(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.

Not Quite Friday the 13th

Another Saturday off, loving it, despite the fact the weather's turning chilly again, and I will have to bring my plants back in and hope that the fruit blossoms don't get frozen.

Coolest thing this week (although I didn't get a picture): we saw a fox one morning across the road from one of our jobs. Just walking through someone's front yard in the Alta Vista area. I do love that aspect of working outside in the mornings. It's quiet, and you never know what you will see!

I was rather wondering what yesterday would bring, being Friday the 13th, and rain predicted. But I would say it was rather good for a 'bad-luck' day. Sure it rained, but only a few hours, and we were warm and dry by the end of the day's work. And I am rejoicing, just a little, because it was the last day for one of the new garden guys - he has decided on a nursery job. And another new gardener starts Monday, a woman this time, so I am being cautiously optimistic. It sounds really sexist to say it, but really, in three seasons and something like 9 other gardeners and students I've worked with, the guys have been very disappointing compared to the girls, in terms of combined speed and ability. I expect there are good male gardeners out there, but I haven't met them!

Just to round out a nice Friday the 13th, my tax return arrived (with an adjustment in my favour even!) and my lettuce is up, and the lilacs and my little apple tree are starting to bloom.

My Hypnosis socks are finally finished, so that is exciting. Even if I can't wear them until after fair season, because I want to enter them in the fair. I am tempted to make something else for myself (after the gloves for Johanne's stash I cast on the other day), but I know I need to start prep for shows and such...we shall see.

Oh, and good news on our side, at least, from the Fort Mac fires. People are starting to go back home, and my cousin reports that things look better than they did on the news, and in particular, his truck and buildings are safe and sound. Plus there's now lots of work for him in helping with rebuilding.

Spring Scramble

First three weeks of work already done, and busy - we did two Saturdays in a row, and having yesterday off felt like a luxury. So much free time! Two new faces on the garden crew and both, um, not up to the speed of our other (amazing) gardener, who has been helping out with the lawn stuff as well as gardening this spring. This week there was some improvement, so with any luck we won't be running behind all season...Only I'm waiting to see how this works out when one has grass allergies and back pain, and one has pollen allergies and can't kneel for long because of pins in one ankle.

Most of the back bed I wanted to rearrange is done and replanted. What's left is mostly the things that have come from a greenhouse and are still being hardened off. Mom was nice enough to take my wish list with her to a local plant sale at a horticulture school, and brought me piles of pretty things - a fragrant white clematis with a purple centre, and some liatris for the back bed, a ninebark and a fuzzy annual lamb's-ears for the front, and a bunch of things for a planter in yellows and whites - variegated ivy, daisies and coreopsis, New Guinea impatiens, and lantana, plus a few herbs. And since my veg bed is now free, I may just put in my lettuce today.

Knitting pace, of course, slows significantly now we're working. Especially since I'm nodding off in the bus half the time when I could be knitting. But I'm now on the leg of my second sock, and I did a pair of mitts for Johanne's pile, with duplicate-stitched roses on a diamond trellis background.

The cat let me sleep in until 7:30 this morning, presumably as a Mother's Day present, which was much appreciated, since a friend and I went out to contra dancing last night, and bedtime was late. Yesterday it was 5:30 when I gave up the battle and got out of bed, but it was such a lovely morning I forgave her, and went out and gardened for a few hours after breakfast. Actually, I kind of felt sorry for the people who were still asleep and missing the birds twittering, the mild air, and the sweeps of geese going north against the morning sky.

Such a contrast to what it must be in Alberta. I'm keeping an eye on the news from Fort Mac wildfires. A cousin and his family live (lived?) there. They got out safely, but financially it will be awful for them - his work truck and all his equipment left behind, and the two buildings he had bought as an investment (and was still paying for) - not to mention all the personal stuff lost. And to think it will be essentially a whole town in the same boat. It's been great to hear of so many people stepping up to help the evacuees though.

A Little Bit of Everything

So what about this weather? Can't make up its mind - Easter Sunday it was so warm I sat out on the porch at the parents' in a t-shirt and bare feet and was too hot, then it got cold again this week, and today it's snowing. My library pile, with books on famous English gardens at Sissinghurst and Munstead, seems a nice escape from the snow.

