Tornado Shelter – Part 5

Today’s forecast is for a moderate probability of strong thunderstorms including tornadoes. Storm chasers have taken up positions to the south west and south east of us. The arrival of professional storm chasers is always an ominous sign. I fretted and fretted about using the line of credit as I hate having any debt, but after the forecast yesterday, we decided to go out and buy enough plywood to give the shelter one layer. There is frugal and then there is penny wise and pound foolish. A pleasant surprise was finding out our little local lumber store in Glenella has prices that match Rona, plus great service, so we will be patronizing them first from now on. I didn’t have to climb up on my truck and load lumber. They have a fork lift to precisely place and stack stuff on top. I was very impressed.

The shelter plan calls for two layers of 3/4 inch plywood. We added one this time. One layer is good enough for most severe weather that would involve some windows being knocked out by hail or maybe a small microburst. Not enough for say an F3, but pretty good.

Hubby dearest is a bit paranoid about us being trapped in the closet so we have added an escape hatch at the end opposite the door. This is bolted in but if we find the door buried we can undo the bolts and pull the hatch door in, airplane emergency door style. Hopefully we won’t need it. You can also see our sump pump hole. We are going to use the leftover PWF stuff and make a proper cover and we have purchased a back up sump pump that will run on DC power because the place will flood in heavy rain if the power is out. The battery will be inside the closet and also give us DC lights.

Finished trap door.

A shelter is only as good as the door so we framed that in. No storm is sucking that door out! Inside is more problematic. The local lumber shop did not have any big heavy duty dead bolts as we put three of these little ones in for now but they are not adequate for keeping the door closed with heavy flying debris coming at it. We’ll work on better reinforcing today.

And so we are kind of ready. Our plan is to finish and bolt in the escape hatch today, reinforce the door, and then begin stocking the space. We will move the pets kennels in first thing. That way if we need to take shelter, they can be locked up. I once took a dog through a car wash and I learned it is not pleasant to have a panicking dog in a small space. We will also put in a bench for us to sit on. We will also add emergency supplies in case we have to sit in it for an extended time or need to undo bolts or saw and pry debris in order to get out.

And the primary purpose of this space is storage, not shelter, and so I intend to put in lots of shelves, big ones, small ones perfect for canned goods, places for boxes, hooks to hang stuff, junk and treasures too good to toss. Oh glorious wonderful storage space! You shall be fulfilled soon.

The guy in the lumber store asked us what we were building. I told him a reinforced storage closet that could double as a shelter for a tornado. He went white and then described how his brother’s home was a mere 100 yards from the path of the infamous Elie Manitoba F5. He then added one more happy thought.

“And if you have this ready, you’ll never need it. This will be the cheapest insurance you ever paid for.”

I sure hope he’s right.

And as if to prove it:

The professional storm chasers in their reinforced vehicles have converged on Manitoba and put out their own predictions and we are about 20km outside the upper bullseye.

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Tornado Shelter – Part 4

Work continued on our shelter. The framing is done and the men moved to the door. FEMA has an entire pamphlet on the door for a shelter because the shelter is only as good as the door. You can have the best shelter there is but if your door is weak you’ll end up like the father of the lady scientist in the movie Twister, sucked up for some close and personal encounters with the big one. After checking the diagrams FEMA has, our engineer decided we would need to make a door with the same specifications as the walls, two layers of 3/4 inches plywood glued together and then screwed together. We went to the lake for a swim while we were waiting for the glue to set. It was so pleasant we stayed to watch the sunset.

Back to work. The door needs some heavy duty hinges, and then it would need to be framed into the structure itself, so that even with extreme sucking it would not be able to open outward. It would also need some fancy deadbolt hardware on the inside. Given the design, the basic door had to go in before the layering of plywood and framing on the outside.

Industrial strength hinges with the screws also glued in to make it strong. By this point we were out of wood and Bryan has to leave for a visit with family. He’ll be back in a week and we have plans to go to a country music concert weekend.

This morning we were awakened by thunder storms. A quick check of the radar showed severe storms approaching fast. Then we had some fun watching more rotating clouds overhead doing the eery green thing while Environment Canada issued warnings. Wow it came up fast! Twenty minutes between nothing on radar and then this strong storm. It passed us by, dumped a bunch of golf ball sized hail into the lake 12 kilometres east of us, and we are now sitting in a severe thunderstorm watch with more storms expected later today. Ever feel like you’re in a bulls eye or someone is trying to give you a message?

