Early August

Just a record of some happenings over the last week or so.

 Someone crop dusting started up their helicopter at 5:30 am.  They were 2 fields away so the noise was unexpectedly loud.   They were finally done at almost 9 am before they headed off to wherever.  It was a day for a nap!

I was outside gardening when I noticed the sky was this intense blue.  I snapped a photo and a few minutes later it had lightened up to its more usual paler blue.   It was a great colour and reminded me of the skies when I was a kid, living much further north.

The garden was hit by a fallen tree in a freak storm in early July.  The garlic ended up being smaller this year because their roots were severely disrupted but the tomato plants were knocked over and almost all the growth tips broken.  They've been sending out suckers, and leafy new growth to repair themselves which has resulted in my having to prune them once or twice a week since then.  They've also grown tall.  Luckily, it's late enough in the season that I can start pinching off the tips to encourage the fruit to ripen and the flowers to set.   Not a lot of fruit so far this year, I think because of the damage to the plants.   This tomato (a heritage Mortgage Lifter variety) is larger than my hand!   I think that poor tomato plant is pouring all its effort into that one tomato.  

A hollyhock.  I'd planted seeds for black and regular holly hocks.  I think there was one black flowered plant and a few white and light pink one's. Now they've settled into just this colour.  They are pretty though.   I haven't had enough flowers to try dyeing with them, so I'm just enjoying the mid summer colour.  Thankfully they seem to be surviving the wild raspberries that are volunteering that that bed and the chooks who like to hid out there.

It was quite cool the other night so I pulled out the quilt my daughter made me for last Christmas.   Dion adores it and if I don't get it folded up in time, he claims it for the day.  He's a sweet kitty, who is so routine driven it's crazy.  He follows it every single day and you can almost tell the time by his routine.  He does love a good belly scratch though, which is also sort of odd, since most cats won't let you touch their bellies without shredding your hand up.

More buttons and garden update

 I've been fiddling around with making some new buttons.   I wanted to make some shirtwaist buttons and some zwirnknopf buttons, both thread buttons in the same category.  They are a wrapped button, secured with stitches and the button hole stitch border is applied after the threads are wrapped.   They apparently work best on a flat ring like a washer or spacer, rather than a round ring.   I made my first one with a round ring that I use for Dorset buttons.  It was okay, but the roundness of the wire made the wraps more difficult to keep secure and in place.   I ended up starting like a Dorset button and doing the button hole stitch all around the ring first, so that the wrapping threads would have something to grip on to.   This worked well, although not really a zwirnknopf button due to doing that step first.

When I tried to do it properly, with the wrapping threads first, they just keep sliding, even after applying beeswax to the ring and then sanding the ring.   When I tried a smaller ring, it seemed to work with lots of beeswax but every time I went to secure the stitches, they'd just slide off.  It was frustrating.  So other than ordering the appropriate button rings from the U.K., I went on field trip to various local hardware stores looking for washers that were flat rings, with a narrow rim and a large opening in the middle.  I didn't care if they were metal, plastic or fibre board.  Nothing came up at all.  Finally Hubby found a short length of ABS pipe and said he'd slice it up for me to try.   After several attempts and being told it wouldn't work, I was presented with a handful of thin slices of ABS pipe for buttons.  They needed sanding which was no problem and they're  about 1.5 inches in diameter, so too larger for useable buttons, but great for decorative buttons, shawl pins and jewellery,  The plus is that size is also really easy to work with.    The two buttons on the right are shirtwaist buttons and the bunny button is an art Dorset button.  I think it's cute!

This tomato is larger than my hand.   It survived the tree falling on the garden when it was very small and just keeps growing.  My Son in law started the seeds and it's a Mortgage Lifter heritage variety. It's taken a bit for the rest of the tomato plants to catch up after being crushed by the tree in the storm.  

They really only started flowering a week ago.   There are a few chocolate cherry tomatoes and a few more of these mortgage lifters, although they are still small.  I hope that there is time for more of the fruit to set.  We really only have a few more weeks of actual summer, before it will get too cool in the evenings.  I'll snip off all the growth tips  and flowers on the tomatoes then, in hopes of forcing the rest of the fruit that has set to actually ripen.  

