Removal of the Cone

I kept Cashew from ripping her stitches open for 3 whole weeks. I had to carry her up and down the stairs every time she went outside each day and watch her like a hawk, as she had figured out how to crane her neck to use the edge of the cone like a fingernail to scratch her incision. After 3 weeks the purple stitch at the end of her pink incision was still securely rooted in its place. The vet had told me it would fall out on its own. I was pretty desperate for life to return to some sense of normalcy where Cashew could be trusted to do for herself some of the time. I called the vet and asked them why it hadn’t fallen out. They told me that sometimes it could take a month or more but the external part of the stitching would eventually fall out. They said that at 3 weeks all the internal stitches would have disolved and her skin would have healed together completely. They said if the stitch bothered me i could bring her in and they’d pull it out or i could pull it out. I was surprised, “i can pull it out?” They said her skin had probably grown around it but it wouldn’t be attached to anything within her anymore and i could just give it a tug and out it would come. Not wanting to drive an hour and pay for a whole other vet visit, i decided to pull it out. I tried 3 times. On the third tug her skin let go and a purple plastic knot was left between my fingers, a shallow tiny crater in the skin of her abdomen. Her skin had indeed enveloped the remaining part of the stitch. It looked as if i had just excised a blackhead from a widened pore. I threw the stitch away and ceremoniously removed Cashew’s cone. The dark days were over. The spay process was complete.

Both dogs immediately went nuts, as you can see. Sili may have been more excited for her sister than Cashew even was herself. There was jumping and punching and craziness and all sorts of vocalizations. I let it go on for a while and then i demanded house-appropriate conduct in the house, as they were running into things.

At this point they were sitting at attention getting ahold of themselves for fear that i may change my mind about removing the cone if they somehow forgot to observe the house rules about rough housing (do it outside).

So they did just that. I let them outside where they continued the celebration of Cashew’s long awaited freedom from the horrible plastic cone. Sili was really happy Cashew was back in commision because while she was in recovery Coyote patrol had fallen to Sili and i. Though she loved me and would not leave me to face them alone, Sili did not look forward to coming with me to finish the chores when coyotes were on the property. She slunk behind me with her ears back and tail between her legs, quiet as a mouse. Cashew was definitely the only dog on the property the coyotes were afraid of. It was good to have her back.

Charlotte’s Supper

My mother has remarked several times that there’s so much interesting stuff to watch on the homestead, i don’t even need tv. She’s right. While Charlotte was living outside our kitchen window we had a 24/7 nature channel on spider behavior. It was like watching a really good documentary on orb weavers. One of my favorite things about having her over the window was that if i timed it right and kept checking behind the curtain throughout the night i could watch her catch and eat her supper.

I posted a bonus video of Charlotte repairing her web because it’s pretty cool to watch. She navigates the strands with such ease. She knows which ones are for her and which ones are for prey and she uses her legs to places the strands against already existing strands of her web. She’s quite skillful and makes quick work of it.

Cashew’s Cone

So, Cashew’s surgery went well. Everything they encountered was routine and the vet called me afterwards to tell me she was doing fine and in recovery. I was super relieved. They told me i could come pick her up. I immediately reminded them that they were boarding her for two extra days after the surgery, an expense that was absolutely necessary as far as i was concerned. They told me i was welcome to pay for a couple extra days of boarding but they didn’t see a need for it as they were sure she would be lethargic and sedentary while in pain during recovery. I laughed; like out-loud. I knew Cashew. I’d raised her since she was 5 lbs; small enough to be held with one hand. 1. She had the energy of the bunny with the drumset from that incredibly redundant battery commercial. 2. She had the highest threshold for pain of anyone i’d ever known. 3. She had absolutely zero survival instinct. Throw all those things together with a set of brand new internal and external stitches and i would have had a blood bath on my hands. I knew better than they when it came to Cashew. Getting her to the point where her stitches healed up would turn out to be one of those sanity shredding periods of my life. When i picked her up they said, “No running, jumping, or twisting for 14 days.” When she saw me Cashew ran away from the vet tech, jumped on me in her excitement, and then flopped on the ground, twisting her body to roll over for a belly scratch. I pointed, “that stuff. That stuff that she just did…that’s all the stuff she’s going to be too lethargic to do at home?” The staff scratched their heads. They showed me how to lift her by gathering her legs against my arms and pressing inwards as i lifted her without using my hands or reaching under her belly. As i predicted, given more space than a few feet, she rolled, leapt, twisted, and head-butted anything in sight. She was immediately crated and unfortunately only let out for bathroom breaks until her stitches healed. I tried a couple times just to let her be free range in the house. I even locked her sister up to let her do it. She still found reasons to be wild and crazy. Fuzz, a spider, the shadow of the windchimes through the window… She could not be left out of my sight for a moment and i could not get anything done. So, back in the crate she went.