*sigh*

We had planned on waiting until next month to purchase the next $300 or so of stuff we need to finish the shelter. However the forecast is for extreme heat (35C/95F) until Saturday and then an approaching cold front will mean yet another round of severe storms. So we may yet decide to buy the rest on the line of credit and finish this thing for Saturday. For today though, we will just get caught up on other stuff. Having company is great. Having a project to build is a lot of fun. Still we are behind on a whole bunch of little things, there is sawdust everywhere in my house. All the floors need washing. Time to get to work.

Tornado Shelter – Part 3

Work on our basement closet/tornado shelter continues. We had some delays yesterday. We needed to borrow some tools and that took some scrounging around town. This meant we had folks come to see what we were up to. Naturally, we needed to break out a beer or two to keep the conversation moving. Then we had to wait for the beer to wear off before we went back to work. Saws and beer don’t mix. But, finally, we did get back to work. 

These metal plates with nails add enormous strength against uplift. One way tornados kill is that the tremendous uplift rips off the roof. Once the roof is gone, the rest of the structure collapses onto anyone down below and then if that doesn’t kill you, the tornado blenderizes all that wall material and stuff inside and then shreds everything down to deadly missiles. (I read a tragic story of a two year old who died because a doorknob got inserted into the back of his head by this force. So heartrending!) These strengthening plates are added at all the points where the roof meets the side frame. These plates are also cheap and easy to install. I took on the assignment of hammering in 125 nails into six plates for the back wall which is against the concrete block basement wall. The total cost of plates and nails was under $15 from our local Co-op. It’s little touches like this that greatly increase the strength of the structure with minimal additional cost. You do have to plan these things into it though. You can’t just wing it.

It’s been fascinating watching an engineer plan and then see the plans come together. Our friend Bryan read the plans provided by FEMA and studied some of the diagrams and stats on force and uplift of F0-F5. His eyebrows went up and his eyes went wide a few times as he read. Twice he actually whistled in awe. Yes, tornados are vicious beasties. No doubt about that. To me, the neat FEMA diagrams looked like strange goblety gook lines in black and white but he understood them. He speaks that language.

“Okay, I can see why they do that.”

“Oh yeah, that makes sense.”

“Well, we can get the same amount of protection for a lot less money if we do this instead.”

And all of this knowledge and experience got built into the design. So I recommend that if you want to build one of these reinforced sheltering areas, it would be a really good idea to involve an experienced engineer. First, to make sure the thing holds up against a monster storm, second to save money, and finally, because each place one of these shelters needs to be built in requires special modifications to fit the location. I could have built a closet myself but I could never have come up with this design.

We are doing the framing now. The studs on the outer wall are spaced every 12 inches instead of the standard 16 inches to increase the strength of the walls by 50%. Since the studs cost under $4 you get a great increase in strength for very little additional cost. The other cheap strength improvement is that all the screws are getting glued in with special construction glue applied before insertion. So you get not just the power of the screw itself, but also the adhesive and that adhesive is really cheap too. Such things do add time.

And the door will open inwards and be partly under the stairs. Our stairs are very well built with dove tailing where the stair is inserted into the stringer so they will take a lot of force. This makes it less likely we’ll be trapped if the building collapsed. We would be able to open the door with greater safety and have a chance of getting out once it’s all over and the storm has moved on.

I sure hope we never have to use this closet/tornado shelter. But if we do, we’re going to have it. I have always been of the opinion that if you prepare for events, they don’t happen. So my little superstition means putting our shelter in, will actually prevent a tornado from coming.

Adding a Tornado Shelter

http://globalnews.ca/news/2135053/manitoba-tornado-lasted-incredible-2-5-to-3-hours-environment-canada/

Over the last two weeks there have been at least five different tornado producing storms within 200 kilometres of us in all directions. The worst has been a “high end F2”. Fortunately the population density up here is so low it hit nothing except one poor farmer who lost all his outbuildings but he and his family were unhurt. At various times the tornado had seven vortices and it was a kilometre wide at ground level. In other words it was a typical tornado alley event and since Manitoba is straight north of Texas, it is part of tornado alley. Our little home town has had damage due to tornados twice in thirty years. So, it makes perfect sense to be concerned about tornados in Manitoba.

