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Posts Tagged ‘Garden’

Brought to you courtesy of Apple

02 May

At last, I’ve gone over to the other side – I got a Mac. (And an iPad, but that’s a story for another day.)

Rock cress

Rock cress

Setting up the new machine, and playing with years of digital memories in iPhoto, has gotten my creativity raging again, and since the weather is so incredible, I’ve been out in the garden. NOTE: “Setting up the new machine” actually consisted of copying my photos, music, and knitting patterns.

The rock cress, phlox and late primroses are in full bloom. I love the carpets of color in the rock garden! Everything now is in shades of pink and purple, except for a few tulips hanging on. I’ll never be rid of the grape hyacinths – they’re pretty, but there are so many of them.

The daffodils are nearly all gone – it’s time to clean up the spent blossoms. Our tiny azalea is showing some magenta, though it looks dead 11 1/2 months of the year. The roses are budding, and wisteria is blooming. Though nearly every lilac in the city is in full bloom (today Walking in the woods is the best day to visit Highland Park, but the Lilac Festival isn’t until next week) ours is at least a week away.

Yesterday, we went south to Cumming Nature Center in Naples, NY. The boys had fun herding snakes, tracking muskrats in the pond, and generally horsing around. The place is a bit meh, though the location is interesting – there’s a beaver pond, a stand of Norway pine, wetland, grasses, and more. A woodpecker (or yellow-bellied sapsucker? don’t know, never saw it) was working away somewhere in the treetops, and a pair of Canada geese were having some kind of debate on a log in the middle of the pond. The beavers moved on decades ago, but we spotted a muskrat building his cattail lodge.

Today is heavy, waiting for the rain. We’ll be visiting Corrie & Bowden later this afternoon, and Staffan is rehearsing his newscast for homework. Meantime, I’ve got Faces to confirm.

 
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Posted in Garden

 

Another new version??

21 Jun

Seems as though every time I log in to post something, WordPress begs me to upgrade to a Newer, Better Version. But I’m not so into that right now. Anyone have something different, better, more stable? At one point I didn’t have ISP access for MT, but that’s all different now.

And here I am, vegging out after a lively Father’s day weekend working in the garden. Weeding, transplanting, hilling potatoes, mulching out back of the new house where there is actually no soil – just clay and rock. Something got at the asparagus last year, and only 2 plants came back – so they’re long past harvest. But we had some very early snap peas, snow peas, almost the last of the strawberries, and shortly I’ll head out and gather some swiss chard for a greens-n-eggs dinner that’s really good.

We also started some skin salve today, from herbs (comfrey, golden seal) plus wild “weed” herbs like White Man’s Foot (which is either common plaintain or narrow-leaf plantain) and flowers (calendula) plus others which I can’t recall now … But anyway, chop them up really well, cover with olive oil, set in bright sunshine ~2 weeks, then strain out the plant bits and add “some” beeswax. [Quite the operation here: gotta have bees to be sure everything gets pollinated, so honey and beeswax are a kind of bonus.)

My schedule has changed, so I have these bi-monthly apprenticeship weekends. Which hopefully will help my home garden. Eventually – when I’m back there again.

No clue if this is coherent or not – I’ve not been very eloquent lately, more aphasic in fact – so these few paragraphs are just me, here, now. Miscellany I wanted to report: I’m trying a new pattern for that wonderful JustOurYarn cashmere, so I’m still knitting. And I traded the Chrysler 300 Hemi gas-hog (much as I loved it!) this week for a Honda Fit. That’s an entire post in itself, except I don’t have photo-edit software on the laptop (still) and it’s so cute, pictures are required … So watch for that next week. Or maybe next month.

PS – With my broadband wireless connection, I may be able to blog our vay-cay in a couple weeks, virtually live.

PPS – I’ve rediscovered music, and spend 40% of my waking hours with headphones on – everything from Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites, to Orbital’s 21st century electronica, to the Decemberists, to the Silk Road Project, to the White Stripes garage band. What’s up with that? The Chieftains share airtime with Moby, Bjork, Frank Sinatra and Pablo Cruise. Do most people stick with a genre that they like?