Sili had become very bonded to Cashew while they were boarded together during my trip. They had stayed in the same cage and all they had in that noisy sterile place was each other. I had hoped the familiar presence of their sibling would cause them to grow closer while i was out of state. Sili was already quite the little empath. She sensed Cashew’s misery during the confinement period with the cone on her head. During the moments i did let her out of her crate for a bit Sili tried her very best to comfort her sister and provide moral support.

Having a cone on her head did not make her any more careful or less accident prone. She would still leap off the porch steps. Now she was just doing it blind. She would still run through the yard. Now she was just in danger of breaking her neck as she hit the ground with the cone during each stride. She was still a bull in a china shop. She was just more blind and less coordinated. It would have been comical if i wasn’t so busy trying to save her from herself. Depending on what hour of the morning it was i either laughed or cried when i thought of how the veterinary staff all thought Cashew would be guarded and careful in response to pain and stitches. They had never met an aussie. Careful was not in her vocabulary and as for guarded…aussies guard plenty of things; property, livestock, humans… when it came to injuries, i tried to explain it to people in terms they would understand… i would say to them, “think of an aussie as a pro football player or a bering sea crab fisherman.” Aussies were also known for being very intelligent and having excellent problem solving skills. For the sake of truthfulness i should probably mention that Cashew figured out how to turn her plastic cone so that she could wedge her teeth in the part that clipped together and pop it open. She also figured out that if she just pressed hard enough with her head she could get the cone to bend and she could see and reach the thing she was originally going after. She was exhausting.

Making Raisins

I’d like to be able to say i did this on purpose. I’d like to be able to claim that i set out to make raisins, researched the process, put a lot of hard work and time into it, and that it was some sun-kissed romantic process. That’s not what happened. What happened was that i was working 1 job, 2 side jobs, taking online courses, running a homestead, and writing a blog. I bought a lot of grapes. I thought, if the worst possibility should occur, i could just put a whole bag of grapes in the car and drive it to work as breakfast lunch and dinner. I did manage to scratch a few things together and did not have to resort to the bag of grapes idea, so i had a lot of grapes in the refrigerator. One day i opened the door and i did not have a lot of grapes in the refrigerator. I had a lot of raisins.

Charlotte

One morning i walked out into the yard and saw something colorful against the pale green wall of the house. It was a spider; a golden orb weaver to be exact. Anytime i encountered something new i researched it. It was how i learned about the world and decided where i stood on matters. So i researched the golden orb weaver. I learned that this was a female golden orb weaver, both because of its size, shape, and the absence of “boxing gloves” (the little appendages on the arms of male orb weavers used to pump sperm to its destination during mating). Knowledge is power. The more you know the less you’re going to make rash decisions you may regret at a later date in time. I wasn’t immediately thrilled about the giant spider making an impressive sized web on the side of my house, but the more i researched, the better she sounded. She ate mosquitos. She was a “wait and see” kind of predator. Unlike the wolf spiders, she didn’t move often and there was no jumping. She stayed still in her web and waited for prey to ensnare itself. Then she would leave her post to wrap it in silk and return to her position. She was always in exactly the same spot so i never had to wonder where she’d be. I could get within an inch of her and she wouldn’t move. She was a great listener. I introduced her to the dogs and told her all about my plans for the property. Many people thought i’d lost my mind talking to a spider on the side of the house but the fact of the matter was i had always prefered the company of animals to people. Animals really didn’t have the words “vengeance” or “ulterior motives” in their vocabulary. They were survivalists and everything they did was governed by instinct. Less drama. She was there all day every day for a week. She wove a magnificent web on the side of the house. Even the dogs were aware of her and occasionally stopped underneath her web to watch her. She had become a part of our lives and she needed a name. I tried not to overthink it. I named her “Charlotte”. So Charlotte and i had a little chat. I told her that she was welcome to the mosquitos that were continuously hatching in the water trays of my hanging plants on the porch and the moths and beetles that buzzed around the porch light each night. I had just one rule; don’t come in the house. I told her if she could adhere to that rule she was welcome indefinitely.