The preparations for spring are moving forward, though. Clean-up outside is mostly done. My seeds have all arrived, and all the windowsills are occupied by flats (spaced so the cat can still jump up in her usual places, though). The zinnias and salpiglossis are up already, and I check the window boxes more often than I check my e-mails, waiting for the next little plants. I feel really happy about the salpiglossis, since they haven't had a textbook life so far. The package said they had to be sprouted in the dark for 20 days at 80 F. Well, I wrapped them in black plastic and put them in the windowsill right by the stove, since I couldn't think of any other way to keep them warm. After less than a week (!) they were up, tiny, pale,  spindly things, so I thought they might be better off with light, and switched the black plastic for clear. And promptly managed to drop the flat upside-down while putting it back on the windowsill. But there were still seedlings on top, in the soil, when I turned it back over - thank goodness for that bag I had over it - so I thought no harm in seeing if they'll live. And they are - they are bigger and they have little green leaves, so all is well!

Assorted items done: Got things up in my Etsy store again - and this time they are set up to auto-renew if they expire. Yay, because I'm really bad at paying attention to that little job. Got my taxes done today. Finalized the garden plans I made for Liz last spring (she had a busy year too, so it wasn't like she was twiddling her thumbs waiting on me), and did some estimating for a patio a friend wants.

Work hasn't started yet, except for our first job of the season, which was building a garden at the Home and Garden show the other week. We took a day and a half to do the planting, between deciding how things would look best, and juggling the plan when some plants didn't show up in good condition. Trees, shrubs, perennials, bulbs in bloom, we had it all, in a stone and wood backyard patio setting the construction team built. I was worried tear-down would be a long job also, but it went like a team of army ants had gotten in. Three hours only, and we kept all the plants for use this summer.

A treat Easter Monday - a whole flock of Bohemian waxwings showed up and hung around for a while, eating the little crabapples on a tree in the front yard at the parents'. Gorgeous birds, and watching them eat crabapples is a hoot. They were eating them whole, but if the apple is too big...bird opens beak wide, apple slides down, bird closes beak, apple slides back up!

There has been fibre stuff going on as well, of course. Mitts for the ranch store, and now I'm on an interesting project; a request for a chiengora lace scarf. The dog is more of a hair than a fur type, so I mixed it with half Romney wool, spun a couple bobbins of fairly fine 2-ply, and now it's on the needles in an Estonian floral lace pattern.

The mitts are both from a book by Solveig Larsson, and it is a lovely book.

Spring On The Way

Baby socks for a friend of my sister's, finished this week just a little after the baby made her appearance:

Little people, and now little plants. Several days of mild weather means the snow is retreating, and in its wake, the daffodils in front of the building are coming up already.

And that means I have to get my act together and order seeds. I don't usually do that - it's a small garden, and what I need can usually be assembled from what I save myself plus some extras from my mother, and the occasional purchase at the store or garden center.

This year, however, I got a catalogue from Heritage Harvest Seeds in Manitoba when I was demo-ing at the Farm Show last week, and I couldn't resist. Plus I have a gift certificate from Stokes that should be used. So I've been hemming and hawing over decisions. Flowers from Stokes, veg from Heritage, that was pretty straightforward.

After that...well, there's less varieties for a lot of the veg, but Heritage has something like 200 types of tomato, and I have space for maybe 6 plants, so no point getting more than one type. I settled on Forme de Coeur, a nice multipurpose, productive, Quebec heirloom. But I could have had anything from White Currant (cream colored and half the size of a cherry tomato) to Ferris Wheel (where a slice is bigger than a piece of bread), or Silvery Fir Tree with delicate ferny foliage as well as nice fruit, or red-and-yellow-streaked hollow stuffing tomatoes, or a long-term keeper that ripens from the inside out... Deciding on beans was just as hard, but I ended up with 2 dual-purpose (fresh or dried) ones - Blue Jay, a green bean with navy blue and beige seeds, and Dragon Tongue, a yellow wax bean with purple-streaked pods and purple-striped beige seeds.

And it will be nice to have some pretty annuals to start from seed and pop in gaps in the beds for colour. I'm getting multicoloured zinnias and pink and cream celosia, and multicolored painted tongue (salpiglossis), which I've always liked the look of but never tried. I can hardly wait!

Summer To Fall

The last of summer is speeding by already. All the signs are here that fall is on the way. Cooler mornings, geese flying overhead, asters and chrysanthemums blooming, and a few early leaves turning. In the veg garden the tomatoes are ripening (there will be bruschetta this weekend!), and I took enough beets and onions out last weekend to put up nine jars of pickles.