Now I’m really incoherent. Posting anyway. Until next time…

 
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Posted in Blather

 

Are you ready for some FOOTBALL?

08 Sep

Trent Edwards Under Fire
What a fun game! Very entertaining, with so many highlights. Here are my faves:

Roscoe Parish’s punt return
Lee Evan’s great catch
Marshawn Lynch running, and running, and scoring
Trent Edwards does it all

As for the garden: I did a little research on cucurbits, primarily because all my early squash blossoms have just fallen right off their stems*. The answer helped with the cuke-bounty problem in my last post: many or most of the cucumber blossoms are male blossoms, and cannot produce fruit. However, a quick check revealed over a dozen fruits growing, and there’s still 6-8 weeks till the first frost.

 
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Posted in Garden, Weaving

 

The bottom line

05 Mar

The storm was far less severe than my hysterical imagination predicted. Being the 17th anniversary – to the day! – of the Big Stormâ„¢, and seeing how quickly my windshield iced up driving home from Avon last night, I was fearing the worst.

I had fun at dinner last night, because Staffan wasn’t around in 1991, and apparently he hasn’t heard the stories too many times … “You lived at Grandma’s?”, or “You had a dog?” made me feel like I’ve shortchanged him on the family history. OTOH, he may have heard and discarded it all several times before. He remembers things very well, but selectively.

No knitting so far this week, aside from a row or two on the cabled socks. I’m too tired when I get home. This recovery rate is hard to plot: so much slower than my expectations the first 2 weeks, then so quick last week that I thought I was all better; but now I’m still not 100%. I haven’t been back to the gym, for example. All the rates are in the right direction, though – so I’m not complaining! And by the time I can get out and dig in the garden, I’ll be 100% again.

Speaking of the garden – I can’t wait to see daffodils and primroses. Another six weeks, right? Big plans this year include: snap peas, green peppers and sweet potatoes. No annual flowers out back, at all. We’ll put the peppers in pots on the deck, again. It worked really well for water control there (peppers like it hot and dry, and our yard is too wet) and besides, it looks good. The sweet potatoes will go in where I’m clearing out that tall phlox-y weed-y flower, the one that’s taken over the east end of the center bed. And the peas will go way out back, where the strawberries have petered out. Yeah – like 25 feet from the deck is “way out back”.

So many plans! I hope by late April I still have this much enthusiasm.

PS – Lisa, click here to see how cute baby knitting can be. (This is not pressure, though! I am totally happy to wait for grandmacity grandmotherishness grandmomitude becoming a grandma.)

 
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Posted in Garden

 

Reassured

02 Jul

I’ve been doing a lot of baking lately, and drooling over Baker’s Catalog. But the comments from June’s recent post on flour [I know, it's two weeks old - I'm catching up, ok?] shows I’m not the only flour-collector. I have a paltry six flours: all purpose, bread, whole wheat, rye, potato, and vital wheat gluten. Plus corn meal, of course, and cornstarch. That’s about average, judging from the comments.

Sean came over last night, just in time. I’ve been cooking too much again, and resistant to leftovers – but he was happy to scarf up the Italian pasta salad, a spare chicken breast, and some baked beans. I cleaned out the fridge, even though it wasn’t garbage night – who’s got the energy to clean the fridge on Tuesday? – and vowed to make Smaller Portions, Less Frequently.

One less dessert got baked yesterday. I picked a quart of sour cherries from our little tree, about a third of what’s there. But when I was cleaning them I found worms. Yuck. Maybe they don’t hurt you to eat them, but I got nauseous just seeing them, and pitched the lot. So, no pie. I may look into worm-prevention for next season, though. I had my tastebuds set for a sour cherry pie.

The strawberries were a disappointment this year – less than a pint, delicious but sparse. I’ve got to clean up the bed, pull the old plants, space out the new ones, and get them ready for next year. No tomato plants this year, nor peppers – but the black raspberries are looking wonderful. They’ll be ready in a few weeks I think – this is our first real crop from them.