While following the weather alerts on the last really big storm, we realized if the storm maintained its strength and trajectory we might be making our own dash to the basement and so we went and inspected it with an eye to using it for shelter. It was rather alarming to note our very nice basement is totally unsuitable for a tornado shelter because it has four big windows that let in lots of sunlight. This means flying shrapnel and acute danger if a tornado hits. So we felt it was time.

One other thing the basement does not have is storage. So we decided to fix two problems by putting in a storage closet that could double as a tornado shelter. FEMA has lovely plans and designs and we had a friend visiting who is an engineer. He consulted the FEMA sketches for came up with a design and we agreed to give him guidance and support for some help with a paper he is working on in exchange. We made out list and went to town to get supplies. For budget reasons, we decided to do it all in two stages. First we will build the frame with his guidance and then we will add the outer double 3/4 inch plywood layers later by ourselves. In this way we can spread the cost over more than one month.

I was really beginning to wonder if we were crazy. Putting in the shelter means adding a few hundred dollars to the total cost of the storage closet and honestly, did we really need it? As if God was giving us a message, a huge thunderhead was forming as we worked in the lumber yard securing the lumber to the truck for the trip back from the city. Fortunately, it was going east and we were west. The speed it grew was impressive. The employees in the lumber yard were clearly concerned. I casually remarked to the young man helping us secure 42 2X4s to our truck rack that this storm was going to produce hail, severe weather and maybe even a tornado shortly but we didn’t need to worry. He was very interested in the storm. I gave him a brief lesson on the mesocyclone and anvil and other tidbits of severe storm structure one can assess storms from as I strapped lumber down. As we left the lumber yard the warnings began. Sure enough, this monster produced at least two F0-F1 tornados and dumped golf ball to tennis ball sized hail along its path before wandering off into Ontario. It was apparently in the mood to eat crops not homes so no one was hurt and there was no damage. Since I was busy loading lumber to build a tornado shelter, I didn’t chase after it to get any pretty pictures. (Actually I don’t like chasing these things. I prefer to figure out which way they are going and move as rapidly as possible in the opposite direction.) Fortunately for the purposes of blogging, others like to chase and so you can see some very nice pictures here. As we checked out the tornado warnings I decided the $500 we had just spent, $300 of which was for extra stuff a mere closet did not require like bolts into cement to keep the closet in place even if the house lifted and flew off to Oz, was likely a good investment.

http://www.draega.net/storm.html

I will update as the shelter goes in.

50th parallel gardening in the prairies.

Several thing happened to my garden since my last update. Ten days ago after a week of baking heat, we got nine inches of rain in 48 hours. This was followed by several more days of at least an inch of rain a day. I wish I could complain a lot about this being an unusual year but its not. This is prairie gardening. So in addition to ….long….. summer days, and a short growing season there is insane swings in temperature and water. The long hot days of no rain you can compensate for with a hose and sprinkler. There is nothing you can do about too much rain. Well not quite nothing. I deepened a preexisting trench at the bottom of the slant of the garden to get water to drain a little faster. The trench was put in by the previous owner of this garden patch indicating just how not unusual the situation is.

The result of all the wet meant that the spinach promptly up and died except for the fourth planting that went to seed when it was only five centimeters tall and had maybe four teeny tiny leaves. So the spinach is done for the year. With the staggered planting we had several meals of spinach fresh and cooked but we ate it as soon as we got it so none was put by for later. Note to self, more spinach, less staggering. Radishes, well the last of those are in the picture. And you can see what all the rain did. They split. Same note re radishes. The corn has taken on a rather sickly hue of yellow green and it may or may not recover. And one tomato plant that was standing in water for days gave up and died. It also meant I couldn’t get in to weed for nearly a week. The weeds, being prairie weeds and well adapted to this local environment, took off, well like weeds, with the wet. This is why I didn’t plant any peas. Every year I have tried one of these heavy rainstorms has started the powdery mildew and no peas.

Some thing didn’t care. The beets and carrots did just fine and today I thinned them again. The results are above and represent a meal of baby carrots and beets. The green beans seemed to absolutely love both the heat and drought and the wet. They are in full swing now and we will be enjoying green beans for a while. I don’t seem to have any yellow beans which is strange because I planted both green and yellow bean seeds. I lost quite a few baby bean plants to frost and now I am wondering if maybe it was all the yellow ones. Note to self, next year separate rows, and green beans seem spring hardier than yellow.

