Not where I'm supposed to be.

I was supposed to be out in the garden this morning.  The plan was to be there by now.  It was a good plan.  Really.  It was a most needed plan.  You have no idea how needed.

But due to the vagaries of weather, I'm not.  Let's just leave it at that.  I'm going to go out and check a little later.  We didn't have a lot here and if they didn't have much up there, then it should be possible to get there just a little later today.  I don't like working in the hot sun, but I don't think I have any choice.  

I did not get around to blocking the rest of that lace.  There is some laundry and some dishes, and if I recall correctly, the household is running low on toilet paper.  It isn't like I have nothing to do.  

There is always knitting.  As far as knitting goes, this can only be good.  I knit through the next lace/color changes on Lillia Hyrna, and I knit a whole bunch on the Folklore cardigan.  

I'm very pleased.  I'm also a little confused.  I did a swatch.  I got 22 stitches on four inches on the swatch.  Its hard to figure out what the gauge on the top multi coloured section, but on the bottom it is 26.  I pay attention to gauge, but it is a good thing I compulsively try it on.  Rather than trusting gauge, I tend to trust fit more.  

So, as usual, knit to fit.  Just a little closely mind.  Once washed, yarns almost always relax and give me the little bit of ease I need.  

It's things like this that make knitting exciting.  And gut wrenching.  Forward I go.  If the skies stay dark and the wet stuff still falls, I ought to get a lot done.

I have to post this, un-edtied and un-spellchecked before the signal on my internet sat cuts out again. One way or another, one day or another there will be dirt between my toes instead of just between my ears. 

Yarn stuff

OK, still no knitting.  The kitchen knitting is looking great but is still to damp for photos  I have moved it to dry right on top of the dehumidifier.  Hah, dampness.  Take that.

But do not despair.  I have some lovely stuff.  I stopped at Custom Woolen Mills the other day.  There was a sale bin.  Be still my beating heart. I delved.  I dug. 

The cones are sock wieights.  One full cone of red singles, and partial cones of singles in green and navy.  The white is a very fine 2 ply.  They are soft and lovely and make my fingers want to sing. 

The other skeins of mulespun have a purpose.  I have long needed more of the soft alpaca blend for the shawl I envision it to be.  And the steadfast gray is to use with some turquoise Mulespun I have in the stash.  Originally the turquoise was for with the black mulespun that my Elysium sweater was made from, but the contrast was too strong.  I think this softer colour will show off the good points of the turquoise (still one of my favourite shades) rather than making it look garish and too bright.  

Time will tell.  There is a heap of yard work to be done this morning.  And laundry is mountainous.  A week of goofing off, watching the rains fall, mourning my river.

 Ah yes.  The rivulet.  Didn't mention that did I?  See the middle of the garden.  Yeah.  River.  

I don't know how we missed this.  The ridge does have shallow spots along the top of it.  Those spots do collect water.  It has to drain somewhere when it overflows.  

Consolation

I am taking a one week break and only a one week break from that darned sweater and I will not swear (out loud) and I will behave like a lady (in public) when speaking about said sweater.

In consolation, I dug this out of the basket and am having a really good time.  All Clapotis are a really good time.  Simple knitting.  No brainwork required so long as you use a lot of stitch markers.  Hypnotic?  Yes. What's not to love?

I will also console myself with Persuasion.  In it, Jane Austen affirms that even a love lost can be renewed if that love be true.

Updated to add:  I was watering the garden yesterday.  I have vegetables!  Not all are up yet, but some things are peeking through.  There is always the smallest tension before the plants come up.  Did you do it right?  Were the seeds good?  Will all my hard work be worth it?  Small tension, with a big reward.

Hey it sounds a lot like knitting! 

Nature, taking its course.

Once again, almost a week has gone by with several cloudy days and the smell of rain showers in the air, but nary a drop of rain falling anywhere near here.  Many many places in Canada, including the prairie are having water problems of an excess nature, but we are having a drought.  

So today I am off to the farm, water jugs in hand, a a few good ideas to make the task of watering the beast of a garden just a little easier.  I also will be planting the cabbage, cauliflower and tomatoes today.  It might yet freeze and they will have no shelter, but at some point you just have to get on with it, plant them and let nature take its course.  If nature decides you are not going to have tomatoes, well, there it is.

Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead.

Dirt between my toes?

Not at all.  Because I wear shoes.  And socks.  Planting in a field with some stubble still standing from last year would be murder without shoes.  But my ankles are a study in dirt that only a 4 year old could love.

The wind was up and down today and when it was down it could have been misery.  