Staycation week adventures

 It was a holiday week for us, a staycation with a few day trips planned.   Our first one got rained out by torrential rains.  We'd left to visit friends when the skies opened up and was just pouring down rain.   The rain was so heavy that there was virtually zero visibility.   We tried to keep on, figuring that rain this heavy only lasts for a few minutes, but nope, it kept on pouring down.  We cancelled our trip when we realized that the storm front was directly over us, travelling in the same direction as us ( thanks to phone weather radar!). We took the long way home as we missed our turn because we couldn't see it until we were right there.  Water was pooling on the roads and puddling badly.   A nearby town had photos of water in parking lots coming to the doors and past of some cars!  Crazy weather!

Dome open and CN tower

Our next foray was to a Blue Jays game a couple of days later.  That was also an adventure.   The weather was superb but stop and go traffic on the highway slowed down our trip dramatically.  Our train stop had no parking spots available at all.  Because the train is so much easier and faster than driving, as well as cheaper, we went to the next stop and the same.   The third stop we won and found parking.  We arrived the same time as our train but by the time we got from the far end of the parking lot to the platform, the train had left on its merry way.   Half an hour later, the next train arrived and we had so many Blue Jays fans there, that the announcer was cheerfully telling us to enjoy the game and a reminder of the stop we needed.

My view from 3rd Base line

We'd allowed a lot of extra time, thinking we'd grab lunch in the city and have time to look around the ball park.   Instead of arriving at 12:30 pm, we got there at 2 pm.  Sheesh.  However, the Jays played a great game and they won, which was really nice.  On our way home we took our time getting to the train station, waited for the next train with all the other Jays fans who'd missed the first train, and got to our desired stop with no issues.  The conductor announcing stops wasn't quite so luck and messed up announcing the station stops several times.  It was creating a lot of giggling in our carriage at any rate.  Finally we got to the station and our car was gone!  We'd wandered around the now half empty parking lot in the area where we'd parked and our car was not there.   All of a sudden a very nice lady stopped us and told us she'd just done the same thing.  It turns out there are 2 parking lots (we found out later there were actually 3 different parking lots) and she told us how to find the other lot.   A wander over there and I stayed in the terminal, just in case, and Hubby went off to find the car, which he did.  I ended up leaving the terminal to wait outside because a very noisy and violent person came in swearing and screaming at me, while banging things around.   Fun times (not so much).  

The next day we went back to the same area to visit our friends and have a bbq and some good conversation.   We took the scenic route to avoid the traffic and were late, but still had lots of time to catch up.   Our way home took us to where we could see the highway, which was at a standstill, so we took a scenic route back home.  It was longer in distance but  probably faster.  

Yesterday, after a busy week, we decided to just stay home.   I spent time in the garden and harvested the garlic.  As expected all the garlic that had been partially uprooted by the storm and tree falling didn't  grow anymore and so there are a lot of smaller heads of garlic.  The two with the undisturbed roots were a decent size though.   I watered the garden and then rinsed off most of the dirt from the garlic and have set it out to dry.  Once the outer skins have dried and become papery, the hard neck garlic will last several months. 

Freak Fierce Storm.

 

First look at the storm damage on the garden

Weather perceptions are defined by what your climate normals are.  We're currently stuck in a miserable heat wave.  Our daytime temperatures are hovering in the 33C to 34C, with a humidex of 42C - 44C. It may not be that warm to some areas, but here it's really quite abnormal.  We're definitely not used to these sort of temperatures, although we get it once or twice a summer for a couple of days at a time.  It's not cooling down much at night either, making for little relief.  

Split tree that fell on the garden

Besides being uncomfortable, there is usually a risk of pop up storms.   We had one of those yesterday afternoon.   I kept thinking to myself that I should bring the laundry in because it would have been dry fairly quickly, when I looked outside and realized that the hazy blue sky was now grey.   I ran outside just as a few drops started falling.  
I did get the laundry off the line but it was starting to get a bit wet by the last couple of t-shirts.   I then ran to the barn to shut the door.  I'd left the chooks inside because the two new girls have still been hesitant to come in at night.   The more they're in their coop room, the more they realise it's home.  Obviously a week wasn't enough to settle them in with the existing flock.

Anyway, by the time I reached the barn, the winds had picked up.   I got back to the house, with the wettish laundry in tow, but I was soaked because the rain was now pounding down.   After changing my shirt and towelling off my hair, I made dinner early because with that rain and the winds, our power could have gone out at any time.  It did flicker, but we ended up being okay. As I started to make dinner I heard the sounds of a tree or branches coming down.   We checked the windows but couldn't go out because the rain storm was now crashing down thunder and lightning too.   It was a quick moving storm and about 20 minutes later, my son found the culprit.  Half a tree had fallen down on my garden!  Yikes

Bird feeders and stands in with the garlic bed

We'll start the clean up this afternoon.  It's going to take a bit of time and a chainsaw.   From a quick glance, it looks like all but a couple of the 36 garlic plants have been crushed, along with all the green beans, all but 3 tomato plants, some peppers and cucumbers.   Fingers crossed there will be enough growing tips left on the tomatoes and peppers to keep them viable.   I'll have to go get more tomato cages if the plants can be saved because they are mangled!

