Prime Time Knitter

June Bugged and July Baked

For the last five or six weeks, I’ve had nothing to show for my hours of knitting.  I switched to shawl knitting as an antidote to the hot weather, which had not yet arrived in June, by starting the Tendrils crescent shawl in the latest Twist Collective.  This was intended to get me acclimated not only to the weather but to knitting with beads.

Well, the bead knitting was easy enough.  What was not easy enough was every other aspect of this shawl.  Let’s just say I crawled up my learning curve by taking one step forward and two steps back.  I’d like to say that I made every mistake possible, but new possibilities keep cropping up.  This is not the shawl that is warming me up for Evenstar, but a formidable challenge of its own.

The first hurdle was casting on the 507 stitches to start the shawl.  This is my first bottom-up shawl, and just that task alone gave me some pause.  I counted the stitches a zillion times before purling back and getting ready for the lace border.  I did manage to get the 507 stitches cast on.  Don’t rush to congratulate me yet.

On my first pass, I learned that dropping a purl stitch sends you back to square one.  This is 100% silk lace and very slippery, so what might be forgiven on wool (a stitch “stuck there” waiting to be picked up) is a disaster on silk. The stitch falls into the cast-on row.

So back to square one.  I cast on again, purled back, and was ready for the first lace row.  No drumrolls yet though.  I read the chart incorrectly and didn’t knit the edge stitch.  So when I managed the 506 lace stitches, without a flaw, I had two stitches at the end of my needle when I should have had one. 

I thought I’d tink back, despite the annoyance of doing so, but that was an exercise in futility.  The beads flew everywhere and the knit 3 tog’s disappeared into oblivion.  I ripped out everything and started again.

Hah.  I’m not going to make these mistakes again.  And I didn’t.  But, lest you not be aware of it, silk lace spins around on the circular cable.  After knitting up to about row 15, I realized that I had twisted the yarn in Mobius-like fashion—something I have never done before. And never hope to do again.

Back to square one.  This time, despite one minor hitch, I appear to have done it:

 

 The flaw is here:

 

I’m actually not sure what I did.  The yarnovers flop over the knit stitches next to them (or the purls on the wrong side), and it is easy to knit or purl the stitches out of order.  I think I did that, and then tried to put the stitches back on the needle.  In any case, this better block out because I’m not ripping again. 

Despite the aggravation, I love this project.  It would have been in the trash had I not been so captivated.  And I’m now happy to be working on it after nearly three weeks of unrelenting heat (we’re headed for two 100˚ days before the latest heat wave ends—and not even for that long).

Until this week, when the temperatures because stifling, my garden had done pretty well.  This is what it looked like at the start of July.

 

My new "capital improvement" for this year was the purchase of a large roll of shade cloth (the green stuff), which is saving my beets and chard.  The broccoli in the back two rows didn't make it.

I’m particularly pleased with my garlic harvest (nearly 7 lb!).

And even more pleasing, with a face only its mother and a gardener could love, is a praying mantis (actually, I have spotted two).  I’m thankful to my knitting friend Sara for giving me an egg case last fall. 

The garden doesn’t look quite so orderly now because the rule around here is not to weed when the temperatures soar into the 90s and the air quality is unhealthy.  Also the plants are very stressed.  But I had a great salad year, and it looks like a wonderful pepper and green bean year as well.  My fingers are crossed for the tomatoes.

As Luck Would Have It

Hurricane Sandy has come and gone, and miraculously I sustained no serious damage.  In fact, storms of much lesser magnitude have been more destructive for me than this one. Last year’s Halloween snowstorm left me without power for three days. Now that I see what Sandy has wrought, I have stopped complaining about that outage.  Parts of my municipality are still without power, and some won’t have it restored until the weekend.  And this is hardly as serious as the problems many in New York City and New Jersey are facing.  I’m truly grateful that I was spared.

A few large tree limbs fell around my garden, lots of leaves came off the trees (so much for this year’s fall foliage), and shingles blew in from my neighbor’s roof.  But we’re still eating garden-fresh carrots, and there is a bit of spinach.

Nature does appear to be telling me that it is folly to grow Brussels sprouts (lower right).  After battling cabbage loopers last year, and aphids for most of this growing season, Sandy just blew them over.  There’s a chance I’ll scrounge up a few sprouts eventually, but next year I’ll be planting fall lettuce and kale.