Work has slowed down a little, but there's still plenty going on. Last week (yeah, in that heat wave)  we had three of us out to an all-day job, clearing a massive set of stone terraces and steps on a waterfront property. The owner wanted some of the wildflowers left but the massive stuff and the bad stuff (like burdock and nettle and weed trees) gone. We put a good dent in it, but it will take another day's work at least to do it all. And thank goodness he had a burn pile, because that was so much easier than bagging it all - we got the pile to the point where it was six feet tall and at least twice that long. It felt at times like we were clearing Mayan ruins, and we should have had pith helmets and machetes. Yesterday we started another bigger job which will continue Monday - tidying up a property that I don't think has had much care in a year or two, but needs to get to a decent point, after which we will be doing regular maintenance. It's an older house and gardens, and definitely has potential, but some plants, like the day lilies and hydrangeas, have sort of started taking over - I think about 70% of the space is orange day lilies at the moment.

I'm still trying to finish re-skeining all the dyed yarn from the summer's batches. The bag of things to re-skein is slowly emptying (most of what's left in there is pastel shades of alpaca), and the box of things to label is slowly filling.

Only three weeks until the WoolGathering and Havelock Fair, and things need to be labeled and packed, and I'd like to do a bit more spinning and knitting if possible. Just finished a pair of fingerless mitts that are definitely seasonal, though!

The main reason the re-skeining goes slowly is HRH Julia. Standard session goes like this: I have the swift and the reel set up on the dining table, which is pretty much the most convenient spot in the place for me, and start working, then she decides after I get set up that she needs to stretch out right there also. So I shift the reel out of her way, she rolls over and gets whacked with it,

I move her over, she gets grouchy and comments that she's trying to sleep and I'm in her way. I reply that Temptations don't grow on trees and someone needs to buy them for her. I get a little more work done before she rolls over in the way of the reel again, I get up and go do something else, then several minutes later she gets bored and wanders off elsewhere. I go back to re-skeining, and try to get as much done as I can before the next round of need-to-nap-on-the-table-now-plz. Which is where I'm headed now, since the table's free for now...

Everything Going On

So here we are, at the official start of summer. Just over a week to July, folks, and the time's been going fast. This weekend seems to be my first breathing space in a while. A nice quiet Sunday with a little mizzle in the air, and a chance to sit down at the computer for more than the time to check e-mail or do work. At least for a little while, before I have to see about lunches for the week, and tidying the place for a friend's visit, and getting some work done on Liz's garden plan, a few changes to be made following a chat with her last weekend...

It's been busy in the gardens this year. We've had more clients at work, more jobs coming in, than last year for sure. No early finishes to the days. Little chance of getting rainy days off. More Saturdays worked than before. And then our head gardener let us know she was leaving, so the next little while will be more fun than ever. Thankfully Emily (the other gardener remaining) and I work well together, and the organizing of jobs we've been doing this week seems to be getting a good amount done. But if you know of an experienced gardener looking for work (a slim hope, but whatever), send them our way!

Actual knitting content has been happening also, no fear. I mentioned that I was doing one for the boss for his fundraiser, right? It got done, working on it right to the last minute. Under 4 weeks, dudes, and I am not trying that again. There are changes I would make another time, but it turned out well, the boss liked it, and he was happy with the auction results, and said it got a lot of positive comments. Phew. This was the final product (although you can't see the cables very well; they're on both red and grey stripes:

Please note the cat is helping. She's usually very good about not touching my work, so I don't know what got into her, but every time I had the afghan pieces out to pin and arrange for sewing, she was there rolling on my work, and I was panicking that she would coat it in cat hair or snag it. I ended up putting a tablecloth over whatever parts I wasn't actually working on.

The logo is from their website, and I will note that Photoshop or a similar image manipulation program is your friend if you want to copy/adapt something like this for knitting, especially if you're like me and can't draw. If you want to know how I did it, the process goes like this:
1) I grabbed the image from the website, then in Photoshop, I cropped it to the area with just the logo I needed.

 2) I did a gauge swatch of my yarn, figured out how big a panel I wanted to make with the logo, and used that info to get an approximate stitch and row count for the panel.
3) Back in Photoshop, I changed the image size width in pixels to match my stitch count desired for the panel (I wasn't too fussed about row count, as I figured I could just make the shorter strips below it whatever length I needed, and I didn't want to distort the image.)
4) Then I magnified the image until I could see the individual pixels well.

5) I opened up a page of electronic graph paper (I found it as a free download somewhere a few years ago) in Photoshop as well, and copied the image outlines to the graph paper.

Since the original image had pixels in multiple colours and intensities, and I wanted essentially a black and white version, I had to decide for the in-between shades whether a square should be graphed as black or white, and I adjusted the lettering to be more regular than it would be by using strictly dark/light decisions. But the idea worked wonderfully on the whole, and I love the idea that it means there doesn't have to be a graphed image out there for something I want to do, because I can create one fairly easily in whatever size I want. (Of course, be respectful of copyright, if you are going to try this at home. I wasn't worrying about it because of it being done by request for the actual organization in question.)