I can still hear the buzzing of the swarms that stayed above my head all day today.  They stayed near my head just in case.  I mean who know when a patch of white tasty human skin will stick out?  The mosquitoes here are voracious and plentiful, and they would eat you alive if you stood still without a good layer of deet.  I was prepared.  I bought bug spray before the stores ran out last weekend.   

I know a lot of people won't use it anymore but that only works if you live in cities and towns where they either spray or have a good program for keeping the area free of standing water.  Remember the creek on the front of our property?  Its down to very sluggish or still pools. Mosquito breeding country. 

Deet is my best friend.  (But only when I absolutely need it.  I know.  I'm fickle.)

A long weekend

We planted our hearts out and barely scratched the surface.  We got trees and potatoes in, but there still is a nice little bunch of spruce to plants, and I think it is going to be up to me to get that done a few at a time.  Somewhere about 3 pm on Saturday, I was heard to mumble 'who thought this *insert curse of choice* thing up'.  My dear husband ungallantly pointed in my direction.

Today I have to go out to find something to mark the rows so that he can work between them later, and then, off to the garden.  There still is corn, peas, onions, and few other things to put in.  All the tender things will wait, unless I find some hotcaps or other frost protection on my jaunt today.  

There has been knitting too, though it isn't what I thought I would be knitting on.  The wool of the shawl is catchy and my hands are a little rough right now.  I picked up some cotton knitting and that seems to be working up easier.  

 I'm trying to knit a polo shirt but I realized too late that I left out too many stitches for the bands.  That stopped this project for a long while, so its been good to knit on it again.  The two bands will be laced together, I think.  So far so fair.  Proof will be when I get the collar done and can try it on.  Then to the severely short sleeves, and then to knit and see how far the yarn will take me.  

I know I am skirting the bounds of yarn quantities here.  I started with 4 balls of the teal when I really should have had 5 to get the length I want.  Once collar andsleeves are done, once I know how much I have left, I will be able to judge just what I have to do to make the teal go farther.  

See the little stripe in the button band?  The same stripe will be appearing in the collar and on the sleeves.  It is part of the plan to get more distance out of the yarn I do have.   The plan right now is to put in a few stripes of rust in the mid section to help the teal go farther.  I am thinking stripes a la Tempest, narrow at the mid section.   And if that doesn't look right, then it will be hippy stripes of rust among the teal.  

My other option is to simply accept that this will be a short top (not fond of this choice).  One way or another, it will be a top I can wear.  It will also be a learning experience and that is never a bad thing.  

Its time to get this day begun.  Off I go into the wild garden yonder.  

Farming

I say that with tongue in cheek, you know.  I'm not farming, nor do I intend to.  I did that and this is nothing like the scale farming requires, nothing like the comittment that farming requires, to bet once again on the season being fair.  Farming is not what this is.  This is play.

What I am doing is gardening.  And a lot of what I am going to be doing this weekend, has little to do with gardening, it has more to do with trees.

This weekend we are planting a bunch of trees that arrived this week.  Mostly fruit trees, and berry bushes,  raspberries, cherries, saskatoons, but there are alos a bunch of trees that we are moving from here over to the farm.  

Remember this?  

Not the big trees, the wee ones that pop up every time we turn around here. We never did get around to taking them out and then when the land happened last year, we decided to leave them and move them once we had things organized.  Things are organzed,  Mostly.  This weekend we are going to be moving them and a lot of other small seedlings.  Birch, hazelnut, the occasional small poplar.  These all have popped up in planters and in the mulched areas around here.  So the big move is happening this weekend.  

We missed the farmstead tree order this spring by a few weeks, but next year there will be some good old fashioned Northwest poplar, some laurel leaf willow,  different varieties of spruce.  While I crave the long views and plenty of sunlight, what a good sensible farmyard needs is a windbreak.    

This weekend I shall play arborist, but it is also time to get my flower pots planted here.  By Monday I should be ready to start the garden proper, so this next week or so, there will be plenty of garden, but little knitting.

The knitting I am doing is on the Shetland Shawl.  I am about 20 stitches from the second corner and am really looking forward to the turn.

Way back when , one of my quests was to explain the dirt between my toes.  Now I seek only to put more there.  This is a good thing.

Time to farm

Yes it is time to farm. Eventually the new place will be a retirement home, but it will also be a retirement project.  It will give us something to work together on, to play together on and just to have a little bit of fun with.  Its a good investment besides.  

And though we were starting to wonder, spring showed up! You saw our Easter Sunday photos.  This is a week later.  

out the front door

out the back door

And most revealing of the enormous change, 

the site of the Easter egg hunt.

