years now. But he's always been an indoor cat. It is until very recently. So as a lot of Waffles, a couple months ago. He was older, he was 13. Passed away from feline diabetes, it was unfortunate, but it was his time. We've always had another cat, Charlie. And Charlie's always been an indoor cat. He wasn't before we got him, I think, when we adopted him. I think he was They had found him outdoors, so he started his life as an outdoor cat. Here he comes right now. But we kept him inside for a couple of reasons. I think the primary reason has been fleas. He picks up fleas very easily. But these past few months, he's been really trying to get outside. So we've just been letting him do it. We've just been letting him go outside as an experiment. And he's been doing it. And so oftentimes when we come out in the morning, Nana Janna or Holly will have let him out. And he's here in the barn, and sometimes I'll see him up in the hayloft. There was, I think it was a few weeks ago, I walked up in the hayloft to get some hay in the morning. And I was very surprised that Charlie just ran up to me. I guess we have a barn cat now. No, it'something weren't expecting. But the cool thing about barn cats is that, hopefully, paying them, they're taking care of rodents. So the hope is, we've always dealt with mice in the barn. Hopefully he's taking care of them. But I wanted to introduce At night, he comes in and snuggles with us during the day, during his feeding time. Cold weather. But if it's nice out, he'll be out here. And I don't blame him. The yo barn cat, Charlie. This is him, me, Charlie. Kind of a mellow episode this week. A lot going on at work. That's going to be something I'm going to be talking to you guys about, because, well, let's just say that it can't keep going We'll talk about that more in future episodes. For my own notation, and for your guys's notation, keeping track of things, I did want to give a quick tour of the garden, which is pretty much all planted now. The beginning of the 2023 garden season starts here, as far as I'm concerned. So we didn't go as crazy as we have in previous years, but we have a generally good idea of the things that grow well here. Sweet potatoes. As you can see, we've planted these guys, and they seem to be off to a good start. One thing that's always concerned me at the beginning of the season was sweet potatoes. You'll often see them start to kind of turn orange-ish. That concerned me the first year, but for some reason I think that's just a natural process that sweet potato slips go through. We've seen that in previous years, and sweet potatoes have always done very, very well for us. So this is the sweet potato bed. Next up, we've got okra. Okra does very, very, very well in our environment. For some reason, I don't know why. For okra plants, these things will be very tall by the end of the season. These, I think we started from seed. I can't remember. But here they are, they're in the ground right now. They will be thriving here in a few months. Next up, peppers. These, I think we got pre-started. We've got a variety of different peppers. We've got our favorite, which is these red-hot cherry peppers. These do very, very well for us. For some reason, peppers always grow well in our ground. We've got some shishito peppers. Those do well for us too, and we love shishito peppers. This bed right here is empty. Nanna Jana is clearing it of weeds. I'm not sure what we're going to put in here. It's a bonus bed, so we'll figure out something to put in there soon. Next up, tomatoes. And that's what I've done here. And some of these we haven't planted yet, we will. But some of them we have planted. Basically, what we've done is we just cut through the cardboard, dug down a little bit, added some compost, and then put the tomatoes in. And so these tomatoes will crawl up the trellises. We've got a variety of different tomatoes. Something called sun gold, something called purple zebra, and then some other regular varieties that most people have probably already heard of, brandy wines and things We The first year were here, they did great. The second year, they didn't do so well. Now that our third year, we're hoping they do better. So here's the tomatoes. We've got all of them. We've got this trellis. I think they'll do good. Next up, we have squash of some sort. I think these are yellow squash. Squash is tough for us, because we've always dealt with squash bugs. Last year, were very, very vigilant about getting the squash bug eggs off the lead. That starts sometime in June or July, where those squash bugs start laying those eggs. And squash bugs here will just absolutely destroy our squash plants. We're hoping that we can do the same as we did last year and maintain those squash bug populations. But they started, they're off to a good start. And by the way, I guess I might be wondering about these low beds. We actually dug them out very deeply and then put compost up inside of them. So Then we put the plants in. That's what we've done here. We'll be mounding them up as they get bigger with more compost. Cuc Won't be using the frost cloth for a long time. These guys will be climbing up. I don't know if we've done cuc I can't remember, but here they are. We'll see how they do. Zucchini, three of them. Started off, I think we started these from seed. I can't remember. They started off very poorly, but they've actually kind of started greening up and looking better. So fingers crossed with the zucchini. We'll see how they do. Zucchini, three of them. We'll see how they do. The water's pretty good. The grass's pretty good. We'll be mounding them up. So we put it down, and we'll see how they do. And then we throw it in. We'll put it in the tree. So we take the plant and put it in the tree, and we'll see how it does. It's a big thing. We'll be mounding it up. Here's the first one. And then we'll be mounding it up. So, there we go. This is a bonus bed. We haven't put any compost in this, but we have dug the weeds out of it. This is what the earth looks And it's just dirt. As you can see, it's just very inhospitable to growth in life. So we will add compost to this and plant probably herbs. I'm not sure what or when, but within the next few weeks, this will be our herb bed. This bed was started all from seed and we've got a mix of collard greens and kale in this bed. We started this from seed a few weeks ago and everything seems to be popping up really nicely so we'll keep an eye on this. And lastly, our greens bed, which we started three or four weeks ago. It's been a few weeks and it's doing great. We've actually started using these greens for our salad. We've got our arugula, our mustard, we've got our tatsoi and we've got our lettuce, our volunteer lettuce. We actually started a couple more lettuce strips from seed as well and they're starting to pop up. Tatsoi, I've talked to It's just incredible. I'm very enthusiastic about tatsoi. It's We've replaced spinach completely with tatsoi and I'm glad we did. It's already off to a great start. We also love our mustard greens. They're very spicy and they, it's good on a sandwich or you want a little bit of spice. It's a mustard, obviously a mustard taste, but almost kind of a, what's the word I'm looking for? Horse radish. It's a horseradish taste and it's great on sandwiches. So we love mustard greens and arugula of course, it's a great all around green. Our greens bed is doing wonderfully and we're very, very happy with it. I definitely don't want to leave out some of the other things we're growing. Our raspberry trellises are bustling. We've actually got to come in here and trim these up because they're getting a little too crazy. Too early for raspberries to start popping out, but something tells me we're going to have a big haul this year because these guys are looking really good. So I think it's worth noting the beginning of garden season and what we've got going on and seeing how it grows or doesn't grow depending on the plant. And in terms of how everything else is going, it's going okay. I think everyone here knows how tough it's been for me to juggle a very, very full time workload with the duties of taking care of the yostead. But thankfully I've got an incredible team here with my parents, with Nanna Janna, with Holly, of course little Henry to help me do that. This current setup cannot continue for very long. So we're talking about ways we can shake things up and change things. So it'something that deserves further discussion. It'something that we're excited about because let's just say working 60 plus hours a week isn'tenable with where I'm at in my life. So that'something that we'll talk about in future episodes. But as far as I'm concerned, it's a beautiful Sunday morning here on the yostead. Garden's gotten off to a great start. Little Henry is just now waking up and I should go take care of him, or help Holly take care of him and wish you all the best day that you can have. Thank you for hanging out with me. And until we see you again next time, remember, as always, slowly, slowly.