Category: gardening

  • in progress

    Knitting:

    one-armed Manos

    Just needs the other sleeve sewn in. And the ends. And buttons. And a good blocking.

    Spinning:

    merino/silk

    About 700 yards of fingering weight merino/silk. Off the wheel, technically! But it’s the first completed yarn I’ve made in months.

    Gardening:

    small veggie bed

    A mini bed in front of my back deck. I’m not doing the allotment garden this year (too big, too much work by myself, not sure if I’ll be around all summer) but I am trying to get my crops in among my parents’ plants! This area was pretty sad, a few raspberry offshoots (scraggly ones) and not much else. So I dug up the plants (very tough) and planted about four feet of shelling peas in double rows and four feet of “mammoth melting” snow peas against the deck. Then in front of them I planted green onions, coriander (cilantro) and chives. I need some kind of border stones or something…

    tomato seedlings

    Tomatoes, of course – I’m rather behind this year but I think I’m ok. Varieties: Purple Calabash, Eva Purple Ball, White Queen (they’re white!), Tigerella, Matt’s Wild Cherry.

    Reading:

    oh yeah

    Buffy Season 8, Volume 1. Oh yeah.

  • weekend = work week

    Not a lot of time to blog at the moment, since I’ve got to get off to work, but I thought I’d let you all know how the knitting’s going! Seraphim has been my obsession, of course, and I’ve gotten a lot done this week.

    seraphim, sept 11

    This photo was taken on Tuesday, so I’m rather far behind on my photo-documenting, but I’m much farther now! I’m more than halfway through Chart #3, then it’s the edge chart, and then I’m done! It’s shaping up to be quite big – I usually favour smaller shawls, but I just blindly followed the pattern on this one. I’m sure it’ll be fine.

    And since I haven’t said anything about the garden lately, that’s going well too. The tomatoes are just everywhere, and I’ve been canning – so far I’ve done fourteen pint jars and four litre jars. I need to do the canning about once a week or so, to rotate through the tomatoes that are ripe enough and such. I’ve got two heaping baskets of tomatoes ripening on the counter (3L each) so I’m hoping they’ll be good to go on Tuesday or so. The litre jars hold a lot more each, but I can only fit four in at a time, maybe five – the four jars that I did the other day held about 8 dozen tomatoes. So maybe another batch of litre jars next time.

    We also harvested and ate our very own watermelon!

    our one watermelon!

    It was actually ripe, and delicious! Unfortunately our plant got a bit stunted and only gave the one watermelon before dying. But it was super sweet (also super seedy). And hey, we made a watermelon by sticking a seed in the ground! Growing stuff is awesome.

  • belly party

    IMG_1320.JPG

    Following a rather mad dash to the finishing line (involving me spending pretty much an entire week knitting squares to fill in the gaps) the ladies of the lettuce knit SnB presented our three preggers ladies with blankets!

    Jen, Joyce, and Mel got heaps of presents and lots of handknits, obviously! I, being the genuis that I am, forgot to photograph my finished wee sweaters before I gifted them, so perhaps the ladies would be so kind as to send me something to post?

    (more photo on my flickr.)

    The rush of blanket finishing plus working and all that left little time for other fibrey pursuits, but I finally brought my wheel home from the store (it had been living there for wheel classes for the last six weeks or so) and have been slowly returning to the spinning. If I’m going to make it to Rhinebeck, I’d better spin up at least part of all that fibre I bought last year!

    The crocheted red skirt (herringbone skirt from Knitscene) is thisclose to being done – definitely time for an FO around here! In the meanwhile, I’ve been playing with another toy this week…

    IMG_1340.JPG

    That pile of noodles was actually just test flour-water dough to clean out the machine – we made tortellini filled with ricotta and basil, with fresh homemade tomato sauce with tomatoes from the garden, of course! Does anyone know where I can buy or borrow a pressure canner from? It would be oh so much faster than the boiling water canner once I start canning (I’m currently gearing up for it, the tomatoes are coming in pretty fast).

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