The bird feeders and the  wrought iron and steel hanging posts are bent and tangled in with the branches and plants of the raised beds.  Even most of the large pots and planters were hit.   Last nighty I was able to salvage two tomato plants which were on the perimeter of the fallen tree trunk and branches.   One needed a bit of repotting so I'm hoping that the roots weren't disturbed too badly.

The stupid tree also took down the clothes line.  Luckily it looks like the cable didn't break but just pulled out at the ratchet thing which holds the ends together.  As long as we can find the wheel which was attached to the tree at the far end, it should be a fairly easy, inexpensive fix.  Still, I won't be able to hand the laundry out until the rest of the clean up is done and we can see if we can find the missing pieces.

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!

Just some little things

The garlic is liking this changeable weather.  This photo is from a few days ago.  I took one today, but it was really early in the morning and the shadows made for an interesting but not horribly useful photo.  So the garlic is currently larger and happier than even this.   It's still April and growing really well.  It will be ready to harvest sometime in mid July more or less.  In the meantime, I'm waiting to harvest the scapes which won't show up for weeks yet!

The weather has been very changeable.  It's gone from hot, to cold, with rain, snow and a bit of sunshine.  The Scilla lasted only a few days.  The Daffodils lasted barely a week.  They are just stalks with faded flowers now.   The Alliums are growing well, and already have little buds on them.  They may be early too.   These tulips are the only one's I've seen so far.  The squirrels may have gotten the rest.   Two days ago the blooms barely had any colour and by tomorrow they should be in their full glory.  I wonder how long they will last?

 I have a few teaching opportunities in the next few weeks.  One is a class on processing fibre with various tools like combs, cards, flick carders, drum carder and wool hackles.   However to make this work, I'm washing up some fleeces so we have 2 different kinds, single coat and  double coat fleeces to see how they work differently.   Right now I'm washing a Dorset cross fleece.  It's shorter than I expected so it may be pure Dorset, or Dorset type.  I spun up a fleece of this kind last summer and it was actually pretty nice.  This one is obviously a sheep that liked to roll in icky, muddy, poopy pastures. 

1st cold water soak for washing a Dorset fleece

Ive been doing a cold soak for the first bath, to get rid of the dirt.  This doesn't remove the lanolin, which requires heat.   It does get rid of the actual dirt, mud, some of the urine and feces.  I do the next wash in very hot water, with some orange degreaser and Orvus paste.   By the time this second wash is done, it usually just takes a light third washing, to remove any last stains or stubborn bits.   This stuff is so dirty, that it took a second and third bath in hot water, Orvus and I added some Dawn dish soap.   It only took two rinses though which was nice.   Partially I think because the soap bubbles were backing up in the sink and I had to let the rinse sit for quite a while.  It's not perfectly clean, but clean enough to use.

I have more of this white fleece to wash and then a very pretty Icelandic fleece to wash up.  It's a double fleece and it's so pretty.   I'm just not fond of spinning it, so will sacrifice it to this class.   This is needed in about 3 weeks.

Then I'm doing a nature dye class in June.   A friend gave me a poke to remind me to get on the ball with the planning, so between it, and the SCA event FOOL that I'm doing, plus my son's wedding, it's getting a bit crazy around here.

Of Dinosaurs and freshly spun yarn

I can post this now.  It's a dinosaur made of handspun and dyed yarn.   It was a wedding shower gift for my soon to be daughter in law, who when asked what the dress code was for the wedding was to "wear whatever makes you feel awesome, even if it's a dinosaur costume".  Then she said she kind of hopes someone wears a dinosaur costume.   Since I couldn't do the dinosaur costume,  I figured I could make her a stuffy to keep the fun going.   It's a free pattern on Ravelry and was actually for a dragon.  I left the wings off.  I was going to put a little tulle veil on it, but it didn't quite work with the spines on the back.  It didn't look finished without the spines, so I left off the wedding veil.

I'll have to admit, I do like the partners my kids have chosen.  

I just finished spinning and plying up 450g of Blue Faced Leicester top.   It went pretty quickly and I need to figure out what I'm going to do with it.   It still needs to be wet finished and dyed.   It's a light Worsted/DK grist before wet finishing.   I'm guessing it will bloom a bit and be a worsted yarn when I'm done.