Sort of funny that I had been working so hard on this afghan for a cancer fundraiser, when one of the other recent happenings has been that this week Kim, a knitting friend with cancer, got moved to hospice and subsequently passed away. It's not like we all didn't know this would happen at some point, short of a miracle occurring. And I'm glad for her sake that when she started going downhill, she went pretty fast, so didn't suffer as long. But it's still a hard notion to get used to, that she's gone, and she won't be at knit-outs or on Rav anymore, and I will be glad to be busy for a while and not think about it. She was a nice person, and will be missed around here.

Of Mice and Men

Ok, seriously guys? It's Saturday suppertime and I'm having the second half of my lunch. The first half was at 3. I'm starving and in need of tea, which is steeping right now. And I need to whine a little. It's been one of those days. On the plus side, Emily (the new gardener) and I are having a lovely time exchanging tales of the co-op students...we laugh so we don't cry.

I had been hoping to get to the Glebe Garage Sale today, but no dice. Through a combination of factors, we ended up working today, 9-5:30ish. For one, it's first round of maintenance for some places, so we're doing gardens we haven't seen in over 6 months, and which are consequently a little, um, weedy. Then we have the fact that the co-op students are not getting any faster at working, and apparently are incapable of recognizing some basic weeds, so the work goes rather slower than it should. That meant we had a backlog of something like eight places from this week to catch up on today. And the head gardener took the day off.

Just to start the day off right, I discovered on the way to work that I had left my knitting needles at home. Had the wool, just not the needles. So no knitting during travel time. Fine, I spent the time doing a bit of planning towards Liz's garden on a scrap of paper.

I get to work and Emily and I divide up the jobs and the students, and head out. I took west end, since the biggest job there was one that I knew would be a mess. I figured it would be easier if someone familiar with it went in - they only came to us halfway through last summer, and it took two people two days to get it in shape to do maintenance the rest of the summer. And I don't think they had a fall or spring clean-up. Well, we took 7 bags of weeds and stuff out today and took 5 hours to do it. And just to make things more fun, I managed to kneel on a dog bomb in the back yard. Both knees and kneepads. So I used a spare handkerchief and some of my drinking water to clean up as best as I could, and kept going. My estimate is that I did about 3/4 of the place...

By the time we finished, it was going on 3. Emily and her student were done two small jobs and on to the third - Emily also doing about 3/4 of the work at each site. We stopped for a bathroom break on the way to our second place, and ate what we could while travelling, which added up to half a flatbread with hummus for me. Then another 2 hours work at site # 2. Emily finished their site #4 and got back to the shop maybe 20 minutes ahead of us. And bless the girl, she waited and drove me home - her new place is only 5 minutes from me. I was not looking forward to catching a bus - it comes every 30 min, I think, on Saturdays, and is 15-20 minutes walk down the road from work. She is getting cookies from me, since she is making a habit of driving me when the bus is not being convenient.

And we had our laughs on the way home. One site they went to, I had told her there was only the one bed in the back. She passed the information on to her student - who managed to walk right by the bed in question (which is in a raised masonry surround, filled with rosebushes, and right there when you go to the back). He went all the way down to the back corner where there was a patch of tallish weeds near the fence, and apparently started weeding between the weeds. Ten minutes later he comes to her saying he has a question about which ones are the plants...

I guess they haven't learned weeds yet at school? My student has been making a habit of leaving grass in the beds. Couch grass and lawn grass. He carefully cultivated around a patch of the latter at one place today. I told Emily if their prof ever gets arrested for losing his temper and killing them, I will totally support him on grounds it was extreme provocation and justifiable homicide...

Oh, and the mice? Somehow one or more have gotten into the building for the first time I've noticed since I've lived here. Woke me up one night scritching around and gnawing, apparently in the ceiling above my hallway light fixture. Reported to landlord after a couple episodes, who came and put baits in the ceiling and a few other likely places, and reported some chewed insulation and stuff in the ceiling space. With any luck the baits will take care of the problem before they start chewing electrical wires.

Ah, well. Off to enjoy what's left of the weekend. There's bread rising right now, so I will have fresh bread with butter later on. And maybe tomorrow I will try sleeping in a little, if the cat permits!

A Day For Everything?

You know how there's days for just about any food/activity/disease/whatever? So apparently today was World Naked Gardening day. Seriously. (You learn about so many random things on Ravelry...)