Shortly after our chat there was another wind storm. The wind howled through the trees and whipped the branches back and forth. I retreated into the house with wild-woman hair and dust in my eyes. When the storm was over i emerged from the house to survey the damage. A few tree branches were down by the laundry line but other than that all was well. I turned to the side of the house to check on Charlotte. Both she and her web were gone. There was no trace of her. My brain told me i should have felt relief. I didn’t have to worry about her getting in the house anymore when i opened the windows. But my heart felt saddened. I had grown used to her presence on the side of the house and she was pretty cool to watch, especially when measuring and placing the strands of her web. She used her leg to measure each piece out and then placed it against another strand with the very tip of her leg to make it stick. As i ascended the porch stairs with a heavy heart i turned my head upwards. There was Charlotte! She had made her web directly over the kitchen window and the porch light. I wondered if she had done it to get out of the wind or because i had mentioned the abundance of mosquitos in the hanging plants on the porch. I was so happy to see her! I told her, “Now look here Charlotte, you can have any area to the left of the door, but you can not make a web over the door or on the door, and you cannot come in the house. If you can abide by those rules you are welcome here indefinitely. She never put webbing above or over the door. She put it right up to it, but never incorporated the door in her web. She also never tried to enter the house. She and i had an understanding.

If you look closely you can see the strands of her web.

She lived directly outside the kitchen window next to the porch light. Whatever bugs were attracted to the porch light became entagled in her web and were eaten. She also ate the mosquitos hatching from the water trays under the hanging plants. I lifted the curtain every time i wanted to go out and made note of her whereabouts. I said good morning to her becore i went to work and good night to her as i called the dogs in for bed. Charlotte had become a respected personality and a regular character on the homestead.

Though i am only fond of orb weavers, i never kill the wolf spiders on the property as they have been known to eat brown recluse and black widow spiders.

The Arrival of Summer Meant an Abundance of Local Fruit

Every year in late spring/early summer there was a period of a week or two when little bitty local plums and apricots became available at the market. I’m talking, fall apart in your fingers, dripping sticky juice, melt in your mouth, sugary little morsels. The apricots actually had a smell. Go ahead, smell an apricot from the super market. There’s no smell. You can’t imagine why anyone would call the store-bought odorless giants apricots once you’ve tasted these golden mini treasures with just a bit of blush on their sides. The plums were to die for. Don’t even get me started. I could eat a thousand of them like candy. As i filled the bag in the market one or two would pop open, covering the inside of the bag with moisture. It was a reminder that what i was buying didn’t need to be ripened on the counter for 4 to 5 days. I could eat them on the ride home and they were not ripened with gas in the back of a truck. They were ripened the good old fashioned way on the tree in full sun. Those sugars were well developed and ready for enjoyment. I would be tasting something that had been on the farm it was grown on just 24 hours before i bought it. Well, i didn’t get any pictures of the apricots and plums this year because i missed the one or two weeks they had them. However, i did get pictures of the fredericksburg peaches, the stonewall pears, and the kerrville figs. I prefer the brown turkey figs but their supplier was going through some family stuff and no longer brings them the fruit of their trees, so the other ones had to make do. Those pears though, solid as a rock but super sweet. I loved those stonewall pears to death. People weren’t sure about them because they were crunchy. More for me. If it was sweet and grown local, i didn’t hesitate. I bought 8 to 12 every time i saw them and munched on them for breakfast and lunch all week!