We did face some minor inconveniences.  Finding gasoline this weekend was an exercise in futility (supplies were restored yesterday).  I had some issues with my phone and Internet, possibly from the power glitches.  A Verizon tech saved the day by replacing my router. 

I’m wary of the nor’easter that is headed our way tomorrow.  There are some iffy limbs on some of the trees, and the prediction is for gusts of over 50 miles per hour with up to 5 inches of snow.  So the “big one” for me might just be on the horizon.

Luckily, I took a break from Mara to knit a scarf out of beautiful Zen Garden yarn (Serenity DK; 90% merino, 10% cashmere) for a gift. Zen Garden, whose website has tantalized me for a long time, had a booth at Stitches East.  Their yarns are even more spectacular in person than with my nose pressed to the monitor screen. (Unfortunately, I had to take this shot indoors, at night.)

The simple basketweave stitch is something I can manage by lantern light.  We’ve got all our storm gear handy from the hurricane, and I’m as ready as I’m ever going to be.

Tomato/Tomah-to

Ed and I are engaging in another bit of verbal sparring.  This time it is about my tomatoes. I think that we’re going to have dozens, based on the look of my plants.  Each of my robust 12 main-season tomato plants has four or five tomatoes that look like this:

But Ed says there are none because he defines a tomato as being red and sitting on the kitchen counter, ready to be sliced and eaten. I have assured him that they are on the cusp of ripening, and this statement is met by a stare of disbelief and occasional derisive comments.  My two cherry tomatoes plants have a few tiny tomatoes, where to the discerning (and myopic) eye you can see the blush of red on them.

I set myself up for this because I’ve been strutting around saying that we would have tomatoes by July 15—which now has come and gone without ripe tomatoes.  I felt sure that, because of the warm spring and early start, I’d have tomato juice dribbling down my chin by now.  But no matter what I do, it seems, I can’t manage to get tomatoes before August 1.  When they do start, we are inundated, and I’m about tomatoed-out by the end of September, when the season starts to wind down.  There are, indeed, only so many tomatoes I can eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  And we do use them for sauces and in stews, edible well into the winter.  That’s not the same as the fresh ones.

This has been a challenging gardening year (aren’t they all?), with the early heat and now the prolonged dryness.  Considering what is going on in the rest of the U.S., I feel like a wimp complaining, but my municipality has made things worse by imposing watering restrictions (watering for me is allowed only on odd-numbered days), and I’m back to saving my bathwater and praying for rain.  Yesterday’s thunderstorm that broke the fourth heat wave has helped—temporarily.  But I do need to water the new plantings, especially the burgeoning carrots, every day.  Luckily, a bit of soap scum and sloughed skin cells don’t bother them. 

Still, we have eaten out of the garden about every day since the end of April, and (no matter how things go with the tomatoes), we’ve got green beans and squash about ready for picking.

At the moment, my white onions are the current stars of the garden.

Some are nearly the size of tennis balls, and they are delicious—sweet enough to eat without much cooking.  (I am, however, fantasizing about a tomato-onion salad, with vinaigrette and chopped parsley.)

The mid-July garden looks like this:

The broccoli had a tough time because of the heat.  The heads were small and they tended to flower before getting bigger.  The beets were delicious but they’re now gone, and the row on the lower left is replanted with carrots.

The covered row on the right is Brussels sprouts, which replaced the broccoli. Bush beans are to the right of the pole beans, intended to extend my bean season into the fall, once the pole beans are about tapped out.  These are lovely filet beans.

I’ll be harvesting the rest of the onions today, and the two onion rows will be replanted this weekend with more carrots and fall beets.  Then I just weed and wait for peppers, eggplants, and red/real tomatoes.

Too Hot to Handle?

Today is the day I can decide whether it is possible to press on with Mara over the summer.  The first heatwave is hours away, with the promise of near 100° heat for a couple of days.  It is already sultry.

I’m really gung-ho on knitting on.  I reached the V of the cardigan front, and I did my first decreasing in stranded knitting.  I know this doesn’t look like much, but figuring out where I was on the chart and actually getting these right is a milestone:

The V starts at the markers and moves upward along the edge of the steek.