I have some more of the Dorset fleece which still needs to be washed.   It's supposed to be a Dorset /Friesian cross, which actually works with the Dorset, making it a bit softer and nicer to work with, although Dorset is a fairly nice mid-grade fleece to begin with.   I also have some Icelandic that I need to wash up before the May long weekend.   It's an absolutely lovely fleece. It has a great colour, a defined Tog and Thel.  And I rather dislike actually spinning Icelandic fleece.   I'm using it for a class to get rid of it.

I attended a wedding shower this weekend.  It was lovely.  It was held in an old building, now a distillery, with old stone walls, wooded floor and a few antiques scattered around.  The atmosphere was great.  There were treats, a few activities but no actual games.  One activity was making bouquets (the wedding theme is wild flowers).  There were bunches of flowers and greenery, and little bags with tiny vases in them.   Most people made lovely bouquets, trimming the flowers to fit.   However, because there was no water for those vases to make transporting easier, I made a scraggly bouquet and just sort of put the flowers willy nilly in the vase.   When I got home, I trimmed them up nicely and popped them into the now water filled vase.  They are pretty now and now looking wildly over grown.    

The garlic is coming up in the garden nicely.   Some of it is about 8 inches tall already.   Garlic is an early sprouting plant to begin with.  Having been planted in a raised bed may help because the soil often seems to warm up a bit earlier.  As well we've had crazy amounts of rain so maybe all the conditions have aligned.   It did snow yesterday, crazy heavy flurries on and off.  I had to scrape ice off my car this morning too!  Which I find an unhappy task at any time during the winter, but more so in April!

 

How Does Your Garden Grow?

We've had a run of some unseasonably mild temperatures.  We've had some rain, but as we've been on the edge of the weather systems, we've gotten a reasonable amount rather than the heavy rains just to the north of us.  We've had some sunshine.  I can't tell you how nice it is to see a blue sky, rather than a grey sky.  We've had so many grey skies this winter.

I checked the garden beds the other day.   Because we let the chooks out one day, some of the pots have been dug up from them looking for bugs.  They tend to scatter the soil about.  On the ground it isn't an issue, but in the large planters, they can make a lot of mess, and half empty pots.  I'll just have to get more triple mix and manure to make up the difference.

Last spring I bought a couple of bales of straw.   I had some that I'd used to mulch the large raised beds, but I was hoping that if I left these two out over the summer, they'd start to compost and be a nice addition to dress the raised beds in the fall.   They'd started composting nicely and I dressed the empty bed fairly heavily, with 4in - 6 in of straw.   I'd planted garlic in just under half of the other raised bed, so I only put 2 or 3 inches of straw over the garlic.  I wanted it to have an easier time of sprouting in the spring.  I've had some struggle and start off a little curled up one year when I had a bit too much heavy mulch on my garlic.   Today I checked and we have garlic already sprouting!  Of the 45 cloves I'd planted last fall, 8 are already starting to grow.   It never starts out all at once, so I'm pretty happy.   It's hard neck garlic, and mostly the Music variety.  We're supposed to have rain all week, but the temperatures will be summer like.  I'll pop out to the feed store and pick up some compost to top dress the garlic, over the straw. in hopes of getting slightly bigger bulbs.  There are enough for us to use for a while and to use some as gifts.  I've already had family members suggest that they could be the recipients of our excess!  

I planted some chives in a planter last summer.  Not even one of the large planters, but a medium-ish sized pot on the deck, so that it was easily reached to use over the summer.   It sort of languished and never really got useably large, and I forgot about it as I didn't think it would over winter in that particular pot.  It did though and is growing really, really well!  I'll have chives to use this summer for certain.

The Blue Squill is blooming in full force.   We should have two patches, but one is struggling this year.  I think it may have gotten a bit compacted by the snow, weird winter weather and its proximity to the fire pit and maple syrup production. It's hardy though and the bulbs spread quite readily.

We also have the daffodils, tulips and alliums starting.  The leaves are growing.  We won't have tulip or alliums for a while yet, but a few of the daffs are starting to bud up.   With the warm weather expected this week, they should bud up and maybe start flowering really quickly.

