Yarn in my Pocket

89) G - Garden!

Way back when, I owned up to the fact that I frequently start the year with the best of gardening intentions, but rarely follow through to the end.  This year, I've stayed the course rather better.  Yields have included carrots that aren't supposed to be round, but are:

Lots of tomatoes:

...including some that were supposed to be round, but weren't... (ahem!)

 

Squash, kohlrabi, white beetroot (nom!), mange tout, 'regular' peas, summer squash and winter squash:

It did not include broccoli.  It did include some very, very deformed cauliflower, and a *lot* of caterpillars.  Next year, my cauliflower and broccoli beds will look more like this:

We also did pretty well for potatoes.  I *adore* new potatoes, and we ate them pretty much every week for several months.  We still have quite a lot of the knobbly pink fir-apple potatoes left.  They're interesting, but I don't think I'll be growing them again; they are best peeled, and those weird shapes make for difficult peeling.

The garlic is now in the beds for next year, where it is being kept company by a fair few pea seedlings which have volunteered in the same location.  We also have more white beetroot over-wintering, and possibly - possibly! - a weird and whirly cauliflower to come.

I'd say that this year, I definitely followed through.  Next year, I need to be more prepared to deal with the harvest as it arrives; things were a bit chaotic this year, with a regrettable amount of waste.

71) The joy of crab apples

Today, the crab apple tree in our garden was severely pruned.

This tree has, forever, looked like a leggy sapling.  It's only when you get close to it that you realise that 90% of the fruit it bears is waaaayyy out of reach.

This tree crops fairly heavily every year, but because the fruit is unpickable, it drops onto the flower beds and the lawn, bruises, rots and gets eaten by dogs, who end up with a bad stomach.  So, we've decided to cut it down to a third of its original height - at precisely the time it is full of fruit.  Which we can now pick off the cut branches - yayy!!!

This is six pounds of crab apples, washed and draining.  They're now in the freezer, where they are waiting their opportunity to turn into wine just as soon as the elderberries are out of the primary fermentation bucket.

Another three pounds have been stewed to mush, which will be strained and turned into jelly some time in the next week or so.  I think a third of them will become plain crabapple jelly, a third will become elderberry-crabapple, and the rest will become chili-crabapple.  Hopefully.

I love having a garden.

65) How does your garden grow?

Wow.  OK, this was always intended to be a before-and-after post, but the photographic evidence has shocked even me.  Back in March, I took this photo of my intended vegetable plot:

before

This morning, I took this one, from roughly the same vantage point:

after

Well, colour me impressed.  And, apparently, green.  All those 15 minute intervals really do seem to add up.

I have peas, beans, crookneck and butternut squash, broccoli, cauliflower, swede, kohl rabi, salad greens, tomatoes...

Like Toni, I may have gone a bit nutso with the squash.  I blame this on the fact that for the last couple of years, I've tried to grow squash, and melons, in pots.  They've produced lots of powdery mildew, but no actual fruits.

This year, I have at least seven crookneck squash vines, and at least two butternut squashes.  Crooknecks are, apparently, similar to courgettes (zucchini), in that they are soft-skinned summer squash, but taste nicer, and (importantly for feeding them to J) are not courgettes.  Anything's worth a try.

Anyway, they're going totally crazy, escaping the raised beds and attempting to grab the hounds as they walk past:

Kita has a lucky escape.

Those beds are two metres long and one metre wide, so you can imagine how big the leaves are.  Also, if you click on the photo for the larger version (and can tear your eyes away from the menacing squash vines), you can see many, many yellow pea pods on the first two pyramids.  (The other pyramid houses beans).  These are a golden mange-tout variety, so we'll be harvesting from those Real Soon Now.

The tomatoes are also going to need an intervention this weekend.  I put nine plants in a 1x1 bed, on the premise that three grow bags fit the space nicely, and each grow bag can hold three plants.  That might be true for vine tomatoes, but these are all bush varieties, and are now barely constrained by the bird netting:

the tomato corral, viewed past the giant peas.  and more squash.

I do love my garden.

59) First fruits roots tubers

I noticed yesterday that some of the early potato tops are starting to die back.  After my first thoughts ("Oh noes!!  Not enough water!"), I remembered that they do this when ready, or at least nearly so.  So we dug up a couple of plants.