Somehow, I don't think it's going to catch on, though. I mean, I'll give the originator props for trying. But some activities don't really go with naked, you know? And gardening is one of them (unless, of course, your idea of gardening is the Edwardian lady with a basket and a scissor cutting flowers to arrange indoors).

I was gardening today. There were shrubs to prune, and a rosebush. Would anyone care to try wrangling a rosebush 6+ feet high with no clothes on? On a nice hot sunny day? I didn't think so. At least the bugs aren't out yet, and there aren't any anthills nearby, but I think you would have been in pain by the end of the day, one way or another...

Pi Day I will celebrate happily. But I think I'll pass on the naked gardening, kthxbai.

Decision Making

To any quilters out there - how do you not go crazy deciding between options? There are so many options!

Where did that thought come from? Well, I'm working on a quilt block. One quilt block. A local quilting group is doing this for a fundraiser, and Mom and I decided to get in on it. Each person doing a block gets a packet with 2 pieces of fabric (the same 2 for everyone), and instructions. Basically, the idea is to add 2-4 more fabrics, and make a 12" quilt block. That's really all the guidelines you have.

First things first, I needed to find two more fabrics. Mom and I went through a couple baskets of scraps.  When your starting point is a blue solid and a blue print, there are a lot of colours that go with them. After trying several different combinations, I ended up with a buttery yellow and a white with a flower print that picked up the blue and the yellow.

Next, pattern. I'm pretty much a novice, so I wanted something fairly simple - i.e., nothing where I had to accurately match eight points together or something. But not too boring. And of course it had to be doable in 4 colours. Um, so we have a couple books with names like "400 Quilt Blocks". And a few with a more specialized focus. I skipped the magazines; that would have been too much input. Finally settled on a block called Canadian Gardens, which seemed appropriate.

Four fabrics, quilt block, all right...Wait, I still have to decide which colours are going where. So out come the coloured pencils and the paper. I'm sure this is a lot easier if you have a vision of the finished quilt in mind - which colours you want to emphasize, for instance. If all you see is a pattern of triangles and squares, there are a lot of possibilities. (If I was doing a whole quilt, in fact, I would be tempted to try out all the various permutations and combinations of colour arrangement for the same block layout.) But since I had only one block, and didn't want to spend two days choosing the colour placement, I sketched just four and picked one of those (the top left one, if you're wondering).

Got the pattern pieces drawn and cut out (the 8-squares-per-inch graph paper I had for school made that SO easy), traced onto cardboard and cut out for templates, and traced and cut appropriate pieces of fabric. Which was a job, not because of the cutting, but because the cat decided she needed attention, and accurately tracing and cutting pieces of fabric is much harder when there's four feet and a tail in the way and a cute face purring and trying to rub your face...Now I get to do the sewing, and hope everything lines up.

But not right now. Because it's beautifully sunny and nice out (supposed to be 23C today!), the birds are chirping, the crocuses are blooming, and I need to finish cleaning up the garden before work starts later this week.

Tempus Fugit

So...how did it get to be 3+ weeks into August already? I've been hearing geese and seeing red leaves - summer's almost over! And it's so dark in the morning now (and cool!) - the birds are only starting to wake up when I leave for work, instead of being up before me. The rabbits are up early, though - Julia's been chasing (but not catching) them in the mornings while I eat breakfast. The weeds in most gardens at work are starting to slow down, but now all the deadheading and cutting back starts. I got into my garden today for the first time in a month, and did the weeding and deadheading; came out with armloads of stuff to compost.

All my other late summer - early fall stuff is going on now too - that's my excuse for disappearing from the blog.

Dye plants are ready, and I've been doing a pile of my own dyeing for the fall shows (pretty, ain't it?), teaching a class in dyeing and one in spinning, and have two, maybe three more dye classes to teach next month. It's exciting that people seem to be really enjoying the natural dyeing. One of the classes, in fact, is a group where they want to dye their own yarn for a KAL of stranded socks and slippers. One of the members I know has done a bit of dyeing and is growing dye plants, and I'll be there to organize and answer questions, and make sure they get a nice variety of colours to play with.

One craft show down, next one in 2 weeks (the Roxham Woolgathering, which has been moved a week earlier this year). One agricultural fair down, one coming in 3 weeks. We exhibit a lot - and doesn't that occasion a pile of running around cutting flowers and scrubbing veg and labelling jam  jars! And thinking of jam jars...one batch of beet pickles and two of jam done, probably another round of the pickles to go.

