A Matter of Timing

I am not doing well juggling my knitting, gardening, work, and the ordinary tasks of everyday life.  The knitting is moving along, my garden looks wonderful, work is slow and steady, but blogging has fallen by the wayside. 

The problem is that I like to post in the morning, after taking photos with the best light for accurate color.  But that is just the time that also is best for tending my vegetables—watering before the sun gets high enough to evaporate the water before it sinks into the roots, smashing slugs with my trowel, weeding before the heat of the day, and getting the grubby things done before a shower.  Ed and I are having a hard time eating fast enough to keep up with the spinach, which I pick in the morning. 

Although the knitting is moving along, the changes in the garden are far more dramatic. The current crop (ok two rows) of lettuce has fulfilled its purpose as a natural mulch for my broccoli.  It is time to eat it and let the broccoli have the planting rows to itself. 

The basketweave sweater is progressing nicely, but not nicely enough to get me three sweaters in five months.  I’m working on my second sleeve, which is actually going very quickly now that I’ve figured out where to place the increases for the arm part and decreases for the cap.

I completed my collection of Fair Isle books (more on the reason for that in another post) with Ann Feitelson’s book and Ann Bourgeois book, intended to help me with the Philosopher’s Wool kit in my stash.  

Two other notable purchases were Cookie A’s sock book and Margaret Radcliffe’s book on color knitting, both of which deserve posts of their own.  And I’m still waiting for Wendy’s toe-up sock book, when Knit Picks restocks it. 

I am feeling a real need for knitting with tweed yarn, and I bought color cards from KnitPicks and Beaverslide Dry Goods. Both have lovely yarns that are paralyzing me with indecision.

But I need to regroup and organize my stash a bit before buying another sweater’s worth of tweed yarn, especially because I also enrolled in the two Stitches East classes on working with Japanese stitch dictionaries and patterns (and June is a tax month, so some fiscal restraint is in order to compensate for my indulgences over the last two months).  But I convinced myself that Knit Picks organic cotton for washcloths (my summer portable projects, and as sample pieces for modular knitting) would be prudent and the 16" Harmony circulars rounded out my collection of fixed and adjustable 24" and 32" circulars :

It will be another week, or even two, before I can plant my warm-weather vegetables.  We’ve had some very cool nights, and I’ve had to bring in my tomato, pepper, eggplant, zucchini, and cucumber plants, and a couple that were so cold, the flats of lettuce and Swiss chard couldn’t remain outside either.  Ed is putting the final deer-stymieing touches on the cage that will keep them from eating those plants—attaching the netting and making doors.  

The next thing I’ll do, even while he is working, is plant my pole bean seeds after I restring those towers and read up on ways to keep the squash borers away from the zucchini.  I’ll start with the row covers that I use to shield the other plants, and then try the aluminum foil approach of covering the stem.  I’m determined to join the ranks of the gardeners who have so many summer squash they don’t know what to do with them.

Comments

[tiennie]

Your garden and sweater are coming along really nicely!