The Tour de Fleece on line spinning challenge is finished.   The natural brown cotton was spun and plied.  I had 63 g of fibre and ended up with 391 yards of 2 ply cotton yarn.   I spun up 50 g of blue Tussah silk into 160 yards of 2 ply yarn.   The last of the brown cotton is still on the bobbin.   I found another bit of brown cotton tucked away, so will use it up at a later date.   Then I started spinning some white Egyptian cotton.   This stuff is processed differently than the brown and is super slick and slippery.   It takes a bit more concentration.  To be honest, if it was going to be a sample for marking, I'd card the sliver into punis as they spin more easily and consistently.  However, this is for woven yardage, so I'm just spinning straight from the sliver.

  I really wasn't going to spin up more cotton right now, but every skein I've spun over the last 4 or 5 years has gone into a container, so that eventually I'd have enough to weave fabric for a shirt.   I checked it, and there is enough, or almost enough cotton yarn for this project.  However, in my mind, there was at least equal parts of white and the naturally coloured brown and green cottons, with an occasional pick of some dyed yarns.   It turns out, I have almost no white cotton yarn spun!  Egads!   Even though the white is less fun to spin, and since it's my demo fibre, I don't tend to spin it at home, I'm spinning up white cotton so that maybe I can get this project to move forward!

 I didn't get enough white currants to do more than say, hey, "white currants".   There isn't enough for jelly, or pie or anything.  I could juice them and add them to another fruit to use as a source of pectin, but I can't think of anything else and it's not like these are something you find at our local farm markets or fruit stands.

After 2 pickings, I ended up with 500g of gooseberries.  That is just over a pound, after topping and tailing them.   They were smaller than normal this year.  I think this is due to several factors.  First, I did a huge pruning in the spring time, but neglected to prune back some of the new growth.  This means the plants energy went into those new shoots, instead of the berries.  Also, we've had near drought conditions.  That lack of water and the extreme heat which we've had, may also have affected the berry size.  Still, there is enough for a very small batch of jam.  This is another fruit which I haven't seen at any local markets or farm stalls.   I still have a modern, large berried gooseberry plant on my garden wish list though.

A few things.

 Here is the cotton I've been spinning for Tour de Fleece.  I divided the cotton simply by folding the sliver in half and breaking it at the mid-way point.   It would have been more accurate if I'd done it by weight, but I went with close enough as I wanted to get started.  The first bobbin has the first half of the sliver and I've started on the second bobbin.  This has been fun, but it's a lot of cotton and a lot of days in a row to be spinning cotton.   I might have to dig up the coloured Corriedale and make some funky rolags for a change once this is done.   I don't have a lot of dyed fibre or commercial colourways and once in a while I think that might be fun to do.

For the Tour de Fleece challenge day I spun some Tussah silk.  I have to admit that spinning silk isn't really a challenge, but I couldn't find the energy to blend some angora, or yak, maybe alpaca with some merino when it was 33°C, feeling like 40°C.  The silk was fun.  It's a bit slippery and does take a bit of concentration.  It's a lovely colour.  I had been mulling around the idea of blending it with some soft grey wool, however I didn't have anything that worked, so it's just plain blue.  I'm not complaining.

The birds have eaten almost all the strawberries.  I noticed that what I thought were the black currants were actually the white ones.   They were already half eaten when I had checked them.  They had just started to ripen.  I tasted a few and a they were so sweet and just barely ripe.  I figured if I didn't get the rest of the berries off the bush right then, they'd be eaten the next day.   I only have 259g of them.   Maybe if I get any of the black currants before the birds get them, I'll have enough to do a blended jelly.     The red currants are being eaten before they ripen, so I've decided not to fight the birds for them.  I didn't put the netting over them this year and obviously it made more of a difference than I realized.

Red Currants and Green Gooseberries.

The currants are ripening daily.   In just a few days I've got 800 g in the freezer.   It's been too hot to use the currants to make jam or bake anything with them for that matter.    This way, I just clean them up, pop them in the freezer and use them when the weather cools.    These are from a very old currant bush.  It's probably some common old fashioned variety, with smaller, tart berries.  I keep thinking I should dig it up and plant a modern cultivar but I never to, and it keeps on giving, with little pruning or care for that matter.

As well, the gooseberries are ripening.  It's hard to tell because these are one of the old hard green common gooseberry bushes.  I bet the bush is 30 years old.  The berries are small and really tart.  They only seem to turn red or ripen when they get eaten by the gooseberry fruit worms.  They take forever to be topped and tailed - you have to snip the blossom and stem ends off before you use them.  Despite this, they make the absolute best jam.   It is soooo good.  

I 've been thinking though that I'd like to take a cutting and plant it elsewhere, then replace this bush with a newer cultivar that has larger, sweeter fruit.     But then I wonder if I just pick half the berries off when it first starts fruiting, if I'd get larger fruit with less effort.    Still, it would be nice to have sweeter berries and maybe more edible with less sugar.  Does anyone know of good, reliable, hardy gooseberry cultivars?

We're still eating salads from the garden, although the spinach has gone to seed with the stinking hot weather we've had recently.    The pumpkins and cucumbers are doing well.  The powdery mildew seems to be held at bay with several sprinklings of sulfur and a change in weather.    I've been spot watering them directly at the roots every day.  They're growing and there are some tiny fruit on one of the pumpkin plants.   The cucumber plants are flowering, the zucchini plants are about to flower and the beans plants are huge and this morning, the little buds finally opened.    That means beans soon too.   If we get some rain here soon, the potatoes will be happy.  It rained on Friday, everywhere but here it seems.