Garden and spinning update!

 Gosh it's gotten cool here.  I harvested the last cucumber on the plants, and with no more flowers, that was the last for the season.  I ate it for lunch the next day.   There are still tomatoes on the vine, but they are all quite green.   We're supposed to have some warmer weather next week, so I'll leave them and hope they get a bit bigger.  There are tons of Hungarian yellow peppers, although I've no idea if they are hot or not.  There are Jalapeños left to harvest.  There are also a lot of them, however they are quite short.  The mystery pepper plant is all still green, but they are very long and slender, so I'm guessing some sort of hot chill pepper. I'll harvest them sometime soon.  Other than that, there are only herbs left to harvest; parsley, basil and soup celery.  I'm going to plant one bed with garlic this fall.   Seed garlic should be in the feed store in a couple of weeks.   

I got 100 g of lovely, deep pink roving from A.  I spun it into singles and then decided that I was going to spin up more singles to ply it, in a different colour, since this was hand dyed and I couldn't match it.   A gave me another 100g of the same fibres which I spun and dyed into a lovely soft grey.   I plied them together, deciding to make a matching hat and mittens.  I knit the mittens first, and then had to figure out how to make the hat fit the remaining bit of yarn.   Finally, after knitting and ripping out hats 5 times, I knit up a sample on a new toy, an old, but lovely working knitting machine.   I made a hat with just a few metres of yarn to spare!

The sky was quite moody on our last hike.   It looked like rain clouds, but it didn't rain and a surprising amount of sunshine broke through the clouds.  The river had a lot scummy stuff on it, which I've not noticed before.  It was a very hot summer though, so that could have been the reason.   There were a lot of dogs on the trails that day.   I generally don't mind them running off leash, as I've only had 1 incident with an aggressive dog.   However, a few owners have decided that they don't need to clean up after their pups, which sadly made for some areas where you had to watch where you stepped, rather than enjoy the scenery!

The Rudbekia or black eyed Susan's were pretty much past their peak blossoms.   The large field of them was showing a lot of spent flowers and not very many blooms.   On the home stretch of the trail, walking beside the river, I saw these pretty blooms.  They look like they should be Rudbeckia but their petals are short and roundish.  I looked it up though and it seems there is a related flower called the Brown eyed Susan and it looks like this!  Pretty enough and nice that it was blooming when it seemed like only the golden rod and a few Queen Anne's Lace stragglers were left.   

I gave away my LeClerc Fanny counterbalance loom to a friend.  She's been looking for one locally but nothing in easy access has been for sale.   The one that came through the guild went to another member.  Since I'd not used it since I strained my shoulder weaving a couple of years ago, I felt it was time to pass it on.   I got this loom with  requirement to pass on another loom.  I have given away a 36 in Mira jack loom, a tapestry loom, a 5 ft. triangle loom and a 15 inch new Dorothy.  I think I have payed it forward enough.   I gave all of these away without any requirements though, just to enjoy and use them.   When my friend picked up the loom, she dropped off a couple of knitting machines she had in her garage.  One which is a plastic bed and the other that she felt I'd enjoy more, was a metal machine.  I've been playing with it and it's quire enjoyable.  It's fast and has a fairly big learning curve like the sock machine.  Really it's just practice and being willing to take off the tangles and figure out what you did wrong.  I had a few of those.

Summer is winding up!

 The summer is slipping by far too quickly.  The ridiculous heat and humidity we've had so much of this year, is something I'm not sure I'll adapt to easily.   However, there are already signs showing how short our summers are.  I drove down a nearby road the other day and there was a tree with a lone branch already turning colours.   I know this could also be due to lack of moisture, but I'm still not sure I'm ready for the leaves to turn colour.   Hubby also brought in a load of kindling yesterday.  I asked if it wasn't too early for that, but he pointed out that we'll likely have to have our first fire in 4 to 6 weeks.  Plus there are the crickets.  They are an end of summer bug; a noisy, loud, end of summer bug.

Speaking of bugs.   I noticed 3 big caterpillars on my parsley plant.  I looked them up and they were parsley worms, or the caterpillars that turn into Swallowtail Butterflies.   The next day there were only 2 of them, and today there aren't any.  They were very slow and hardly moving and large enough that a friend who has watched some all summer, said they were ready to spin their cocoons.   I looked around a bit but didn't see any cocoons, so I'm hoping they found a safe place and weren't dinner for the chooks, who have been hanging around begging for leftovers and treats!   I also hope if they did spin cocoons that they have time to complete their metamorphosis  before it turns too cold here.