My son in law is generously starting some tomato seedlings for me.   He starts all sorts of interesting plants, but as we have somewhat limited our growing space these days, I'm less adventurous in what I plant.  I mainly just grow the basics that we really like to eat, and some plants to put up for use over the winter.  Sometimes it works out better than others.  One summer we at zucchini almost every other day for several months.   Another, I managed to get enough

tomatoes to can for use over the whole winter.  I haven't been able to find that particular variety - Amish Paste Tomato- since.  Too bad because it produced a lot of fruit, but it didn't all ripen at once, so canning it was super easy.  The tomatoes were really tasty too.

I'm so happy that the garden season is starting.   If I pick up some arugula, spinach and leaf lettuce seeds, hopefully we'll have  salads soon too!   Let's hope that we don't get the fruit trees flowering this early and then having more frosty weather afterwards, which damages the new buds and hurts the fruit harvests.

More inkle, a garden treat and some seasonal colour

 

I started a new pick up pattern.   Actually, I started one before this, but cut it off the loom.  I'd used 2/8 cotton for the background and 4/8 for the pattern threads.  It was pink and burgundy and looked very pretty in the 11 thread pattern. However, with the fineness of the threads and the dull daylight hours we've been having, it became way too fussy for me.  There were too many mistakes, and way too much unweaving.   Eventually I cut it off and re-threaded in something that is easier to see.

This is a 7 thread pattern, so easier to begin with.  However the blue and white pattern area gives a lot of contrast and when I'm weaving at night, it's much easier.   The pattern turned out to be a 6 step repeat either forwards or backwards, making it even more fun once I realised that.  It was pretty easy to memorize.

The big issue is that I didn't double my pattern threads.  It's fine and looks okay.  There isn't quite the full coverage nor the slightly raised texture.  This is a flat band.   My recommendation is to not try to warp your inkle loom while watching the Blue Jays come back to even the playoff  series.  I did a bit of unweaving last night too from not paying quite enough attention to my weaving.

The poor chooks have been inside for the past few days due to my being busy.  It's just safer to leave them protected, despite them being not quite so happy. about it.  Soon enough we'll have snow and they'll not want to go out anyway, so as long as the weather is nice enough, I let them free range.    This morning, I let them out and as I was walking by the tomato plant which I'd not yet pulled from its planter,  I saw a flash of yellow.  There were 4 ripe yellow tomatoes, of which 2 were just slightly soft, so I gave them to the chooks for a treat.   The other 2 I brought in, plus 2 of several remaining green tomatoes, which will hopefully ripen inside.  There were another 4 or 5 green ones, but they were just so very tiny.  This was a nice surprise.

I made blueberry jam at Westfield yesterday.  I wish I'd taken a photo though, but I didn't.  I brought my own, very dry wood to start up the stove, which worked a treat.  It hardly smoked at all.  Often, because this year's wood has been green and unseasoned, we've had huge smoke issues when starting up the stove.   It was very windy, but weirdly warm and then we had a lot of rain.  While the stove was burning hot enough to boil, the jam wasn't boiling as the breeze was cooling down the jam from the top of the pot.   In the end though, it turns out that even if the jam just barely boiled, if you cook it long enough it still reduces down, the pectin sets and you get jam despite everything.   I'd popped in a batch of scones into the oven before I started the jam, so we had something to test the jam with.

The drive yesterday was so pretty.   This past week the leaves, really started to change colours.   Lot of oranges around here with some patches of red.  Along my route yesterday, the area has tons of red maple and red oaks, which were all in their full blazing glory.  The colours were spectacular.  On the way home though, because there was still a bit of drizzle and because of the rains, the colours were enhanced.  It was truly a glorious sight.    This little leaf met when I got out of my car at home.

The photo below is what I saw hanging over my usual Westfield parking spot.   It wasn't noticeable when the tree was fully leafed out!   Luckily I'd never noticed the wasps at all this summer, nor in the fall.  Yesterday they were still quiet, so all was good.  I didn't move my car either.  Just left it there because I figured if they hadn't bothered me all summer, they weren't likely to do so yesterday either.

Cookies and my Pepper Harvest

Westfield's theme last weekend was Cookies.  Apparently many other historical villages bake cookies as demo items, because they are pretty easy and appealing.  However it turns out that most of the  Westfield historic cooks cook other things far more often.   This opened up having a village wide theme  of cookies.  It was planned that we'd all make different cookies.   I made hard gingerbread.  Shrewsbury cakes, jumbles, rock cookies and thumbprints were being made throughout the village.   It was a tasty day for sure.  I handed out so many little gingerbread men to visitors that there were only a few left for the staff!