When it decides to go, it goes.  No whimpering allowed.  The weather has been decidedly springlike, coolish, windy, but no heavy overnight frosts.  The ground is warming rapidly.

Though I did knit yesterday, I did not knit much.  I had lunch with my favourite knitters, I spun with a friend, I stopped at the yarn store, but it just wasn't a knitting sort of day.   

My plan for today is to get the Shetland Shawl to a knit row before lunch, do some housework, and then head to town for errands and knitting where I will knit 1 row.   

It is time to farm. It is time to go play in the sunny open fields.  It is time to wake up this lovely shady yard.   

A farm weekend.

Ever since we became farm owners again, at least once a week, we head over and check things out.  It is reminiscent of the Sunday drives of my childhood. It is casual and relaxed with no defined purpose and no real goal. Instead of ice cream at the end, there is usually coffee at the beginning. It usually is the first thing we do on those laid back days.    

That is at an end now.  The ground is more or less dry and it is time to refine and set some of our plans and it is time to get to work.  

Before we could plant anything or work anything up, we had to decide where we would put a the yard and where we would situate the house. 

It will be somewhere out there.  Yup.  Good decision.  Really definite looking.  

Its kind of hard to show in photos.  There really were a couple things to consider and look at.  Placement of the yard will determine style of the house, cost of putting in the yard, water, septic.  It may not look like a lot.  It may not show up in photos.  But with this one decision, a whole host of other things are settled.

Time to get to work on the garden.  It is time to play in the dirt.    

Its the little things

A while ago, I managed to get hold of a copy of Jan Messent's Knitted Gardens.  A short time after that, I came across a long hoped for copy of Embroidered Knot Gardens by Owen Davies.

And last week I happened across this little gem.  The Knitted Farmyard by Hannelore Wernhard.

  You can see I have an interest in the wee and small.  

The book is filled with seriously cute things and for 10 bucks, a real gem. Its not a big book, but rather a cute book.

These would be great toys for older children, but mostly I am interested in them for me.  

But I am not the only one.  Check out the Knitted Village of Mersham

Running late

A few weeks ago I ordered a few things from Interweave online.  

A spinning video for download, now downloaded but not watched and  the 2 available collections of past issues of Piecework Magazine. (There is an additional one out now.  2004-2005)

 

The cds arrived yesterday.  

Oh my.  I have loved Piecework most, of all the magazines I have come into contact with on my journey into knitting.  It connects me with all those things I have done, the embroidery (on a huge scale), the quilting (though not on a huge scale), the crocheting (huge) and connects me with where I have yet to go.

And my spring seed order arrived.  It is currently a rather uninspiring little pile of seed packets in plain brown wrap (oh yes, I love the irony), but within them each seed is a tiny pocket of life and hope and things yet to come. They fill me with joy.

I intend to waffle my day away looking at these things.  But I will also be reknitting the neck of the wee gansey.  The neck looks like you could drive a train through it.

Hmmm, in the picture it doesn't look so bad.  But in front of me?  Ok maybe not a train but surely a fleet of matchbox cars.  

Maybe I will block it first.   

Work or play? Shetland or Purple?

So today I have a hundred and one tasks to do.  I have a mountain of laundry to fold and more to wash.  I have bathrooms to clean, and even I can see the state of my kitchen.

And yet the only question I have this morning is Shetland or Purple?  Which one should I work on today?

All things in good time.  I am hitting some of the housekeeping first, before I let myself touch any needles.  Bathrooms first.  Then I will knit, but only two rows and a cup of tea.  Then I will hit the laundry, clearing the backlog of things to put away.  Then I will knit 4 rows and drink two cups of tea.  That should take me to lunch when I will hit the kitchen.  After the kitchen, I will knit just a little more and drink more tea.  

This afternoon there are some farming matters to take care of.  We'll call it varietal research.  It sounds better than just looking at gardening catalogues.  When I am done with the gardening decisions, I hope that the waning afternoon finds time for a couple more rows and maybe another cup of tea.  

Its a good plan.  The weakness in the plan is that there is knitting in there all over the place, and in the face of all that knitting, I am weak.  2 rows often will begat 3 rows even after the tea is gone.  The weakness in the plan is me.

Because all I can think about is Shetland or Purple?  Which project shall I knit on?

Seed Catalogues

As we go into the deepest darkest part of winter, there is one thing to keep you looking forward, to keep the dark wonter night at bay.  Seed catlaogues!  The first of mine has arrived!

Way back when I was young and growing my first gardens, I found T & T Seeds in the adds in one of the farm papers.  They sold pea seeds in large quantities at half the cost of anywhere else.  In those days, cost was everything.  I was hooked.