I’ve finished three socks – the ones I was so rapturous about, from the spring Knit Picks catalog – and started the fourth. Just haven’t had any knitting mojo lately. Looking at the new Knit Picks catalog, only the Fibonnacci sweater interested me (well, that and the 39-color Fair Isle cardigan) so I think I might use the merino I’ve been spinning to make one. I’m more than half way done with the spinning, pretty much down to single-colors now. I might wind a warp for more towels soon, if I get the gumption to figure out waffle weave. And that’s it for fiberly pursuits, unless you count the gobs of hair coming off the cats. They’ve both been unusually affectionate lately, and I’m beginning to catch on – they want us to help get rid of the excess fur. Mmpff, ppfft ppfft. I hate getting fur all over, it sticks to my sunscreen and I look like a werewolf.

(Did you notice? Not one word about work. I really DO have a life outside the job.)

 
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Posted in Blather

 

21 May

Feeling nostalgic this weekend. I listened to The Time Traveler’s Wife again, and – bless my infinitesimally short auditory memory – completely forgot how it ends. Paul came downstairs to find me sobbing uncontrollably, and could not understand why anyone would read a story like that. How can I explain to him, a typical American tearless man, that a really good cry, every so often, is vital to my emotional health? I don’t mean the kind where you shed a tear or two, or get a little sniffly. The wracking, sobbing, blotchy-faced, full-box-of-tissue cry that purges, makes me feel washed clean again afterwards.

I used to tell my boys that tears contain chemicals, toxic waste of a sort, and crying is the only way to get rid of them. I don’t know if it worked or not. Staffan gets near-tears almost daily – the Aspergers “meltdown” – but doesn’t really let himself go. He tries to hold it in, to be Manly, to retain control of his emotions; but I bet a good cry would be really helpful for him.

Random thought: Remember when Staffan was 5 or 6, and he fell on the edge of the wastebasket and knocked out his front tooth? Lisa, you couldn’t come into the bathroom for fear of seeing blood. My, how you’ve changed!

I’ve got another sock on the needles – a slip-stitch (mosaic?) pattern from Simply Sensational Socks by Charlene Schurch. I despair of ever memorizing the cuff pattern, a 14-st by 32-row repeat. Actually, during the repeat it’s fairly easy to figure out the next row; but starting the next section of pattern is totally unintuitive. I’d never done this type of knitting before, thinking that fair isle is quicker (knitting two rounds for each row sounds crazy!) but this pattern would totally not work as fair isle. The colors are never carried more than 1 stitch, and the horizontal stripes have more rows than the vertical ones. It makes an interesting, skewed fabric, too. I wonder how it will block out.

Another random memory, that’s been on my mind for the last few weeks: I’ve been back in Rochester for (ahem) 22 years now, and May is the craziest weather month. That first May I was back, it was hot – very hot, with sudden thunder showers and hail and everything. The thing I remember most, though, is the way the sun would shine while it was pouring rain. Only in Rochester.

Last year this time, it was hot again – we’d just moved into the new building, and the air conditioning wasn’t working. (The whole HVAC system has been a bit of a nightmare, this last year.) But at least we haven’t had three weeks of 95F in the office. Gave a whole new meaning to “sweat shop”. We’d hired a lot of new people, and they lasted two days on average – they thought we were out of our minds, of course!

Today, if it dries up a bit outside, I’m going to get some annuals planted. There are a few bare spots that need some all-summer color. Dahlias, petunias, gerbera daisies out back, and impatiens for the shady side of the house – though the sweet woodruff has taken over two-thirds of that bed so far, and the lily-of-the-valley has finally gotten a tiny foothold at the other end. The two-year-old peony is about to bloom (eight buds – whoo hoo!) but the bleeding heart disappeared. Probably eaten by the hops – which I’ve been pulling out by the barrel-full every week. My goodness, what a hardy vine that is!

And in another week or two, we’ll have strawberries. The early-bearers have proved hardiest; the ever-bearers gave up the ghost after the second winter. Mmmm. Oh! I got some “Bakewell Cream” from Bakers Catalog, and it makes THE most amazing baking powder biscuits ever. Light and fluffy and flaky, just incredible. I better practice a bit with the sweet shortcake biscuit recipe.

 
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Posted in Blather