The next Mara challenge is to shape, “at the same time,” the armholes.  Mara has a slightly shaped armhole, and it starts now—and the neck shaping continues.  I definitely will have to pause my audiobook as I prepare the armhole steek, but I hope I can sketch out on a copy of the chart just what the decreases will look like.  Then, if my hands aren’t hot and sweaty, it will be onto the upper part of the body tube.

To be fair about the heat, so long as Con Edison cooperates, I’ll be running the AC and it should be 78° with some additional fans going.  This is not going to be an iffy day in the low 80s where I mumble to Ed about whether we should turn on the AC or not. 

The warm and wet spring has given me something I’ve never been able to grow successfully before: garlic.  I’ve gotten some, and I have usually harvested it July, but this year, I really have a haul to be proud of--weeks ahead of schedule.  There are 90 heads of garlic now curing in my garage (and I hope it stays cool enough in there over the next few days).  It is really a treat to go into the garage—the smell of the garlic can knock you over.  I just stand there breathing it in.

I suspect I’ll need a case of breath mints before long, but I have plans to use most of it and store what I can. 

Over the cool weekend, I did what I could to prepare the garden for the heat.  Everything is looking great now (and weeded, I might add proudly, and mulched).  The beets, which are a few weeks from harvest, are on the lower left, covered with shade cloth.  The tomatoes in the rows after that have flowers—even the main season tomatoes.  I don’t recall being this far along in my potential tomato harvest for years.  The garlic rows were replanted with summer squash and eggplant (covered, until they flower, to keep the squash vine borers off the squash and flea beetles off the eggplant).  Carrots are in the row after that, with the straw mulch.  The next thing to eat will be the broccoli (our first tonight) in the covered rows on the lower right.  The covers did keep the cabbage loopers off.  The pole beans are growing, as are the onions.  The remaining right-side rows are more eggplant (also covered) and two rows of peppers.  So if everything works out, I can use that garlic in some spicy ratatouille.

 

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.”

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night...

Hurricane Irene did not fulfill the dire forecasts, at least not for me.  Although it rained steadily through the night and morning, the winds never picked up sufficiently for the nearby trees to fall—although they did fall across some of our major roads, and there was flooding for lower elevations.  I took in the jar I use as a rain gauge to avoid having it blow around, so I’m not sure how much rain we got, but I’m guessing it was around 6 to 8 inches.

By 11 am the sun peeked out, and I was able to check the damage to the garden. 

Although there are puddles everywhere, the dry and beautiful weather we’re supposed to get for the rest of the week ought to perk up nearly everything (except my newly emerging spinach, which may need replanting). And by next weekend, I hope to pull the broccoli (back left) and put in my transplants. 

Some plants seem as if nothing happened.  My beans appeared to enjoy themselves, and there’s enough to pick for another dinner should the leaves dry out today.

The peppers are regrouping for another crop, some of which will join the 37 stuffed peppers now in my freezer.

And I will have more tomatoes.

I don’t know why the vines grew so high this year.  Those cages are 6-feet tall.

I should enjoy my first row of carrots soon, but those soaker hoses won’t be put to much use. 

It is too wet to take any outdoor knitting pictures, but my shawl, Fiori di Sole, is about half done, and there are assorted UFOs that need attention. Knitting content will return shortly.

 

Taken by Storm

I’m sitting here, now that I’ve made all the preparations I can think of, waiting for the arrival of Hurricane Irene. I’ve lived through other East Coast hurricanes but not in the era of 24-hour news shows and web coverage.  So although this one seems worse than most, the sense of impending doom is much greater than in the past, when we simply knew “it would get here.”  In fact, my first memories of a New York hurricane have almost nothing to do with the hurricane itself.  When Hurricane Hazel hit back in 1955, I spent the night with my grandparents.  I was only 7 or 8, but I remember it being very dark and rainy, with windows rattling.  The image that has stayed with me was my midnight trip to the bathroom, when I saw a small, pink, cylindrical container on the sink.  Not satisfied to leave well enough alone, I opened it to find my grandfather’s teeth—and I was so scared that I ran back to bed and hid under the covers.  And I never mentioned this to anyone, until years later, well into adulthood, when I confided it to my mother. 