Exploding Water Jug

I was driving home from work one day in the middle of august when i heard what sounded like a gunshot in the back seat of the car. I immediately pressed on the brake and pulled over to the side of the road. I got out of the car and tried to process what i had just heard. There were no passengers in the car. It could not have been a gunshot. I did not have a gun in the back seat. I opened the door to investigate. Everything was wet. My papers were wet. The seat was wet. The window even had droplets on it. I picked up my empty 3 gallon water jug that had been sitting in the back seat. The whole bottom of it fell away. Apparently my 3 gallon water jug had exploded in the back seat while i was driving. That’s how i learned to screw the lids on the empty ones very loosely, especially during warm weather. I had to go to walmart to get a replacement jug. I visited HEB first. They had one but it was at the back of the top shelf and didn’t have a price tag. I suspect their lack of knowledge about how to get it down and what to charge for it led them to tell me that it was just there for decoration or example purposes, which is what they and their manager told me. I went to walmart and they sold me one for the purpose of holding water. So i have 5 round jugs and 1 rectangular one with a handle to remind me of why it’s important not to screw the caps on the empty jugs too tightly during the summer months.

Dreams of Chickens and Tomato Plants

Year one was not the time for big projects. Year one was the time for saving. My mortgage payments were pretty reasonable during year 1 but the banks wouldn’t do a fixed rate mortgage on a tiny house so i had to account for the fact that my mortgage payment was subject to a notable increase every two years. I saved as furiously as i could in the face of ever arising repair costs. But i could dream about bigger more expensive projects i would one day undertake to fulfill my vision for the property. Namely, i wanted chickens. I had always wanted chickens, ever since i was a little girl. They fascinated me. I had dreams of owning a small flock of buff orpingtons. They were supposed to be a good chicken for beginners. They were friendly and in some cases would follow you around the yard in a little group. This notion sounded magical to my dreamy brain. Since they were a fairly friendly chicken, i wouldn’t have to worry so much about them pecking each other to death like some of the more agressive meat birds. I was allergic to chicken eggs so the eggs would be gifted to my friends of course. The idea of these giant fluffy birds walking around the yard just tickled me to death. I wanted the caged-in area around the coop because of hawks. I didn’t want the hawks to be able to swoop down and grab a chicken while i was inside making dinner. However, i had hoped to let the chickens out in the yard when i was out there watching them and allow them to help curb our grasshopper problem and decrese the frequency with which i had to mow the yard in the chicken area. Chickens scratched for bugs with their little feet which often hindered or eliminated the growth of grass in the areas where they were kept. It would have been a welcome effort during the rainy spring we had. The chickens would have to be secured in the coop before dusk as we had plenty of foxes that i was quite sure were not above digging under a fence for a meal. Cashew would probably be their best line of defence against all the things that would eat them while i was in the house. So i drew up a blueprint of what i would need to build and budget for to add chickens to the homestead and i filed that dream away to be taken out at a later date in time when i had the elbow grease, the time, and the funds to make it happen. Shout out to “White House on the Hill” for giving me advice and info on how to safely raise chickens with the proper gear and setup for cleaning out the coop.

The other thing i dreamt about adding to the homestead was a garden. I missed my hibiscus and my roses terribly. At one point i had a potted double blossom butterball hibiscus that was to die for. It had these giant butter yellow blossoms that were just stunning when they opened. However, it was the vegetable garden i was dying inside without. In the past 6 or 7 years i had lived in apartments, i had always had vegetable gardens in container boxes or pots. I grew okra, tomatoes, brussels sprouts, cabbage, zucchini, greens, lettuce, rhubarb, japanese eggplant, beans, bell peppers, kale, spinach, strawberries, celery, and sugar snap peas. Now i had two acres and i was growing nothing. The reason was grasshoppers; hundreds and hundreds of grasshoppers. With every step in the dry crunchy grass the grasshoppers jumped up from where they were hiding. They were everywhere. They were a relentless force of little munchers. The only way i kept the baby fruit trees remotely alive was to cover them in diatomaceous earth. However, it had to be reapplied after every rain or gust of wind and the hoppers would often beat me to it and already have claimed half the leaves by the time i sprinkled more on. I knew, if i ever wanted to garden on the land (without pesticides) i would have to use a green house. I wanted a model the honey bees would be able to enter to polinate the plants so i began looking at models with sky lights that could be propped open for air flow and access for bees. I found one with hooks in place so that you could hang plants in it as well. I would build planter boxes inside using brick (wood would just need to be treated against all the carpenter ants and termites living on my property). I would stack the bricks but not cement them so that water could drain easily.