With only 1 tomato plant, which was supposed to be a cherry tomato but has turned out to give large,
yellow albeit delicious fruit, I purchased a couple of baskets of tomatoes.  I quickly peeled them, chopped them up and tossed them into the canner.   I've done 2 batches this way.  It means 2 hours at most at one time for canning, unlike having a bushel and it taking 2 full days to do them up.   I remembered how easy it was that year that my tomatoes ripened slowly and I had a canner load every 3 days or so.   That was really the best way to do it.

I'm passing on my big counter balance loom.   I have a smaller jack loom which has been unused for well over a decade.  I've decided to clean it up and switch them out since the counter balance is just a bit too big to be comfortable these days.   A friend wants it so hopefully two of us will be happy about this.

I put this on the rigid heddle loom last night.   Mary Maxim is having their tent sale and while they tend to have a lot of middle of the road yarns for quality, nice but not exceptional, their prices, especially at the sale are decent.   They didn't have much sock yarn, but this stuff was nice.   The  only thing is that it is DK weight, and sort of in-between reed sizes.   It's interesting because of the way the colour changes are painted.  I thought it might be more serendipitous plaid like but it's not at all.  It's lovely in this part, with the section which is mainly white, but a little different in the next colour change with the darker blue and the little black bits.    This photo was taken at night, so despite the flash, it is dull.   The white is nice and creamy and the blue parts area. really nice shade.  The vertical black spots are great, but the part I'm not sure about is when the black and blue are in the weft, and go horizontally.  I don't have enough of this yarn to cut out the blue and black sections, and have enough yarn for the weft left and it wasn't cheap enough to grab another ball to play with, so I'm going with it.  I won't really know what it's like until it's off the loom and washed.  It could end up being lovely.

Rant and summer colour update

We saved up all our pennies for 5 years because we needed a new car.  The old truck was on the road for 2 or 3 years longer than we would have liked.   We shared my car last year because winter safety and then general safety, was more important than me getting out of the house, which was a bit difficult sometimes, but it's what was needed.   We did without a lot, stopped purchasing unnecessary stuff, used our leftovers, stopped eating out at restaurants, carefully weighed costs vs expectations  for classes etc, and I mended a lot of clothes.   It's not that we did totally without, as we took small vacations etc but were actively saving for the car first, now a new roof and to get 2 mature trees professionally removed because the previous owner planted them in a stupid spot: both of them in different stupid spots!  

 So why do some people find this an issue?   Like I'm supposed to just go and spend whatever I want whenever, when I have a budgeted amount of mad money for the year and refuse to go over my budgeted amount?    I have to pick and choose what I do, and I'm okay with it.   Somehow I don't think anyone else should be ticked off that we chose to find a way to make our budget work well for us!

Rant over and it was due to comments and actions of some acquaintances and friends.  And nope, just because we have our car now, I still can't afford to get that or do that.  By the way the car is nice.  It's not horribly special or exotic but all cars are stupidly expensive right now, so what can you do? 

This little guy, or his relatives have lived in our woodpile since we moved here.   He's not overly tamed or friendly but he's getting better about not racing off as soon as I try to take a picture of him.   I'm not a huge fan of small rodent creatures living this close to the house, but he's better than some it could be.  I do mean that I'd freak a bit if there was a honking huge rat sitting there, like we used to see sometimes on the farm!  We lived on a road with almost all dairy farms, so there were tons of them when someone tried to eradicate them from a barn.  ICK!

The black eyed Susans were out in full force on our last walk.   The field that had all the poppies in the spring is now filled with these and some clumps of bergamot.   I really wonder if someone tossed a bunch of seed out into that field, or if they are natural.  There are just so many of them.   My only experience with wild flowers in unused field areas, is from a different area, with less farming and more bush, and a colder climate, so maybe all these flowers are normal for this climate zone?

One of our favourite trails has several different trail routes you can take.  It's a mix and match thing, giving lots of choices on how long, what sort of terrain and what you'd like to see on the trail.  One part of the trail runs through this spot, with a single bit of railway track persevered.   It's fun and an odd spot for something like this, but it fits.  Despite there being 2 different working railway tracks on two sides of the conserved area, there is a little bit you can safely walk on and have fun with.

Elecampane.   I planted this because I'd read some natural dyeing information which suggested that you could get black with the roots.   Someone warned me you might never get rid of it once it was planted, but I thought that I was safe.   It has giant leaves on the base, with a few small leaves up the very long stalk and a rather spindly flower.  It's not full, it gets scraggly easily.  I think it will dye a yellow, but I dug up the whole patch to try the roots once to see if it gave black and got nothing but a lovely clear dye bath.   And now, after having dug up my whole plot of the flower, it's growing in other parts of my garden?  Like how does it do that?  Like madder, it's not a horribly lovely plant, but I guess at least it's not prickly like madder is!