The constant coverage of Hurricane Irene, along with clips of winds damaging houses and trees falling on roads and cars (along with the specter of the far more powerful Katrina), has gotten me spooked a bit.  My house is on a hill, and although I’m not looking forward to the predicted 10 to 12 inches of rain, I should experience little flood damage.  But the winds could cause havoc because of the many tall trees.  We removed some dying locust trees like these:

but my next-door neighbor has not.  Now when I wake up at night, I think of the damage those downed trees can cause, and the forthcoming days with no power.  It takes a lot less than 50- or 60-mph winds to knock out our power, and restoring it to such a huge area after Irene will take time.

So for now, I seem to be obsessing about the damage I can imagine—and it too is about as serious in the scheme of things as my grandfather’s dentures.  My poor garden, which I’ve coaxed and nurtured since the spring, may succumb to the wind and rain.  It is ironic that this is happening just as my tomatoes are ripening en masse.

I’ve picked all I can, even the not really ready ones, because I think those may be all I get.

The growing season was a challenge.  Cucumber beetles destroyed my cucumbers and most summer squash.  Only one yellow squash continued valiantly to bear, and to give us a small but regular supply, despite its powdery mildew affliction.  But I think the squash I picked this morning will be the last. 

The 100° heat at the end of July caused my broccoli to turn yellow before the heads got very big, but the side shoots that are still coming have been quite delicious.  I have new broccoli transplants ready to go in, but the last few weekends have been too rainy.  The July heat also delayed my peppers and eggplant, but we did get beautiful peppers after all, as well as beans and more beans. It has been a great bean year.

Before that really hot week, we enjoyed our Chiogga beets and the greens

and picked a great crop of onions.

If the hurricane damage is not as bad as I fear, I’ll be planting that fall broccoli, chard, and lettuce.  And the carrots that are looking good, but not ready yet, should get us through September.  And this might be the first year I get successful Brussels sprouts.

So for now, I’ve got my fingers crossed that I’ll make it through, and it is time to check again (for the hundredth time) to see if there’s a change in the computer model that has the storm going directly over my patch of the world.

 

Excuses, Excuses

The reasons for my most recent blog hiatus fall in the dog-ate-my-homework category. 

Just when I had that fleeting senses that I was about to get my work-life-gardening balance back, Con Edison had other plans.  Early in June, they descended on my street, unannounced, with jackhammers and backhoes so they could dig it up and replace my gas main.  This was how the edge of my driveway looked about three days into a week-plus of work.

With additional contributions to the deafening decibel level from my neighbors, who took down a tree and another who used another backhoe to help reseed his lawn (I’m going to get an “I hate backhoes” bumper sticker), my work schedule fell back into the toilet, and I needed every single June weekend—and July 4^th—to catch up.

And my birds, who would make Mr. and Mrs. Rabbit blush with their antics, finally did what nature intended.  Addi was about to lay an egg.  But things did not work according to plan at all.  The books and websites tell you that you can let the budgie lay an egg and replace it with a dummy. 

The hen presumably will sit on the dummy and eventually lose interest.  Addi Bird doesn’t seem to know that.  She tried to lay the egg and could not.  She was eggbound, which is serious and can result in injury or death.  So off to the avian vet we went, and he removed what looked like a boulder compared to her tiny size (imagine giving birth to a 12-lb baby, and you will get the idea).  She did not respond right away and looked really miserable a day or two later.  Back to the vet we went for antibiotics and cortisone, to relieve the swelling in her nether parts.  I’m happy to say that she is now better, but she and Larry are renewing their commitment to having a family.  From the moment they wake, they begin the courtship routine with mutual barfing into one another’s beaks—a sign of birdie affection.

What can I do about this, because I don’t think Addi really should lay more eggs any time soon? Well, essentially not much.  Female birds can lay eggs without males present, although they’re not fertilized.  So there’s still a chance she will have another egg or two or three.  The vet said I should keep her in the dark more to give her the sense that it isn’t the breeding season, but you can see how well that is working out.  The extra couple of hours of sleep just seems to give both of them more energy.  I have attempted to break them up, but this is a fool’s errand.  Yesterday I just turned around to change their water, and they were mating again.  I can only imagine what goes on when I’m in the shower or on the phone.

