(Mostly) About the Gardening

A three-day holiday weekend with warm weather - so definitely what you might call a busman's holiday for me, naturally. I've been out in the garden all three days, besides one trip to buy plants, and one to a friend's to do a little help with her garden weeding and clean-up. But really, how can you resist being out in such nice weather?

I got all my plants in the ground and the planters, except the still tiny things from seed. Man, I've been adding a lot this year. It didn't really hit me until I saw the pile of plant tags.

The biggest garden splurge this year, however, was good old-fashioned manure. And a serious shout-out to Manotick Gardens, who delivered the stuff on the Sunday of a holiday weekend. I finally had a chance to call on Saturday to order, and the woman on the phone said, 'You're not getting it today.' I said, no, that was fine, if I had wanted it for today I would have called earlier in the week. Frankly, I was just glad the office was open so I could order. Then she said, 'How's Sunday?' What, like tomorrow? Hell, yeah. Deal. And sure enough, yesterday evening I came home to a cubic yard of 5-year-old local manure. Which proved to be enough to top-dress everything in the place, down to my planters, so I am thrilled. And all the plants look great against the dark-brown background, laid on like a mulch.

Even pre-manuring, though, things were looking nice, and I spend half the time outside admiring flowers. Pure white apple blossom:

The lilacs and the ground phlox end up nearly the same color:

Veronica whitleyi is in full bloom. It's a ground cover, low and grey-green most of the season but a carpet of blue-purple right now:

The bleeding heart, I think, will look good behind the euonymus, once it's established itself and gotten bigger:

With all this, of course, the knitting is going slowly, but I have hopes of getting some good work done today on the diamond-patterned gloves on the needles - the afternoon is supposed to be pretty hot, so indoor pursuits sound like a good idea.

Sad news from home, though. Turns out we were overly optimistic about the prognosis for the dog's Lyme disease. She did perk up for a while, but then started going downhill again, and the vet said the Lyme had damaged her bone marrow and she wasn't producing red blood cells anymore. No cure for that, poor Vicky, and I don't think she'll be around when I get to the country for Jo's alpaca shearing bee next week.

Progress Report

Feels like I've been really productive the last few days. This morning I got the last of my gorgeous red and purple silk/wool roving from Rhinebeck 2012 spun, plied and off the wheel. (Needed the wheel freed up for some other spinning I want to do this week, that was a good motivation.)

Two skeins of that, roughly fingering-weight, and it will probably become a shawl or scarf for me. Something super-simple, I think, just to show off the yarn.

Yesterday I sat myself down and said I wasn't allowed to work on my sweater until I finished at least the first mitt for a pair I'm making Gaby, who was one of my classmates and a definite fan of my work.

She fell in love with the Winter Twilight mitts I made for myself, with a red sky; the sky in these is a purple sock yarn from our local Riverside Studios (katdry on Rav), which I bought a few years ago and hadn't gotten around to using yet. I'll see Gaby Sunday, so I thought it would be nice to have them done by then.

And I did end up having time to knit on my sweater, the more so because I was on the phone with my mother last night, so that was a nice chunk of knitting time. I'm at about 12", finished the waist shaping, and about 3" to go before splitting for the armholes. That seems like it's on track to finish in November...

She said there was no new information yet about the Dog, except presumably the Week-enders still have her; but she was going to visit the Baker today and find out if there was any news...

Bucolic

That is definitely the way to describe my weekend. Saturday's class went really well, and everyone had fun. I think it was just a great combination of people. It was supposed to be 1-4, but at 4:30 everyone was still there talking - always a nice sign.

Anyone who thinks the perfect Sunday morning means sleeping in and having a leisurely brunch would have been out of luck at the farm this week. By 9:30 or 10, everyone was up and fed, dishes done, Mom was taking the dog for his walk before work, Dad was taking the lawnmower for a walk before church, and I was hanging my second load of laundry on the clothesline - slightly delayed, since I hadn't wanted to interrupt a pair of flycatchers who seemed to be discussing the possibilities of the shed eaves near the clothesline as a nest-building site.