Spuds!!  Now, I know that this is hardly going to be knocking chunks off my grocery bill (I've thrown out more potatoes than this in one go, because they were sprouty/weird/wrinkled), and hell, this shouldn't be major news to me because I think Dad has grown his own potatoes every single year since I was born, and yeah, we definitely need to learn how not to stick the garden fork right into the biggest potatoes of the bunch, but, DUDES!!  These are potatoes!  From my garden!!!

I also happen to know that home-grown new potatoes are one of the tastiest things ever.  With mint.  And butter.  NOM!

ETA: That really isn't many potatoes; I have *tiny* hands, especially for someone who is 6ft tall.  That ring you can just see on my little finger?  It's a toe ring.  Yeah.

53) New paths

This is a time of change, excitement, sunshine and darn hard work.  It turns out that picking up freelance knitting pattern checking and grading work can seriously eat into your actual knitting time - who knew?

In addition, I'm working hard on Something Else, which I am very, very excited about and which I will tell more about next week.  It involves dyes.  And yarn.  And a launch party, scheduled for the end of this month.  It's making me giddy with excitement but also strangely reticent...  and busy.

The result is that Eloise - the sweater I started and almost finished at Easter! - is fully knit and the seaming is about half done, though I haven't found buttons for her yet.  Maybe tomorrow.  The graded yarn I spun is turning itself into a mini-Revontuli, but very slowly.

The garden is growing, also.  Miraculously, I have real plants in the ground, which are not dead, and even ate my first proper harvest (salad greens) yesterday - more to come today, for my lunch.  Yum!  More on that later, though.

More posts.  Definitely.  Though, if you'll excuse me, they'll probably be rather photo heavy and light on the words for a while.

50) $@#*!

Marauders!

Predators!!

Thieves!!!

**Something** has been attacking my plants.  Not slugs/snails, I'm sure.  Whole plants have been nipped off and have disappeared, and I don't see any trails.  Some of the remaining stems look sort of chewed.

Bizarre as it sounds, one of my first thoughts was cats.  We do get a few of the neighbourhood moggies into our garden, and I wish we didn't¹.  Some of the remaining stems have a chewed look that remind me of cat-grass chewing.  I see no evidence of small rodent-teeth or beaks, but mice or birds are still possible culprits.

I see nothing for it but to put netting over the beds.  And being thankful that I have a few spare plants kept back in the greenhouse.

---

¹Don't get me wrong, I love cats!  But they mess everywhere and do quite a bit of damage, and they wind up the hounds like crazy.  And they are not mine.  One of my biggest fears is that one day, we will miss a cat that is in the garden, and one of the dogs will catch it when we let them out.  If that happens, the cat will die, and our dogs will be in deep, deep trouble, because such is the law in this country.

49) Garden report

Potato plants are going great:

The rescued herbs are thriving:

Especially the thyme:

The other bed now has even more potatoes, onions, carrots; leek and parsnip seeds have been sown, and apparently, mushrooms are sprouting between my carrot seedlings:

These beds don't look too tidy right now; a whole pile of dead leaves from the pyrocanthus in the neighbouring garden have come down on top of everything.

These vertical poles are a dog-fence, by the way:

They're just bamboo canes, pushed in to the earth, and sure, the houndies could push through if they really wanted, but this is enough to stop them randomly wandering across my seedlings.

Possibly most importantly, the rest of the veggies are now fenced off from the rest of the garden:

Getting that fence up was a major part of the work my Dad did last weekend.  Since then, J and I have bought some plants for the border; nothing organised, planned or primped; just a selection of Nice Looking Stuff.  I think my favourite is probably this lily, which is sufferring right now from my horrible photography skills:

Today, I got the first of the pea canes in:

Surrounded by calabrese broccoli and summer squash seedlings, this should be an interesting square metre for a month or two to come!

38) Handy for planning that square-foot garden

A quick recommendation-style shout-out for this handy square-foot planning tool...

I've spent most of today in the garden, with remarkably unphotogenic results.  This is my first square-foot subdivided bed-section:

Three of these squares have been sown with carrot seeds.  Can you guess which?

The 'highlight' of today's labours?  Removing a very dead and extremely dessicated frog from a very disappointed dog's mouth.