And the garden has had some new surprises for me.  My garden is looking pretty lush for the beginning of July.

I’ve replanted the rows that kept us in lettuce and mustard greens for the spring with carrots and parsnips, the tomatoes all have tiny green fruit, we're eating the beets and their greens now, the onions (lower left) are about ready and we’ve enjoyed scallions all spring as I picked and ate the thinnings, but my cucumbers are being attacked by striped cucumber beetles.  These little nefarious critters chew the leaves and flowers, lay eggs at the base of the plant that hatch into larvae that eat the roots, and spread bacterial wilt, which kills the plant.  So I covered the cucumber trellis with row cover, to help keep them off.  Although this has worked (I can’t tell if the larvae will attack, however), the beetles are now on to my squash.  It probably wasn’t such a good idea to plant squash next to the cucumbers because they’re in the same family, but that was the only space I had in my crop-rotation scheme.  So even though we’ve enjoyed some summer squash so far, I think there won’t be that much for the growing season.  And, of course, I spent hours on the web researching what I can do to protect the plants—not much here too, unless I want to spray with chemicals that also kill bees.

So knitting has offered some respite.  Sirdal’s first sleeve is done.

I’m up to the end of the cuff on the second, but I need some thinking time to position the rest of the sleeve above it.  And I’ve knit quite a lot of Wing of the Moth, and I’m up to the bottom border.

Where the Sun Don't Shine

For the last week or so, we’ve had gloomy days with rainfall ranging from torrential to misty and annoying. There’s been about 20 minutes of sunshine. This has been good and bad for my garden.

My lettuce, broccoli, and onions look as if they’re truly enjoying themselves. But for the first time in a couple of growing seasons, slugs are invading en masse. I will have to break out the beer and tuna cans this week, so I can trap them. Usually I get my thrills by smashing slugs with my trowel, but for now they are so small I can find only a handful (well, not exactly a “hand” full because I avoid touching them). Their nocturnal munchings give them away. 

The good news for me is that I haven’t had to water, but the wet weather has made it hard for Ed to put down the soaker hoses, and so that is a WIP for him. And it has kept me from making any new plantings, so lots of veggies and flowers are still growing on my deck.

In addition to the tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and basil, I’m growing sunflowers for the first time. I really wanted them in the garden by now to start attracting beneficial insects.  At least my thyme plants are blooming (not to mention taking over the herb row, back left) to give the bees and beneficial wasps a reason to visit.

But unlike most people who are griping about our weather and the cool temperatures we’ve had throughout May, I’m rejoicing because it is giving me a chance to finish Sirdal.  And, Sleeve #1 is progressing extremely well—I’m up to my elbow.  There are just a few days in the next couple of weeks when we’ll flirt with the 80s, but the evenings are still forecast as being cool.  I really could love a summer like this, even if it meant few tomatoes.

The weather has made it hard for me to get serious about summer knitting, something I really don’t enjoy that much.  I’m a wool knitter, and summers require me to lose my rhythm and switch to other things.  One hot summer a few years ago, my brain got so fried I actually knitted with fun fur. And it is the reason that Sirdal was put out to pasture in 2010. 

In my heart of hearts, I’d like to proceed with stranded projects, and I balled up the yarn for Alice Starmore’s Oregon cardigan.  I’ll consider swatching for it if the weather remains cool, once Sirdal’s sleeves are done and I have to work on the steeks (something best left for a weekend morning, when I’m relaxed and presumably clear-headed).  But to be on the safe side, should warm weather finally arrive, I started dragging out my lace-weight yarn, and I cast on for Anne Hanson’s Wing of the Moth shawl.  In truth, the yarn I picked isn’t lace weight, but fingering weight.  It is the Fibre Company’s Canopy Sport:

It is mix of alpaca, merino, and bamboo, and so it is smooth to work with and not sticky as most wools would be in heat and humidity. (Needless to say, outdoor picture taking is not possible--this is a light mauve.)  It took a few starts and stops to get the set-up rows done, but until I reach the border, it uses an easy pattern of 8-row repeats (four of which are just purling back rows).  So there may be yet another shawl on the horizon, in true lace-weight yarn, for later.