A bucket for every occasion

Okay, so it’s just one bucket. But it got quite a bit of use this week.

Red Hill General Store was very generous to supply the Real Farmwives of America & Friends with some buckets to try out! (Check out the rest of the girls today to see what they did with their buckets, too.)
I got a 4-quart galvanized bucket to play with. And let me say, it has already come in pretty handy, and I’ve got some more uses planned for it in the future!

Right after I got my bucket, I went away to a veterinary conference for a week. I asked Hubby Doc to use the bucket to corral the mail while I was gone. It’s just the perfect size!

I thought perhaps I could use this bucket as a cat dish, and then I wouldn’t have to worry about feeding the cats twice a day (you know, self-feeding).

No such luck. Leo (on the left with the white toes) and Pretzel (on the right with the giant mouth) went to town on the huge bucket of food.

And they would not share with Martin…


Or with Orleans. Poor Floof-Cat.

Okay, so scrap that idea. I will share that I made a giant mess trying to get the cat food back into the original bag. Cat food all over the floor. Whoops. Good thing I had four hungry cats around to help me clean it up!
My fish tank was looking a little low, so I used the bucket to top off the tank (after a thorough washing and rinsing, of course). Just the perfect size for this, too!


I may have accidentally poured water all over the floor while I was filling the fish tank. Note to self, next time, get someone else to take photos when I am dealing with running water in the house…

So I took my bucket outside to see what kind of trouble I could get in out in the garden.
Hmmm… These blackberries are not quite ripe yet. But when they are, this bucket will be the perfect size to pick them into! (And then I’ll be able to post about our famous homemade blackberry ice cream recipe…  yum!)

The tomato plants are also not quite ready. They have started to flower, but are far from putting on fruit. Hubby Doc likes to pick into a five-gallon bucket in the garden. Those get too heavy for me, so this 1-gallon bucket will be just right.


Um, did he really plant four rows of green beans? I might need another bucket…


On the way back inside, I stopped to pick a few lilies from my weedy flower beds.


And then I turned my bucket into a centerpiece for dinner with the girls before the True Blood season premiere!


If only I can get the cats to leave the flowers alone… (That is a long shot around here.)

Like the bucket? The Real Farmwives of America & Friends are having a giveaway this week! Be sure to stop by and enter to win a Galvanized Embossed Tub from Red Hill General Store on the Real Farmwives’ blog. Also check out Red Hill General Store – they have lots of buckets, tubs, bottles, and so much more!!
Thanks, Red Hill, this bucket fits right in around my Home & Garden!

While Red Hill General Store did provide me with a bucket to blog about for this post the pictures, ideas and opinions shared here are my own.

Cats like herbs, too

And it makes me so mad!

I brought home some supplies to make an herb container garden from my visit to the Family Roots Nursery a few weeks ago. And make a container garden I did.

Now, we have four cats in the house, so the safety of house plants is always an issue. (We make sure to not bring in anything that is poisonous to the cats, so safety of the cats isn’t usually an issue. Unless I catch them chewing on the plants, that is!)

I thought I was being really smart. I put one of the containers tucked into a corner shelf above the kitchen sink…


…and the other one went up really high.


Not high enough.



Cats like chives and dill. They do not like rosemary, cilantro, or oregano. But those chives… yum yum!


And the fluffy dill that was next to the chives? Not so fluffy anymore.


But the rosemary is doing great! They don’t seem to like rosemary.


I do have another of those corner shelves. The rosemary container didn’t get put there because the rosemary was too tall to fit. But I did put a geranium there.


(It hasn’t been safe, either, which means the shelf is not the magic factor keeping the cats from eating my plants. It’s simply taste. Darn things!)

We devised a plan. We set out upside-down mousetraps near the plants to keep the cats away.



Don’t worry, the goal here was not to trap the cats. Or even hurt them. All I wanted to do was scare the stupid things so they wouldn’t eat my herbs!


The theory is that they’ll jump on the microwave on the way to the high herbs. The vibration will trigger the mousetrap, which will jump and make a loud noise. The movement and noise will scare the cat, and my herbs are safe. (There’s also on on top of the cabinet, right next to the container.)

We also tried to protect the geranium.


Did you notice I said tried?

That’s because it didn’t work.

The first night, we heard a trap go off. The next morning, we found it was the one on top of the cabinet (the one on the microwave hadn’t budged), and there was no new carnage.

Today, however, is a different story.

There were more chives on the floor.

And my geranium had been attacked again.


But the mousetraps were just as we had left them!

Aargh! If only I knew which cat this was! Maybe I should flip the mousetraps right side up…

Okay. Maybe not.

Next, we will interrogate the suspects…