Category: gardening
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Crafting Galore
My crafting mojo is really strong right now! Maybe it’s because it’s been so hot out, I’ve been staying home surrounded by all my delicious crafty supplies. I finished knitting a deadline sweater (still needs ends, blocking and oh yeah, the pattern) and was immediately gripped with the urge to start something new, despite all the other stuff I have going.
I pulled out a bunch of yarn and found my sock yarn scrap stash – there’s a lot of it! I just wanted to make something easy, quick, and scrappy, so I ended up starting a half granny square triangle shawl.
It’s so fun! I want to make all my sock yarn scraps into shawls! Grey is Anzula Squishy, pink is madelinetosh pashmina and multi is Indigodragonfly MCN Sock.
I’ve been cooking up a storm, too. This week: homemade bagels (from this recipe, with brown sugar instead of white and no malt powder) and blueberry pie (with cornstarch instead of flour for thickening). YUM on both counts, and I should probably work out or something.
And I picked the first tomatoes of the year! They’re so cute.
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State of the Garden, July 19
The very first tomatoes are starting to ripen. There’s quite a bit of fruit on the plants! Most of them are healthy, but the tigerellas (above) were attacked pretty severely by flea beetles. They seem to have gone now (maybe burned up in the heat, ha) so maybe the plant will come back? At any rate, it has some nice fruit on there that we can always pick and ripen inside.
Knobbly tomatoes are getting bigger.
Tiny cherry tomatoes, about the size of a small gum ball. Shouldn’t be too long now before we can harvest a few.
Scarlet runners.
Royal burgundy beans are coming up nicely.
Small round eggplants – I left this plant in the tiny cell from the garden center for over a month and though it hasn’t grown, it has survived! So when I took out the spinach I planted it. I don’t have high hopes that it’ll produce, but it’s just nice to have plants rather than dirt.
The teeny tiniest little squash that I started last week – the other zucchini plant is doing pretty well, though no flowers yet.
So, the tomatoes seem to be doing quite well – I’m trying to feed the soil with eggshells, coffee grinds, kelp meal, and other assorted hippie-type stuff. It’s such a short growing season here and I find that things just don’t do as well in containers as in the magical ground, but it’s okay. I’m a bit jealous of people who are harvesting stuff! In the future I hope to have a garden that can produce enough to put by for winter treats, but this year I’d be happy with just a tomato sandwich.