I have always kept up an association with them, though in this yard,    there was always a strong focus towards the shade plants.  Hostas, 

and ligularias and all sorts of lovely plants that thrive in sheltered, dense shade.  

Now, with the farm ready for next year, I will think of sunflowers 

and Four O'clocks

I shall think of  plums

and red and golden raspberries

(all but the first photo are from the T & T Seeds catalogue)

This time, I got too look at it and know that come spring, I will be planting for the sun. I can take that wee fact out and think of it, any time I feel the dark long winter setting itself just a little too firmly in my soul. 

'Monday, Monday, so good to me'

I am a wee bit distracted today.  I have so many things I want to accomplish.  And so few hours in which to get it all done.  

But mostly, my head is in the dirt today.  I have been thinking about all the things I want in my garden next year.  

It is time to pull out the old garden notes.  Every year, I used to cut out the blurbs from the seeds I planted and paste them into a journal.  Then I wrote notes about how well they performed.  I tried to assess plants and production for the conditions I had.  I had hoped that over the many years I planned to garden, that I would be able to figure out which varieties of peas I like the best, which potatoes I preferred, which zucchini.  I had hoped to have thick journals with many details.  And then it all ended.  And I have not had a vegetable garden since.  

It sounds silly, but it won't be long now and the seed catalogues will be out.  I know I have time to think about it all, but if you want to start seeds indoors, you have to be ready to begin by late January or the beginning of February.  

In that long time ago, I had peas, carrots, onions, potatoes, corn, cucumbers.  Just ordinary things.  And zucchini.  I always seemed to have an extraordinary crop of zucchini, but then, who didn't.  My biggest adventure was asparagus.  It would have produced its first crop the year we moved.  

I want more this time.  Much, much, more.  I want turnips and garlic.  I want a few tomatoes.  I want cucumbers enough that I can pick them small and pickle real honest to goodness baby dills. ( I want dill and herbs in this garden too).   I want raspberries and apples and gooseberries and plums and strawberries...

And I have to begin to figure out just how I am going to store all these things too. This current house does not have a cold room, unless you count my study.  And I may yet consider that, though there would have to be some adjustments.  I'm not sure yellow is a good colour for storing vegetables and it is nice and sunny in here.  

And the big question, if the vegetables move in here, just where the heck will all this stuff go?  

Seriously, I am considering building a good old fashioned root cellar at the farm. I have a suspicion that Mr. Needles is not even remotely thinking of it.  Indeed I think he would be appalled.  

Such is the set of my thoughts today.  Today garden paths are true garden paths.  Simple knitting accompanies it all.

Or it will once I fix this mess.  

(Song lyrics in title:  'Monday, Monday' by John Phillips)

Forests

I have lived in a forest for many years now.  There are things you give up when you live in a forest.  I know.  Hard to believe. 

And there are things you get for free from living in a forest.  One of these free things is an unlimited supply (or so it seems) of seedling spruce trees.  

Last year the volunteer spruce looked like this.  

What with one thing and another, we ended up not getting them moved last year.  

This year they looked like this.

Its a good thing 'what with one thing and another' happened.  All these little trees are going to stay right where they are till next spring.  Then they are going to be carefully planted at the farm, and one day will grace the farm yard and will be gracefully dotted around in order not to permanently block the sunrise and sunset.     

Yup, I'm going to baby these little trees.  We are keeping them well watered, cozy with their roots under the washed rock mulch, and come spring I'm going to rip them out and stick them out on the bald prairie.  Sounds kind of cruel when you look at it that way doesn't it.  

I'd show you knitting, but with the big event happening at the store, I've worked a few extra days.  Sum total of knitting is one lone dishcloth.  

We picked up the rest of the farm tools yesterday.  Well maybe not the rest, but the vast majority of the rest.

Discs

 Harrows, still in the crate.

 Cultivator and electronic 3 point hitch mounted to quad  tractor.

This last one gives you an idea of just how small these things are.  They are so small, they are cute, and whoever heard of cute farm equipment.  They might look cute, but they are built right, they are heavy steel and will do the job.

Mr. Needles father used to have a six foot long 'one way'.  He worked his entire farm with it and it took days.  When his dad was visiting, they had a really good time discussing exactly how long it was going to take to work up our 80 acres with these wee implements.  They span just under 4 feet.

And then they go and give it a cute name.  

The size of the things, the catalogues, the colors, are all meant to appeal to guys.  They are designed by guys, for guys, so guys can explain to their wives why they must have a new quad. Then they build them so they can actually do a the job. 

The cute name is meant to appeal to us, so we will let them.