34) So, how did the weekend pan out?

Glorrrrriously.

That list?

• Sow the seeds due this week
• Dig more veg. beds - no, but I dug over an old one (see below)
• Make significant progress on the current knitting project
• Write up my plans for A&S50 (no, haven't mentioned that here yet)
• Wind up some dyed yarn
• Bottle the lager
• Stabilise the wine
• Maybe start another brew?
• Look through my fabric stash.

Pretty darn awesome results, I say - and what's more, I enjoyed myself hugely.  The vilely changeable weather we've been having this week cleared up today and I've spent much of it in the garden, attempting to defy J's prediction that I'm going to knacker myself out and be good for nothing the rest of the week.

Apart from planting tomato, chard, cabbage and lettuce seeds, I got the mini-greenhouse put up:

...and last years' bean and pea poles taken down (seen here stacked behind Jessie, the concrete greyhound).  The chitting potatoes, plus all the seeds, are now resident in here...

To my delight, I discovered several abandoned plantpots which actually contained plants corresponding to the seeds that I originally sewed in them.  I therefore have two rosemary plants, a thyme bush and a marjoram bush, as well as two mint colonies and some flat-leaved parsley all grown from seed.  A bit of TLC, removing the docken and other oddities that had moved in with them (ungrateful squatters!), some fresh compost and, in some cases, a larger pot to grow into, and I have some plants that may actually be of usable size some day:

Parsley, marjoram and sage (which I think used to be a supermarket pot).

Rosemary and thyme.  Sounds like a song...

And I've rescued the Big Veg Bed that I've been using for the last three years.  Again, I have volunteer survivors from previous crops:

Perpetual spinach (leaf beet), and some leeks.  Invisible to the eye are a fair few self-sown landcress plants, which is a true delight to my heart, because I have run out of those seeds and not been able to get any more this year.  It's lovely to start digging over a plot only to find there are harvestable plants already growing in it.

Although the whole garden is south facing, this bed gets a lot of shade, and isn't therefore ideal for lots of veg.  I'm going to try lots of slow-growing veggies in here this year; the stuff I expect to be sowing now to harvest next winter and up to this time next year.  It will also be ideal for the sort of thing that can't take too much sunshine without bolting.

On the whole, very satisfying.  But I haven't knit a stitch all day!!  Must.. rectify...

31) That Gardening Itch

The gardening itch.  It strikes me every year, and every year I go nuts for a short while, get overwhelmed, get distracted and whirr off to other things that don't require me to stand up so much.

This year, I've dug one and a half veg beds, ordered forty quid's worth of seeds, and am at least still raring to go.  I am *determined* that we should be eating a significant proportion of our veggies from our very own garden this year, and hopefully through into next year,  too.

I've been intrigued by, and attracted to, the idea of square foot gardening for a while; the thought that an average family does not want or indeed need a whole row of radishes all coming ready at once is so obvious and yet so far-out in terms of normal gardening practice that, when I first heard it, it pretty much blew me away.  And the beds look pretty, too.

Well, they will.  Our garden is large (this is maybe a quarter of it?) and currently a complete tip, thanks to dogs, chronic fatigue and the aforementioned gardener's ADD.  My  vision, however, is *gorgeous*.  The sticks and bits of pampas grass do actually mark out beds; the bits I've dug so far are the obvious bit to the left of the photo, and the less-obvious bits to the far left of the photo, directly in front of the fence and flanking the shrub.

Yesterday, I looked through my seeds (delivered astonishingly quickly, thanks, Real Seeds!) and found I'd ordered three varieties of cauliflower, two of carrots, three types of tomato...  Have I gone mad?!  Well, I suppose it's always possible.  But the method behind my madness, in this instance at least, is that they are all varieties which harvest at different times.  J and I actually eat a fairly restricted range of veggies (onions, potatoes, broccoli, peas, cauliflower, some carrots, green beans) unless we're cooking something that absolutely *demands*, for example, baby corn.  At this time of year, precious little in the way of vegetables is actually in season, meaning that it's well worth the effort of ensuring some winter and spring crops.  At least, that's the theory!

So, now I've outed myself, and at least hinted at the grandiosity of my plans, will I stick to them any better than in previous years?  Only time will tell gentle readers; only time will tell!