Back at home, I've been working on the garden.  The weather has been perfect, warm enough to not need a jacket, but cool enough to make for easy working.   I've cleaned out the raised bed that had been dedicated to green beans this year.   Then I harvested peppers.  It was a very good year for peppers this year!   I planted sweet banana peppers, jalapeno peppers and some kind of chilli pepper, that I'm pretty sure was mislabeled.   All the plants were very productive and had huge crops of fruit.   The jalapeños were small in size though, and all the hazy skies and clouds reduced the actual sunshine hours which for parts of my garden area, was an issue for actual ripening of the fruit.

I spent the morning threading each of those little hot peppers onto sewing thread to hang them to dry.  I'm not sure why I didn't anticipate how long that would actually take, but I actually turned on the tv and watched 1.5 episodes of Vera while I dutifully threaded the peppers individually onto the thread.  They're hanging in the kitchen now.   I'm packaging some peppers for my kids when we get together on the weekend.  It seems appropriate to share my garden bounty on our Thanksgiving.  

Tomorrow I'm going to harvest the last of the herbs.   I have some chives, parsley and a huge amount of leaf celery or soup celery.  I priced out dehydrators today but right now they are out of my price range, so I'll have to air dry the herbs.    

My son brought in the lemon tree yesterday.  It's so weird that we've still had lovely weather this late into the autumn.   While there hasn't been any frost warnings yet, the low temperatures for the next 3 days are supposed to hover just barely above freezing, which means at the very least patchy frost.  Getting the rest of the garden harvested before then just means less work of covering all the plants at night to protect them.     

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.

Garden update and CSM trouble

 We've had 2 lovely summer days which were cool enough at night for good sleeping, and not hot, humid nor windy during the day.   It's been such a nice change from those crazy warm days.   It's been so hot that some days, it was too warm to fuss with weeding the garden.  While I normally water the garden beds mid afternoon, so the plants have time to dry properly to minimise the risk of powdery mildew, blight or other diseases, there was one evening I actually watered the garden beds because it had been so hot I didn't think the plants would survive the night without water.    We've had a bit of rain in between, so mostly I haven't had to water a lot this summer.   

Due to the blight issues last summer, I only planted a single tomato plant this year.   I'll hunt around at the market or see if there are local farmers selling their extras when I want to put them up.   Not my favourite way, but it gives the garden a break this year.   So the single tomato plant I chose was a sweet 100, a cherry tomato type that I plant for both use in salads and for just eating out of hand when I'm working in the garden.  While all the plants in that tray had little plant stakes declaring that they were all indeed Sweet 100, this one obviously was mislabelled.   These are not cherry tomatoes!  Nor do I have any idea what variety I might have here.  It's fruiting already though, so that's nice.

I planted more pepper plants than I usually do.   There wasn't a lot of variety choice this year, unless I wanted to spend half a day hunting through different garden centres.  The large one at the grocery store had minimal choices and they weren't looking all that happy.   I usually just go to the feed store up the road and get whatever they have unless it's something special that I really want.  So this year I planted Hungarian hot peppers, Jalapeños and one plant without a tag, in a tray with several different varieties.  I planted no sweet peppers because they are easy to find locally during the summer.

I have baby cucumbers too, from some old seed I found in a packet from a year or two ago.   It's some fancy variety I think, but since I couldn't find any cucumber seeds at the shop, I thought that it was worth the trial.  I had 4 seeds and 3 plants grew.    I also did zucchini that way, from seed in a packet that I seemed to have ripped off the variety.   I had 2 seeds and lucky me, I have two plants, one already flowering.     I planted onion sets but they need weeding desperately but I've held off due to the number of mosquitoes in the cooler evenings.

I took apart my CSM (Circular Sock Machine) to clean it.  It took several hours getting the cylinder clean due to yarn fuzz.   Then I put it together wrong and had to put a call into my mentor to send her videos of what it was doing, which she diagnosed over the phone, told me how to fix it.   It took me 5 minutes to fix, since I just put something in the right place, but the wrong location, if that makes sense.   Anyway, everything on this machine, a Legare 400, needs to be set up at 6 o'clock to be in the correct location - crank hand, yarn carrier and making sure the ribber stop is also correctly places.   So I'm going to see how it works by making my daughter hiking socks for her birthday.   She liked the shorties I make for myself for the summer, but wants them just a little bit higher to fit in her hiking boots.

Winter walks, garden visitor and shawl update

Hawk, right side, middle of picture.