The tomatoes are doing very well in spite of one untimely death. They not only have lots of heavy green fruit but they also are still blossoming and we have been enjoying small yellow ones for about a week now. They are beyond delicious and I wish they would hurry up and produce more. The cucumbers took a hit but look better. I have tiny two inch cucumbers. The zucchini responded to the extremes by producing the weird looking ones you see. I think they like wet better than drought though because the weird ones started in the drought and the ones coming up behind these two look normal. The zucchinis are the only thing that has taken over and overshadowed the weeds. We had a huge wind that took out all the sunflowers so they are now lying on their sides and the heads are bent up from the talks at ninety degrees. I think they may still make nice flowers but they look very strange. The lettuce is getting close to bolting but isn’t quite there so we will have lettuce a bit longer. Surprise surprise my experimental spaghetti squash took a great leap up and are now in bloom. They seem to like rain too.

And finally the momma robin has been very busy because the rain caused a huge outbreak of white slugs. Fortunately, the robin is now on her second brood of babies and they are hungry little guys who needs lots of slugs to grow into adult robins. So the rain has been good for her.

Home canned meals are great!

Hot fresh bread and using up emergency meals. For tonight’s dinner, I made a loaf of fresh honey whole wheat bread to go with my jar of beef stew. The quart jars are a meal but just. Hearty fresh bread rounds them out perfectly. Last summer I was reading up on being prepared for disasters and I researched various kinds of food and considered our lifestyle. I then set about to set us up with everything we would need to sell sufficient and well fed for at least three days. Part of this involved preparing some home canned complete meals we could just open, reheat and serve, or if required, eat cold. By canning at a time fresh produce was cheap and abundant at a local you pick and buying meat on sale, I was able to have one dozen of my own prepared meals to eat. If you have never canned food before, it is important to use a pressure canner if meat or low acid food is involved because boiling just won’t get stuff hot enough to kill nasty spores like botulism. I was very careful to create my meals with that in mind. I also saved some time and energy by making a double meal and eating half for dinner and canning the other half. I made beef stew, chicken stew, spaghetti sauce, chili concarne, minestrone, chicken soup, vegetable soup, beef meatball loaf, turkey soup, turkey stew, mushroom soup,      and beef soup. I used all fresh from the local pick you-own-veggies place with lots of fresh herbs (although I did get a bunch of mushrooms off the clearance shelf). I was very careful to use only vegetables that have a reputation for canning well like corn, carrots, zucchini, potatoes, and beans. I also checked on line to make sure the combinations I used were compatible when canned. The emergency meals are approaching the one year mark and the garden is about to boom with more produce, so I decided we should eat up the old meals in preparation for a new season. So we are working our way through them. I have made one absolutely delightful surprise in this. I always thought those canned meals from the grocery store were horrid because of the pressure canning process ruining the food. It simply isn’t true! Home canned meals taste superb, almost as good as if they were fresh from the pot the same day I made them. They have all the lovely flavour, depth, and texture of home made. In the picture above I show my home canned beef stew with carrots, potatoes, corn, little one bite chunks of meat, celery, parsley, and onions there were used to make the broth and a bit of salt and pepper. I cooked the meat and broth first. I prepared the veggies and then layered them into the jar raw. I poured more hot broth in to fill the jar until I had one inch of head room and then popped it all directly into the pressure canner. I used to use the bread maker for my bread. I didn’t like how the loaves came out so I would use the machine just to knead and then bake it in my own oven and use my own pans. We actually wore out so many bread makers (one about every two years) that we decided to spend a little extra and get a proper Kitchen Aid with the dough hook. I do love using it and that loaf of honey whole wheat bread pictured above is one product of it. Homemade bread is also a great way to use up all kinds of snips and bits of things. For example, in this loaf I added some shelled sunflower seeds that we purchased for salad topping but which were beginning to go stale. The result was a hearty, nut flavoured loaf. Making your own canned meals and bread is one of those things that is a fair amount of work up front but once you get into the swing of it, it isn’t hard. The main issue is you have to be around between steps. For example, the pressure canner has to run for 90 minutes where you need to be in the room monitoring the little bobbing thing on top. So you need to be a stay-at-home type with more time than money to make all this work worthwhile. About two years ago I calculated my bread costs me about 40-60 cents for each loaf depending on the type.  The fancy heavy European style dark pumpernickel Hubby dearest loves costs more than plain whole wheat. Bread with honey cost more than bread with sugar. Still the cost is far far below that of buying in the store. The home canned meals worked out to an average of about $3 each with most of the cost being the meat. They are comparable to slightly cheaper in cost when compared to a can of store-bought stuff. However, the homemade meals really cannot be compared to canned meals from the grocery store. When you pick and can local home grown produce the same day, using only really top quality ingredients, well there is just no comparison. I did not include the cost of my electricity in that calculation since at the time I did those meals, we were in a non metered electric site. This year I will have my own garden produce, which will save some money, but have to pay for electricity which will cost some, so the equation may change. My husband paid me a wonderful compliment a few days ago. He said he eats better tasting food at home than he did in his years as a successful scientist frequenting high priced restaurants as a visiting professor. Isn’t he a wise fellow?