After the parents went off to their respective destinations and the day started getting warmer, I settled on the porch to do a little picking. Not banjo, like in some country song, but llama fibre. It's a mindless task, but rather nice to do it on a sunny spring day in the country. All the birds were chirping like mad, about mates and territory, and nest-building. Maybe some of them will have llama-lined nests from my discards!

The llama is my cousins' from last year's shearing. Lots of second cuts to pick out (it was Shawn's first time shearing, and he hadn't been thinking of it going to me at the time), but I got about a 50% yield, and what I was keeping was nice.

It was so nice to be able to sit out and enjoy the spring, and I spent the whole morning there. From the porch I could look out to the front border and the new bush, and to the left, past the apple trees, a gleam of yellow was visible from one of the gardens, where crocuses and daffodils, and forsythia were in bloom.

I wasn't alone in enjoying the weather, or the fibre, either. Abby was stretched out on one of the other chairs, and Rex was busy holding the door closed. Then Gail wandered over, and helped with the picking. She can't resist raw fleece - behaves like it's catnip.

It was, despite the help, a productive session, since about half the garbage-bag-full got picked. I spent the rest of the afternoon in the dye garden, hacking back the greenweed, and collecting the weathered stems from the madder. Last year's experiments showed that stems dried green give an olive colour, but stems that weather overwinter like these will give a peachy-pink similar to bedstraw. No point in wasting them!

 

Down On The Farm

Back in the city, after a lovely weekend out at the parents'. A busy visit, but enjoyable for both me and the cat. She's napping, worn out by all that hunting she did - I don't think she settled down in the house for more than a few hours the whole weekend. And I'm nursing the usual assortment of mosquito bites and stiff muscles garnered in the garden and field.

The strawberries are ripe early this year, and the wild strawberries are amazing. I never remember there being this many or this big. Usually you get a couple handfuls to nibble. But Mom and I spent part of Saturday afternoon hunting them, and came out with a few cups of them! Enough to make strawberry shortcake with the wild berries only, which has to be the height of summer decadence. Real shortcake, none of this sponge-cake stuff, and freshly-whipped cream.

The year's batch of baby chicks have arrived. This bunch is more curious, or less timid, than the last, some of them being willing to come right over to you instead of running away, and not fussing if you pick them up. One even didn't want to get off my hand, but sidled up my wrist, with the apparent aim of perching there for a nap. The dog, Rex, is in his element. He loves the babies, and has to come and see them, and herd them with his big nose, make sure no-one wanders off. Poor Rex looks like an accident victim right now, though, and very sorry for himself:

It's his own fault, really. He had an insect bite or something, and he licked it raw. Mom put the purple livestock disinfectant on it, and he licked that off, and made the spot twice as large. Bandages wouldn't stay on, so it's a pad now with antiseptic salve, taped on. Fine as long as he's supervised, but overnight he got an old t-shirt as makeshift pants, held on by cloth strips for suspenders, to ensure he didn't remove his bandage. His dignity was so injured that I didn't take a picture, but think of Eeyore. He was so sad and insulted he sat on the lawn with his back to the house, and didn't come in to clean the dinner plates!

And then there was the gardening. The weather has been very good for the plants, it seems. I took an entire wheelbarrow of tops off the madder patch, and spread them out to dry - I'm looking forward to trying the fresh tops, given that the bits that had spent the winter on the ground had color enough to dye with. The bedstraw was close to flowering, so I cut that down to compost. Dug out a couple dozen baby pokeweed that were de trop, and set out my Japanese indigo seedlings. Amazing how many fit in the one small pot I started - I dug over 20 holes, and planted 2-4 seedlings per hole. Happy to have plenty, though, since I came across a new technique for dyeing with them that I'm anxious to try - it uses vinegar and water only, and no heating.