Garden and fibre update

I've been digging in the garden.  The May 24th weekend is generally the weekend that we plant our gardens.  I'm usually away on that weekend so I generally wait.  This year, the long weekend was early by almost a week, so I held off planting anyway.   We had some coolish nights, but some early May weird frosts and I'd rather be safe than trying to find new plants.   I don't usually plant cucumbers, zucchini, pumpkins and other squash until June, after having a huge problem with squash bugs from planting early.   

Mortgage Lifter Tomato seedling

My son in law started some tomato plants for me this spring so I've planted two varieties, Mortgage Lifter and Black cherry.   Most are planted and seem to be doing fine.  I'd looked for a couple more of the large tubs to add to my pots and raised bed collection, but no stores around here seem to sell them this year.  If I wanted fancy, expensive but not quite big enough pots, there were a fair number but of large garden planters there were none any where.   So Monday I'll grab some of husbands 5 gallon syrup collecting buckets, drill holes in the bottom and use 2 or 3 of those instead.  They'll require more frequent watering, but should do fine for my peppers, kale and Swiss chard.

The garlic is looking really good this year, with strong, thick, dark green stems.  It's in the front of one of the raised beds.  Behind it I've planted tomatoes.   In the other raised bed, the front is full of lettuce, a couple of volunteer onions, cilantro and a hot pepper plant.  Once I know the weather is consistently warm enough at nights, I'll plant green beans in the rest of the raised bed.  Once the garlic is harvested, if I have enough time, I'll replant beans in that space, otherwise, I'll plant  salad greens.

The blue gradient shawl is almost done.   Because the yarn had very distinctive colour changes, I wound cakes of each separate colour and dressed the loom in stripes.   The downside of this is that the weaving is all the same.   I did start with the darkest grey for weft, transitioned through to the dark blues.   If I can trust that the shawl will be about the length that I've actually woven, with about 2 inches wiggle room, then I've succeeded in using the remaining yarn from the weft.  Otherwise, I'll have lost at yarn chicken and have to use that medium blue for the last couple of inches.  My brain is telling me that I might look odd with only that little bit at the end.  I'm happy to get this one off the loom though, because there wasn't a lot of interesting colour changes weaving this.   That's why I like colour effects like short colour changes, log cabin and things like that.  Lots of interesting things happening without a lot of effort weaving.

I've been washing more fleece.  One of the new fleeces was a little musty smelling.   The fleece was strong and not damaged, so I washed it all up over several days.   It washed up nicely.  The only issue is my own fault, because the lingerie bags I was using were fairly fine meshed and probably took an extra wash to get them clean.   If I processed them with combs, all the trashy vm bits would come out, but I've run some of it through the drum carder to make batts that I've been then hand carding.  Mainly this is because I'm doing a demo of spinning, possibly on a great wheel, and it's easier to  make the rolags with pre-carded fibres when you have to talk with people at the same time.

There is usually a larger patch of poppies but this year there were only 3 buds.  The first one to bloom was the prettiest.   I think the last one will bloom tomorrow.  With the Allium, some sort of little white star shaped flower, the woad and the lilacs, there are lots of little and big bees around,  I hope they stay and do their pollinating thing!