Parsley and Mint Sauce from My Garden

The garden continues to give its bounty. Today I thinned out the parsley and the newest crop of radishes. Even after setting some aside for salads and drying I still had far more parsley than I could use. I found Bobby Flay’s Food network recipe for mint parsley sauce. I picked that recipe because we were having lamb kabobs for dinner and my flower bed is full of lovely fresh mint as well. It was easy to make. mint, parsley, garlic, mustard, honey and a bit of chile pepper.

And the result was a heavenly sauce for lamb kabobs I can highly recommend as well as a whole lot of my garden mint and parsley put to very good use instead of being wasted.

I figure the garden passed the break even mark last week. As usual, it paid for the amount I spent on seed and rototilling and plants just in the abundant lovely green salads we have been enjoying. So everything the garden produced this week is bonus free food. In addition to today’s mint-parsely we also ate zucchini, onions, spinach, radishes, baby carrots, and some small yellow tomatoes. We will very shortly be eating green beans. Yum!

Parsley-Mint Sauce: 1 1/2 cups tightly packed fresh mint leaves 3/4 cup tightly packed fresh flat-leaf parsley 6 cloves garlic, chopped 2 serrano chiles, grilled, peeled, chopped 2 tablespoons honey 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard 1 cup olive oil Water Salt and freshly ground black pepper Place the mint, parsley, garlic and serranos in a food processor and process until coarsely chopped. Add the honey and mustard and process until combined. With the motor running, slowly add the olive oil until emulsified. Transfer the mixture to a bowl and whisk in a few tablespoons of cold water to thin to a sauce-like consistency. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Read more at: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/bobby-flay/spanish-spice-rubbed-chicken-breasts-with-parsley-mint-sauce-recipe.html?oc=linkback

How does your garden grow?

My 50th parallel garden is growing by leaps and bounds in the usual 16 hours a day of sunlight in summer up here. I planted this from seed except where I specify otherwise. We are already enjoying the garden bounty. As I thin we munch what I thin in our salads. We shall shortly be eating our first meal with turnip greens. Turnip greens are a luxury I was introduced to in the south. We are also enjoying fresh herbs in cooking. The cat also loves fresh catnip. The catnip is growing so fast any cat in town who wishes to get stoned can join mine. (Catnip and herbs above.)

The tomato plants were purchased ones. This is actually my second set. The May long weekend blizzard killed my first set. They have gone from just starting to bloom to having fruit.

The cucumbers started from seed three weeks ago are doing very well. I am looking forward to fresh cucumbers and pickles and relishes.

I put in two roots of horse radish. They have both come up now. I’m not sure if there will be enough root for my to use int he fall but I have located an abandoned garden with horse radish growing wild and crazy everywhere and I will take some from there if I need to.

Potato plants took forever to appear from seed potatoes but are finally growing. We LOVE fresh potatoes from the garden, especially those little wee ones.

The beans are just about to bloom. You can also see radishes and lettuce into the next row.

 Spinach. Love it raw. Hubby loves it raw and cooked.

Baby carrots. Nothing beats a fresh carrot from the garden washed off under the hose in summer sun.

Garlic from seed garlic each plant one clove from the bunch of seed garlic. We are big garlic eaters and I want fresh garlic for my pickles..