And then there's the knitting - a few commissions, including socks for my aunt's birthday out of some of my natural-dyed yarn, and trying to accumulate stock for the shows coming up. Thank goodness for long bus rides, because otherwise I would get about 10 minutes of knitting a day after supper before I start nodding off!

Fluff and Stuff

Too bloody hot out there - so glad I'm not out working today. Instead, I'm out at the parents' for the weekend, in the country. Granted, I did go out and weed the dye garden after breakfast, and cut back the madder and the bedstraw - they were flopping all over the path, and the bedstraw was in flower, and I don't want it re-seeding all over the place - but right now, I'm staying in. Even the porch in the shade is on the warm side; I was picking fleece out there, but have given up and moved that in also.

And if you really want a picture that will make you sweat, this morning I finished the alpaca gloves I was working on, and got them blocked. They're nearly dry now.

This year's shipment of chicks arrived last week, including a few of different breeds and colours that will be kept for laying hens.

One of them, a Barred Rock chick, is a little smaller than the others, and she wasn't very lively this morning, and looked like she was panting, so we brought her in to keep an eye on her and keep her from being squashed or trampled. She's perkier now, and is back with the rest (she was feeling lonely, and making plenty of noise to let us know that), but we're keeping an eye on her, since she's still panting and not running about as much as the others. Hopefully she's going to be OK. She's very cute, and has a bit of an owl or a penguin colouring right now, dark on top and a creamy belly.

New Toy and Scrap Socks

So...both fibre and garden content today. For those who couldn't care less about garden stuff, here's the pic I promised of the scrap socks I'm knitting.

Caroline wanted neutral to warm colours, so this is just a bit of everything I had partial balls of that looked like it might fit the colour scheme. She even gets four colours that are natural-dyed. The yellow ochre for rib, heel and toe is dyed with rose canes, the black/grey variegated is logwood, the warm brown is walnut and coreopsis, and the dark olive-brown (in the center of the stars above the heel and the ochre/olive band near the toe) was originally dark blue, which I overdyed with onion.

I am digging the socks, and my mother would steal them except for the fact that they're the wrong size and have Caroline's name knitted in. So I expect there'll be another pair of these in my future.

And for the garden content, I just have to share a picture of my new toy. The head gardener at work introduced us to it, and it does almost everything. Officially it is I think a big grip garden knife. She refers to it simply as 'the tool', which is appropriate, since you can do the week's maintenance on a garden bed with only this in hand.

Sturdy as can be. Works as a trowel, a dandelion/taproot weed extractor (it's been super for lawn weeding), soil cultivator, and slices roots and stems. All those edges and teeth are sharp, though, so definitely keep out of reach of children. I did my garden weeding with it yesterday and it went really fast. Sweep under the surface to slice weed roots and loosen soil, use the tip for any stubborn taproots, and the serrated edge for any stems and branches on perennials that need removal, or root balls that need sawing apart. 10$ at Home Depot if you want one of your own.

Out this morning transplanting eggplants, cucs, and tomatoes, lavender and basil. I know it's a horribly hot day to do it (28C high predicted, and before 10am it was already hot to work outside in a t-shirt). But I only have time on weekends, so today it is. I gave everything a good watering, and shade cloth or a screen of some sort for the afternoon sun, so hopefully they will be all right.

Busman's Holiday

So...a week into my new job. 5 days and a bit actually, since we worked for a few hours on Saturday. It's mostly fun - I'm liking it, despite the part where I have to get up before 5am. Get to see all sorts of gardens while we're out doing spring clean-up on them, and a fair handful of wildlife to boot. There's been a pair of ducks swimming in someone's pool, a curious robin who hung out to watch us, and several dogs either in the house we were at or at a neighbour's. Of course there are the drawbacks, like the rain all day Tuesday, and the very dead rabbit I found in a heap of fallen leaves at one garden.

And there's the learning curve. Not as much about gardening at this point (although I am picking up a few tricks from my supervisor) as the associated stuff. Here's me, coming in with about 10 minutes total experience ever with a cell phone, some ancient experience in city driving, and no experience at all with a pick-up truck - and a week in they've got me driving myself around the city in a truck, and using a Blackberry to text and call. I tell you, if I was into drinking, this week would have been the time to do it. I did go through a bag of chips in reaction, but so far so good - I've managed to recover when I missed my turn-off on a large road a couple of times, and haven't injured any people or property that I know of, even if I did scare a few.