 Here is a photo of the hawk visiting our garden.  He sticks around for over an hour at a time and has a couple of spots he likes to hang out.   With his dedication and patience, we're now thinking it might be the hawk who got one of our chooks.   DH says he found that hen just inside the door of the chicken coop, so it's possible.   The poor girls have been stuck inside since then.   With the risk of a hawk attack so likely, I'm keeping them in the coop.   They aren't fond of the snow regardless.  They'll make a track to the feeders and sometimes to spots where they can sun themselves, and mainly they hangout in the open part of the barn, making a mess of things.

The photo was taken through a double pane window which I didn't think needed cleaning this fall.  I was wrong.  It does.  The hawk is fairly large, like a crow size or a tad larger.  His back is grey and his underside/tummy is white and brownish.  He has a greyish head, which makes it hard to see, but he scanned the area constantly from that perch and I watched him sit there for over an hour.  He's been back daily, sometimes multiple times a day.

We headed out for a walk today.  I needed my sunglasses when we left the house.   The skies were mainly white, with some patches of very pale blue.   The sunlight was reflecting on the snow so it was bright, despite the high clouds.   By the time we were halfway to the chosen trail, I no longer needed my sunglasses.  There was a light flurry as well.   Luckily, the winds and the real snow, didn't pick up until we got back home.   

The trail was white.   Enough people had been on the trails by the time we got there, that the fluffy snow we had over the past 2 days was partially packed and easy to walk on.  No slippery spots and no ice.  Just light fluffy snow and lots of foot prints.

The lake or pond is mainly frozen over.  I don't think the ice is really strong enough to walk on yet, but there were foot prints on it.  They were likely animal prints, but we didn't go close enough to the shore to find out.   We were on top of the hill when we took this photo.   There are some houses and a train track on the other side of the lake.   You can't see them once the trees are leafed out.  This time of year though, they are able to be seen, and I'm betting they have great views as well.

The sun came out briefly (sort of) just as we were near the end of the trail , which runs beside the river.   It's not actually as steep as the photo suggests, but a weird angle to capture that tiny bright spot, the sun and trying to get a bit of the river in as well.  I don't think I was horribly successful.

The winds only picked up after we got home, which was nice and now it's snowing the kind of big flakes which tend to suggest we'll get some accumulation.  

Shawl update:   I'm getting about 4 -6 rows a day done if I put some effort into knitting right now, due to the length of the shawl.  I'm pretty sure I'm going to make this the last repeat.   It's certainly big enough to be a useful shawl, and maybe useful enough to be worn like a sonntag or tied shawl.  It's small enough though that I could also use it as an under-shawl and wear my larger one over top of it for warmth.   I'm also trying to decide whether I'll put the suggested fringe on it or just crochet a simple edging around the sides of it.    I fear the fringe might get in the way of wearing it for warmth while doing things like baking at Westfield, although the fringe in the sample picture was very pretty.

October Colour

 

I had to leave the house at 7:50 am.  The sun was just rising.  I had to stop in the driveway to take this photo as the light and colours were spectacular.   While the mornings are late in coming, I'm really not looking forward to the time change.  I'm on the side of keeping one time zone and not switching back and forth.   Switching seems to cause more issues than not.

This was the view across the road two nights ago.  The light was perfect.  The leaf colour change this year have been odd to say the least.  We've been stuck in a no colour zone for ages.  There have been a few trees changing colour but mainly lots of dull green leaves.  Then a couple of days ago when I was locking up the chooks, the trees were still mainly green in our yard.  The next morning though, it was like every one of them had coloured overnight.  So amazing and beautiful, but definitely odd.

The one zucchini plant left was hit by powdery mildew a while ago.  It survived, albeit damaged with greying leaves.  However I went to pull it out the other day and not only is the plant still flowering, but there were 5 zucchini still growing.  One was starting to get too big, but these 4 are still perfect.   I'd though there were only a few leeks left, but this was a lovely surprise.

I saw this stump full of shelf fungi by a woodpile.   While the trees are finally coloured and the leaves are falling astoundingly quickly, there is still a lot of green in the grass and weeds.     This made a nice contrast.

Soon the world around will be white.  The skies will be grey, or watery, pale blue.  We'll get limited sunlight hours, so I'm enjoying the sun and colours while we still get them.

End of August update

The river on a late summer hike

 This morning had a bit of unexpected excitement.  When I put my glasses on when I woke up, I realised that they were broken!  They were fine when I took them off at bedtime.   Of course without my glasses I couldn't see what was wrong with them, although I did find the missing lens and knew that the frame was unattached at the earpiece thing.   Luckily hubby figured out that a tiny screw had fallen out and by disassembling an old pair of glasses, he was able to fix mine with the scavenged screw.  I was so happy to be able to see clearly again without old glasses or sneaking hubby's glasses, which worked okay in a pinch, although not perfect.