This is an experiment. It is plants for spaghetti squash started from seed. Will it beat the frost and produce something edible? We will see.

Zuchinni started from plants about six weeks old. We have fried zucchini almost every morning with our eggs so I am looking forward to being able to pick and cook my own. My only regret is I could not  find plants with yellow zucchini, common in the south, here in the north. Yellow zucchini has a nuttier milder taste. Maybe next year I can start my own from seed.

Chives from purchased plants.

 This was a volunteer I guessed was a squash. It is beginning to look suspiciously like a sunflower.

I put in one row of corn. It’s kind of silly to put corn in a small garden because they need so much room and give back so little but if we are lucky we can have one or two meals of our own fresh corn. You can see baby beets and turnips beside the corn. Most we will eat as greens as I thin. I few I will find other uses for.

Spoiled Milk Cheese

One of the disadvantages of living in the country is that stuff on the grocery shelves of the small stores doesn’t turn over as quickly as in the city. I forgot this and bought a 4 litre (about a gallon) of whole milk last week and yesterday I noticed a strong flavour to it. I don’t exactly drink a lot of the stuff. A gallon of milk lasts about a month. I just assumed that the stronger flavour was the taste milk gets when cows are moved from feed to pasture, which occurs about this time of year around here.

This morning when I poured milk into my coffee it went all lumpy. I checked the milk and found it was thickish almost lumpy in texture. It was not sour smelling yet but soon would be. I checked the expiration date and found it was set to expire today. Dang it! My mistake. Now back on the farm we rarely had sour milk because the one of homes we shared with was full of teenagers who drank it as fast as it was milked out of our three family milk cow. However, the odd time we did have sour milk, we made it into cakes and assorted other sweet things. Hubby dearest and I struggle to maintain our weight at a healthy level so the last thing I wanted to do was make naughty, fat layering foods like cakes and biscuits. Cottage chess on the other hand is one of our staple snack foods.

I did some reading on line and I decided to try my hand at cottage cheese. I read up on making both riccotta and cottage cheese. There is a whole lot of stuff on line about how store bought milk is pasteurized and you can’t do anything with it if it sours and you have to just throw it out. You can only do this kind of thing with fresh raw whole milk. If you try to start with store bought milk you end will end up spending the next three or four days sick from ghastly manufacturing caused bugs. I guess you can’t believe everything you read on line.

I poured the slightly lumpy milk into my crock pot and stirred in a couple of tablespoons of yogourt and then left it alone set on high. I finished up my morning coffee with almond soy milk, checked my email and then looked at the pot. The picture above is what I found. The liquid stuff was just boiling around the edges of the pot.

I turned the crock pot to low and then went and did some cleaning and had a shower. When I got out, still wet from the shower, I separated off the curds and set them in a cloth to drain.

Hubby dearest and I both tasted the cheese. It is a lovely soft texture, white, spreadable, about like ricotta with just a bit more of a ricotta tang than like cottage cheese taste. So I am not sure if I made ricotta or cottage cheese or something in between. It’s very tasty. The whey smells clean and faintly like yogurt.

The amount of cheese I got, about two cups solid, is worth a little more than the same amount as the milk I lost assuming it is cottage cheese. So much for those who say pasteurized milk can’t be used to make cheese. I’ll put in an update on the post if we get violently ill as the raw milk fans claim we will, but I don’t think we will.

How and Why I Toilet Trained My Cat.

We had company visiting and while we were chatting my cat walked by to the bathroom and then a few minutes later walked back, meowed at me, and left. I excused myself to go flush for him. My guests were amazed. “Your cat uses the toilet?” This led to a discussion about how and why I toilet trained my cat and never spend a penny on kitty litter or time cleaning the litter pan.

Why was easy. Klinger had gotten separated from us and was gone for 8 weeks before we got him back. During that eight weeks I got really comfy with not cleaning the litter box and while it was good to have him back, I found I really resented having to clean that box again. I have asthma and artificial scents and fine dust make me wheeze. I found it was getting harder and harder to find kitty litter that was not full of stuff that makes me wheeze. Bad enough you have the natural dust but all that “fresh air” scent crap they add to cover the dirty litter box smell leaves me with watering eyes and a cough. So that was one reason.