And with a day off finally, what did I do? Finished the spring clean-up at my apartment's gardens, natch. Edged the beds, turned the compost and spread the finished stuff, weeded, and bundled a whack of prunings to go out with the yard waste. (Whoever prunes around here just leaves everything where it falls, and it drives me nuts). Indoors, most of the little seedlings I've started are coming along well, and I'm looking forward to planting things out later on - tomatoes and lettuce, sunset runner beans and cucs, and maybe a daylily from the seeds one of mine produced last fall. It's nice to be looking forward to summer.

More Spring Gardening

Out at the parents' for Easter weekend, and my last free time before work starts on Monday. Been warming up for the job, cleaning out my dye garden, and helping Mom to clear what she refers to as the 'cochonerie' - all the weeds and undesirables - on the back peninsula. The area has been overgrown with raspberries and stuff, and some escaped goutweed, which we're trying to eradicate - two feedbags full of the stuff today, plus a lot of branches and vines to heap up. Once everything is cleaned up, Mom is thinking she'll make a rockery there.

The chickens have been enjoying their last hurrah, since things are coming up, and they make too much of a mess in the flowerbeds to be allowed to run loose. So they go in the pen tomorrow.

And all day a verse I picked up somewhere has been running through my head, as it does every spring, when the flowers start.

Now winter's rains and ruins are over
And all the season of snows and sins

And time remembered is grief forgotten
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten

And in green wood and undercover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins

Pasta and Parterres

I have found a new use for my wooden clothes-dryer.

It makes a great rack to hang fresh noodles on. This is the remains of my first batch of pasta from my new toy (the pasta-maker I got for Christmas), and it made a very tasty supper. How luxe is that - fresh pasta is going to be the norm around here from now on!

And on the perils of combining two interests...I've been reading a lovely book about estate gardens in the US between roughly 1890 and 1940, and a lot of the formal gardens have parterres - variously shaped flower beds, often edged with green low stuff like boxwood and filled with plants, like this:

And at the same time, I'm working on another hat - a reverse engineer of a Finnish pattern in the slip-stitch and stripe technique I've been seeing and wanting to try.

But now I've got the idea, the outlined shapes are making me think of parterres, and I can just about see designing something with a knit version of an outlined parterre garden using this slipstitch patterning. I think it could be fun...

Bunny!

Last fall at school, we spent some time digging a trench at the fenceline and putting a foot or so of hardware cloth underground, aimed to discourage the rabbits from getting in and nibbling the produce.

We now have evidence that we either missed a spot or have very determined, Peter Rabbit-type bunnies. A few of us went to the garden to check on things for our crop reports, and saw this little guy sitting right there.

He didn't even move until we were pretty close, even let me rummage for my camera, and just kept on munching the clover, so a daring sort of rabbit as well as a super-cute one. At least it was the clover and not the veggies!

Despite possible rabbit raiding, the gardens are producing well. We picked well over 20 pounds of beans Monday! Plus there are tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, greens, summer squash, and herbs. The peppers are starting also, and I think we will be pulling carrots soon. For anyone wanting to get some fresh veg at good prices, drop by the M Building at Algonquin, near Woodroffe and College, around lunchtime. We have our little garden center and produce stand open every Tuesday and Thursday from 11 to 1.

Sometimes the produce we don't sell goes to the culinary program at school, and they turn it into tasty meals to sell at their store, Savoir Fare (H Building, and definitely worth a visit). Today though, because the extra veg would all be sitting around for several days, we got to buy them at a deep discount. So I came home with a bag of tomatoes and one of summer squash and eggplant and a head of lettuce, all for under 3$, and I have some beans from earlier this week. There will be tomato sauce and bruschetta in my future this weekend!

Summer School

Well, two days into school, we pretty much know what to expect. Just watch me disappear for a while again, I think. Lots of projects to do - at least they'll be interesting, even if they do take up a lot of time.

Our first little assignment in Urban Agriculture was to plan a garden based on the premise that we want to have a BBQ for 40 people, and get the veg and herb ingredients for the planned menu (given to us) from said garden. Not so bad, I've got most of that done already. But there will be more assignments. And, you know, the usual. ID quizzes, midterms and finals, outdoor lab time and logbooks.

The kicker is going to be the five (count 'em, five!) big projects for the Construction and Maintenance classes. To be done in the next 2 months - most are due the week before exams, so end of September.

Number 1 is a group project, which involves surveying (with theodolite and measuring rod) an assigned area of campus, drawing the scale map and two overlays, one noting possible drainage issues, and one drawing up recommendations to improve it.

  Numbers 2 and 3 kind of go together. For number 2, we have to design a front yard, using our CAD program, then do all the estimating for materials and labour to complete the project. For number 3, we have to put together a maintenance package for the homeowner in our design, with information on care for their new plantings (minimum 12 different plants).