Yesterday I harvested some garden tomatoes.    They are finally starting to ripen.  I've eaten a cucumber and cherry tomatoes for lunch for half the summer, which was lovely.   I've gotten 1.25kg of blackberries in the freezer.   I could easily get another 1 or 2 pickings in,  but I'm not sure it's worth it.   This time of year the seedy berries sometimes get even seedier and they are smaller pickings, for the same amount of work.   I have more than enough for a good batch of jam.

Last time I made blackberry jam, I pressed all the berries though a sieve with a wooden spoon. I've been looking for a Foley's food mill to make that job easier but they don't seem to be available any longer.  These are the metal cone mortar and pestle shaped ones.   The last time I saw one in a store a couple of years ago, I was very tempted to buy it as I've wanted one for years, but the price was really crazy high.   Amazon has one but it's fairly small  and almost $100.   I'm not sure I want to spend that much for a tool I'll only use a few times a year.

 Second choice is a grinder type food mill.   They are more reasonably priced.   When the kids were young, a friend and I would get together a couple of nights in the fall to freeze corn and make apple sauce.  It meant that we each had a freezer full with only a couple of hours of work and fun.    She had a food mill, which was old but really sturdy.  It ground up the apples in no time.   I'm hoping to find one as well built as that.  

I'm ticked at myself for not buying Plums when they were in the store.   Prune plums make spectacular jam.  If you chop them fine enough, you don't even have to peel them, as the peels will dissolve while cooking.   Maybe there will be some left at the market.

On a grey, damp day we went for a walk through the antique mall.   One booth had a few copper moulds in it.  One was $25 and another shopper and I commiserated over that being a ridiculous price for a jelly mould.   She would only pay $5 for one, and because I will pay a couple of dollars more if it's one I really like and don't have, I found these 3.  The strawberry one had some gunk on it, which the $25 one, the same strawberry mould didn't have.   I paid $8 for these and the gunk washed right off the mould with no scratching, discolouration or residue.  I was happy.   

canning and garden update

I wanted to make a batch of bread and butter pickles and some relish, but didn't have enough small cucumbers from my garden.    We went to the local "farm market", which is a shop which brings in local produce, rather than a farmers market because it's only open on Saturday morning, and the timing was wrong.   It was $8 for a small basket of pickling cucumbers and I'd need 4 baskets for the 2 recipes.  There was a half bushel for $30, which was less than the 4 baskets so of course being frugal, I got the half bushel.   

I made dill pickles.

I made cucumber relish

I made a second batch of dill pickles, these ones sliced into rounds instead of spears.

I made bread and butter pickles, my favourite!

I gave 3 lbs of cucumbers to my daughter so she could make pickles.

I still have enough pickles in the fridge to make another batch!

We have more pickles in the pantry than we can eat in a year!  I even started canning some in small jars as give aways!

Last week the blackberries started ripening. They don't all ripen at once, so it's not an onerous task.   If you leave 3 days between picking, or sometimes 4, then it's worth the effort.   This is including the fact that I neglected to weed out the nettles earlier in the season, and keep forgetting to wear long pants and sleeves, resulting in tingling legs and arms.   Anyway, I've got just over 1 kg of blackberries frozen, for use later in the season, when the weather cools down a bit for more comfortable processing.  There are still quite a lot of berries left on the brambles though, so I'm guessing several more pickings before I give up and leave the rest to go to seed.

I also pruned the tomatoes back to get rid of a lot of excess leaves and hopefully aid the fruit in ripening.   I'm not sure I cut away enough of the excess leaves though.  They are still pretty full. The plants have quite a lot of fruit on them, but it's all still very green, due to another summer of less than adequate sunshine.    I may have to buy some tomatoes just to make sure there are some canned in the pantry for the winter.   I use all of the 1/2 bushel that I put up when I have to buy them, but could easily use more.

I have herbs to dry, mainly oregano, basil and parsley this year, and potatoes to harvest.  The tomatoes are wait and see.   The cucumbers are still producing and I'm getting one or two pickling cucumbers a day, which I generally eat for lunch, along with whatever cherry tomatoes are ripe.  The zucchini is still producing, but they are just starting to get a bit of mildew on them, so they'll be done soon.   Peppers, hot Hungarian banana peppers are growing fast and furiously this year.   I will need to harvest soon and I'll likely have to pickle them for winter use too.   They are pretty delicious.