I picked out a spot next to the extension shed where i would put the green house and another spot in the dog disaster/chicken run where i would place the coop. I set these plans on the shelf in my brain. A retired sheep farmer once told me that farming was not about fixing crises; it was about looking at the list of crises and picking which one was the most pressing, the one that needed your time, money, and attention most urgently. He tried to instill in me that if i wanted to run a property by myself, i had to get over the notion that the crises would one day be fixed because there was always going to be something on that list. For each thing i crossed off, a new thing would arise. I tried to remember my former patient’s words each time i wanted to start a new project. The septic tank, the well pump, or the a/c unit could break tomorrow. The termites could decide they liked the house better than their old tree stump. I wouldn’t add something new to the homestead until i had enough money to do it and handle a couple crises if they arose.

The Sumac Harvest

The berries ripened while i was on my week-long trip out of state. They weren’t red yet when i left and they were almost brown when i came back. For maximum sour flavor i should have picked the berries when they were bright red because when the berries turn brown the flavor is gone. I left half the harvest on the tree because it had already shriveled and turned brown. I took my box cutter and gathered the remaining red berries by cutting the tips of the branches where the berries were clustered and placing them all in the wheelbarrow. Hands sticky with berry residue and tree sap i hopped down off of the chair i’d been standing on and prepared to drive the wheel barrow through the tall grass. One of the websites i’d looked at when researching how to harvest sumac had said that if you licked your fingers after handling the berries you would taste the sour flavor of sumac. I licked my hand. It was sour, exactly like sumac or lemon. Yes! Perhaps the berries that still had some red on them were salvageable. Next year i wouldn’t go out of town during the month of harvest and i’d watch the color of the berries more closely but it couldn’t be helped this year so i just had to salvage what i could and hope for the best. I brought the berries into the kitchen and started pulling them off the branches with my fingers over a metal bowl. There were many little white spiders hiding amongst the branches. I kept having to get them on a stick and throw them outside. Getting the berries off the branches took forever! In hindsight, if i had dried the berries on the branches, then pulled them off, it would have been much easier and more of the flavor would have stayed with the berries instead of on my fingers. When i was finished with that step i had a pile of bare branches and a bowl full of reddish berries. I spread the berries out on parchment paper on a cookie sheet. Then i placed the berries in the oven. I turned the oven light on. When i was home i would turn the oven on and then switch it off quickly. I would continue this routine throughout the day. This dried the berries pretty well. However, it did not dry them completely. Their skins became shriveled and they began to toast. I had to stop because i didn’t want a toasted flavor. I wanted a sour flavor. If i had continued i would have burnt the skin of the berries and the whole harvest would have been wasted. So i stopped. But the berries still had a little moisture in them and it would gum up the coffee grinder, making it difficult to grind the berries into a powder later in the process. I decided that for next year’s harvest i would put the cookie sheet in the extension shed for days. The august heat in texas in an un-air-conditioned shed would definitely do the trick and it wouldn’t burn the skins of the berries or give an undesired toasted flavor to the powder. At this point i poured some of the berries into the coffee grinder and ground the berries into a powder in batches. As i said, there was still a little moisture in the berries and it gummed the powder up, sticking it to the blades and the sides of the coffee grinder. I had to stop grinding the berries before they were completely powdered, leaving little hard bits of the center of each berry, because once again i was cooking the powder and eliminating the sour flavor and replacing it with a toasted one. The coffee grinder was working so hard the parts became hot to the touch and i was accidentally cooking the berries. I had hoped to share some of the finished product of the sumac harvest with my sweet friend who had given me the chives plant. However, i quickly realized that this first year’s harvest was going to be an experimental batch and next year i would produce a crop fit for regular consumption. This batch would be for me as i knew not to bite down too hard on anything with the sumac sprinkled on it in case there was a hard bit of the center of the berries that didn’t get ground all the way. I spread the dark red powder on parchment paper laid out on a cookie sheet and left it in the open air of the kitchen for a day to dry out further. When it was finished i placed some of it in a small travel-sized jar and stored the rest in a regular jar. This year’s harvest, i keep in the freezer so it won’t mold but i hope to process next year’s harvest better so that the berries and resulting powder are dryer and ground more finely. That way no teeth will be broken and i can store it at room temperature without worrying about it molding. Also, next year i will harvest the berries on time so there will be more berries in the bowl and the flavor will be at maximum sourness!