Numbers 4 and 5 both involve creating manuals. One is a safety manual for 10 different types of equipment of various sizes, powered and not. The other is a quick reference manual for growth, description, and care of 25 of the plants we will be studying this term.

There's going to be a couple trips off campus, too. One is to a farm that grows and sells wild food - I forget what the name is, but they were profiled in the Citizen earlier this summer, so that's pretty exciting. A few of us are already into wild stuff - we were nibbling on purslane and serviceberries and stuff while weeding the vegetable garden yesterday. I think there's more purslane than legit veg in some spots; maybe we can add it to our market offerings (the class garden center is open Tues and Thurs, 11-1pm, offering plants, and vegetables as they ripen).
Our second trip off campus will be to the Cancer Survivors' Park near Hurdman Station, to do maintenance, then we're stopping at the Arboretum in the afternoon to do an ID quiz walkabout.

So, yeah. Lots to do. I think my policy is going to have to be to start on as much as I can right away, and just keep plugging. Apparently there were a lot of stressed students in the final stretch for the first group...

In Pictures

It's been a crazy month or so. Work, dyeing, getting ready for the Corn Festival back home (my first show of the season), Tour de Fleece, picking and jamming berries (made a raspberry/peach orange combo that turned out real tasty)...Tomorrow is back to school for me, so yay for not being out of the house 12 hours a day. On the other hand, now I get homework, and volunteer work, and prep for teaching dyeing classes, and Huntingdon Fair  is in two weeks, have to get entries ready...

Now, I'm not going to blither at length about everything I've been doing since my last post, and make all those imaginary blog entries I've been planning into reality. But here's a few pics and notes.

Tour de Fleece: Good choice with the Lanterne Rouge group. I was doing all right until the last week or so, when I kind of fell off my wheel, as it were. Total spun: 3.5 skeins. I finally finished the second half of the last skein (another purple one) yesterday.

I didn't show off the last dye batch, did I? It's pretty. I figured some semi-solids would be nice for a change, being more versatile than variegated.

Remember the little wrens we had raising a family in the plants at work? No sooner did they fly off than two robin families took over hanging baskets. (Next year, if I go back, I'm going to change the sign to read Canadian Tire Garden Center and Bird Sanctuary.) The first ones hatched only one of their three eggs, but the baby is kinda cute, in an ugly way. Daddy robin was very suspicious of the camera. I'm glad I got to see the baby before end of work term, though.

There's been knitting too...a baby sweater I don't have a pic of, a pair of blue-and-white mitts in progress that I think of as my 'china' mittens, since they're rather like cobalt and white dishes, a pair of cabled mittens. Now there's a shawl in progress - a commission, in alpaca/silk laceweight, dyed coffee brown with walnuts.

 Next thing on my list? Make sure all my school stuff is ready for tomorrow. Janice has us at 9am for Urban Agriculture, so it looks like we'll be digging in the veg garden before afternoon theory class. Can't wait to see how that's doing, and say hello to Ginger the cat again.

Dang, I'm Good

(Julia says, "OMG! Help! A tornado just blew through!)

No, but seriously. I feel like this has been a really productive, efficient couple of days off. So much got done! Now I can go back to another few days of work with a clear conscience, clean clothes - and food in the fridge, ready to go. One of the things that got done was groceries, plus I made a batch of lentil soup and one of bruschetta (with fresh herbs from the garden!) , a loaf of bread, and some rice cooked up to use for fried rice.

And the fridge has a light now, for the first time in months. The landlord was in yesterday to check out some issues with my electric sockets, and he succeeded in getting the broken bulb out of the fridge so a new one could be put in.

The kitchen's steamed up right now, and has been all evening. One pot of boiling water went into a pail of aphid-infested leaves from the currant bush. Spraying them wasn't really helping (plus the rain kept washing the spray off), so I went out and picked off every single infested leaf I could find, and cooked the buggers. The other two pots currently boiling are mordant and cochineal dye. The UPS shipment yesterday turned out, unexpectedly, to be the yarn I ordered for dyeing. So three skeins of that and a handful of other skeins are getting colored tonight in shades of red and pink - I'm getting every drop of work I can out of that pot of cochineal.

The rest of today has been gardening, spinning and knitting. My Japanese indigo seedlings are set out in a few empty spots in the flower beds, a niche has been found for a little globe basil, and a new row of beets has been planted. Plus the blue fingerless mitts I was working on are done and blocking, and a bunch of angora/wool blend has been carded and spun. Life is good.