Prime Time Knitter

Growing Pleasures and Pains

At the end of last week I contemplated all the truly productive things I could do over a three-day weekend—most of which would contribute to the cleanliness and order of the interior of my house. Those thoughts didn’t even last a New York minute before I tossed them aside in favor of working in my vegetable garden and starting the V-neck on Mara. The garden needed the most attention, which I could give it starting first thing in the morning, with afternoons and evenings set aside for knitting.

I’m now certain there’s no such thing as a typical growing season.  This year, like years past, I start out with sketches on graph paper of what I will grow in each row.  There is a page for spring, another for summer, and a third for fall.  Because March was like May and April was like early March, things got very complicated. (And I might add, the house got very messy as I had to drag my transplants indoors from my deck because the nights were too cool to leave them out.) In addition, March was dry, but late April and the last few weeks have seen tremendous deluges—the most recent was on Friday, when I’m certain I got nearly 4 inches of rain in a single storm.  So now the plans are nearly worthless, and I’m pretending that summer is here—at least for the gardening.

At the end of last week, after a few rainstorms, my garden looked like this.  Weeds were everywhere, and we nearly exhausted the spinach (the empty-ish rows on the left).

Now, three days later, I have tomatoes, with interplanted lettuce, where the spinach grew (the cages are on the left).  There’s a new bean tower on the right, which I seeded today, replacing some mustard greens. Also, most of the rows are nearly weed free.

The row covers are protecting broccoli from cabbage moth larvae and beets and chard from leaf miners.

This week it is on to gorging on lettuce:

and chard:

My salads have been a wonderful mix of mustard greens, lettuce, beet greens, and radishes.

The problem I have now is that there is really plenty of time for eating lettuce, but the plants intended to replace the lettuce have grown apace.  And it is warm enough to plant them. It breaks my heart to pull the lettuce before its time, but there’s no choice but to do that. Here’s my flat of peppers, just waiting for its chance (which it will get next weekend) to join the tomatoes. 

Luckily for the chard, my eggplant transplants aren’t ready yet, and so they’ll remain for at least another week—although I interplant my eggplant with filet beans, and I just could put them in next weekend too.

One of the fun things about the garden is discovering the little extras that I can’t get from buying vegetables in the supermarket, or even the small farmer’s market in my locality.  Last week, I tried my first herbal vinegar of the year, using chive flowers.  The “instructions” for this variety of herb vinegar in most sources are to simply fill a sterile jar about half full with the chive blossoms, add the vinegar, and put the jar in a cool place.

This is what it looks like after 5 days, and I’ll give it a try toward the end of this week. 

 

The other neat little extra is our garlic scape pesto, which is part of tonight’s dinner.  There are probably enough scapes on their way for another batch at the end of this week. 

I’ve not been so nimble in adjusting my plans for “summer” knitting.  I really don’t want to acknowledge that summer could disrupt my knitting with wool.  I have been barreling along on Mara. The body tube is growing, I made it through the first repeat without any mistakes.  I have not been as lucky since then.  There was a tinked out row for a mistake in the pattern, and now I’m making a major correction.  Despite all the work I did to figure out what the yarn dominance ought to be, I somehow messed it up.  I’ve gone four rows with the yarns in the wrong hands.  So tonight I’ll be tinking two (or possibly four) 333-stitch rows, so I can then take a stab at getting it right.

 

And here I thought I’d be up to the shaping for the V-neck.  Well, I don’t have to worry about the pressure of having it done in time for the cold weather.  I’ll have months of happy knitting, and the way things have gone this week, I’ll need every minute of that time for this future FO.

 

A Cooling-Off Period

I’m really tired of starting every post with excuses for why I haven’t posted, and so I won’t.  But some of the things that were higher up on my to-do list are done—at least to some extent—and at least some excuses are history.

One major task over the last few months was getting my new Mac up and running. 

Yes, yes, I know how easy it is to switch from one Mac to another, but with my Macs, as in almost every other aspect of my life, I tend to accumulate stuff that should be tossed and I tend to let disorder reign.  So when I get a new computer, I use it as an “opportunity,” not only to update my software and learn how to use it, but to delete files I no longer need, prune my photos, toss old email, and otherwise make it into a lean and mean machine.  I’m always surprised at how many little things make the conversion from one machine to another drag on and on.  There are the obvious problems, such as learning what Microsoft has in store when it has a new release of Word.  But there are the unexpected problems, such as the simultaneous demise of both my printers, necessitating researching, buying, and installing a new one. And I’m now on iCloud—after following the advice to back up all my email (another Sunday down the tubes) before making the switch. I thought it would be impossible to love a new Mac even more than my old one, but this 27-inch baby is truly wonderful. (You can see that the Luddite in me decided to stick with the wired mouse and old-fashioned, extended keyboard.)

The unusually warm March weather moved my garden up on the to-do list.  In most years, we’d just be tripping on transplants that are crowded before any window with decent light and only be begining to get them planted.  Because March was so warm, I was able to start spinach earlier than I ever did before, and we’re now harvesting it for wonderful salads.

The spinach will be followed by the Swiss chard in a week or so.

The very warm and dry March got me thinking that I’d need to have my head examined for not rushing out with tomatoes and peppers.  But April cooled off to the extent that we even had nights with some frost, and so my decision to get in all my spring vegetables turned out to be a good one.  Right now, everything I wanted to plant is planted (and weeded!).  On the right part of the photo, I have three rows of broccoli, two rows of onions, a row of chard, and rows of lettuce and greens.  On the left, there are beets, the two spinach rows, garlic, and herbs. 

The tomato, pepper, eggplant, and basil seedlings (which will replace the spinach, chard, and lettuce) have been spending evenings indoors. Ed and I spent some of today installing the soaker hoses that are shown between the rows in the photo—so I’m ready for a rainy week.

And a new task on my to-do list is to use the chive flowers, once the buds burst, to make chive vinegar.  I threw a bunch of tarragon into a jar of white vinegar last year, and it ended up being delicious.  This year, I’m going to make a more concerted effort to make herb vinegars and see how things turn out.  The chives flowers are supposed to turn the vinegar pink and give it a garlicky taste.  I’ll report back soon.

But knitting has proved the most challenging in the hot and then cool again weather.  I’m really smitten with Mara, to the extent that I want to keep knitting it until it is done—even through the summer heat.  Now that is an easy statement to make now that the weather has been cool and knitting it has been a delight. I keep recalling that in my youth I spent summers knitting heavy sweaters without a care about the temperature.  I hope I’m not turning into one of those old people who keep harking back to the good-old days, but I don’t remember being as uncomfortable knitting with heavy wool in the 60s and 70s as I have in past years.  I’m almost psyched up to keep going just to prove that I’m young at heart (if nothing else).

This has been more engrossing that anything else that is supposedly “on the needles,” and I love seeing how the colors play out.  I hope my enthusiasm doesn’t wane once I finish all the different motifs in the design, but I’m enjoying this project so much that I’m practicing project monogamy.

I’ll parade some of the neglected WIPs in future posts, but for now this one is “Mara-velous.”