And there was the cost. I didn’t really consider the cost until I started collecting the buckets and using them to make a container garden. That really hit hard. I had a whole bunch of these buckets each one representing about $12 and so that meant I was spending over $600 a year on kitty litter! You don’t think its all that much but add it up over time. I can certainly think of a lot of things I’d rather spend $600 on. That was the second reason.

Then there is the environmental cost. Kitty litter is made of clay which has to be strip mined off the face of poor mother earth. The litter then mostly ends up landfills. Do I really want to be involved in that kind of recycling? No. That was the third reason.

And then there is Klinger. He is a highly fastidious creature, even for a cat. He absolutely hates using the litter box if there’s anything in it. I mean this cat is a clean freak even for a cat. Every single time I cleaned the litter box he would rush right over and display all the signs of delight I feel when I find a public washroom long after the urge has started. I do think that he was holding it as long as he could because the litter box was so unpleasant. That’s not good for cats, especially male cats because retaining urine can help cause stones. Since he learned to use the toilet I have noticed he goes a lot more often then he did with the litter box. The toilet means he always has a nice clean place to go so he doesn’t wait. He even tells me when he has used it and frets until I flush it all away. Apparently he likes the smell even less than I do. That was the best reason. (We did not teach him to flush because people who have done that complain the cat likes to flush for fun over and over again all day and night long.)

So how did we do it? It was easy and hard. It was easy because the steps are simple and straightforward. You don’t try to train the cat all at once. You do it very slowly adding teeny tiny increments until the cat can do it. It was hard because you have to be SO patient while doing those teeny tiny increments. You also have to put up with accidents while learning. It helps to think of accidents as being your fault. An accident means you moved to quickly or made a step too big for the cat.

The steps are available from many excellent on line websites and you tube videos so I won’t detail them here. In summary you start by moving the litter box to beside the toilet for about a week. You then raise the litter a bit (about 15 cm or 6 inches) at a time leaving the litter box at each level for about a week. (Yes it is awkward putting up with the litter box by the toilet. It IS temporary and it IS worth it.) Once you have the litter box at the same level as the toilet and the cat is accustomed to jumping up to that height, you move the litter box over onto the toilet. You now have to put up with a week of moving the litter box every time you need to use the toilet but bear with me.

The next few steps are the trickiest ones and there are various ways of doing it including a neat commercial kit. I used a big bowl I had that happened to sit very nicely in the toilet and was easy to move off and on when I needed to use the thing. You get the litter down to under the toilet seat. The first time Klinger found the litter suddenly under the toilet seat he walked around and around, checked very carefully, tried to get into the small circle and failed. He then gave a cat shrug and balanced on the seat, did his business, covered it and left. This step represents a major hurdle. Some people start by putting a separate toilet seat over the litter box at floor level because of this. Once the cat is reliably using the litter in the bowl while squatting on the seat you can start slowly, very slowly, reducing the amount of litter and increasing the depth of the litter. The cute commercial thing actually has a centre hole that can be adjusted larger and larger. I kept reducing the litter in the bowl until I had none and then I let him get used to using it dry. Because we were living in the trailer when I did this, he didn’t have to learn over water. I did one other thing which I think helped. Mother cats train their babies to bury their waste. I think Klinger regards me as a mother figure so whenever I used the toilet I would invite him in and encourage him to watch me. After I was done I would put him on the toilet seat so he could see and smell. He did seem to “get” what I was up to. Klinger also responds to rewards of cat nip, praise and a nice ear rub. Every time he did something right he got lots of praise for it.

Over all it took about 8 weeks until he was reliably using the toilet. He went through a period where he started using the bathtub instead, when we first moved into the house, because he didn’t like the water in the regular stick house toilet. I had to keep the bathtub full with a layer of water to get him to get over that.  I actually saw him when he found the tub full of water. I could see his cat brain working. Hm tub with lots of water and no perch or toilet with only a little water and a perch. Toilet it is. One other tip is we removed the toilet lid. He can’t lift the lid up by himself and it’s not fair to leave him in that fix.

And that’s how and why I toilet trained my cat.

One funny note: One of my guests asked if the cat didn’t leave a mess I was worried about sitting in. The answer is no and if you look at the picture you can see why. When the cat is squatting on the seat all his equipment is well below. The cat leaves a lot less mess than a typical man! And he doesn’t leave the toilet seat up either. The women all laughed and the men all kind of squirmed and rolled their eyes.