underwater

Posted on Posted in designing, food and garden, lace/shawls, projects

i don’t know about you, but we’ve had a LOT of rain lately—i mean every day, for what feels like weeks. it’s great for the garden to a point; just look at all that GREEN, haha. it’s almost comical. and we don’t have to water, so that’s good.

but then there are mushrooms and weeds that are cropping up in the garden and everywhere else; i’m not sure that’s a good sign . . . i doubt these are tasty, or even edible, but i’m going to try to find out, because we have a ton of them.

i have a date with my garden for saturday—it needs a lot of attention and i wasn’t here for two weeks to give it. on the other hand, it seems to have benefited somewhat from me not being here to fret over it.

some carrots finally came up and now i see there are enough of them to keep cultivating.

the tomatoes are once again growing lush and full—i’ll need to prune them well on saturday to keep them in check a bit.

they are flowering like crazy and putting out fruit that looks beautiful, yay.

peppers too; even the hot ones in the planting boxes have fruit now. i love fresh hot peppers; they are so much tastier than store-bought.

and i finally have okra seedlings—i followed the suggestion on the seed packet to soak them before planting and this time they all seem to have germinated (plus, all that rain probably did a lot more for them than the dry, hot weather we had after the first planting).

my second seeding of green beans was also a success and now i have a row of lush bean plants; i love them! i think i’ll plant some more in the space that’ll be left over when the rapini is gone

that’s it at the front of this photo—growing like weeds; it should be ready to flower very soon. at that point, i’ll pick it all and put it up in the freezer. we love it, but it isn’t something we need a ton of. as you can see, the other greens are all doing well; everything is big enough to do a good thinning so they can all have the space they need.

i made eggs with swiss chard for lunch the other day and it was deLISH; the greens were tender and velvety in the soft eggs and . . . well, you get the picture. there will be plenty more of those lunches this summer.

in fact, we had a few good meals with cookie and janel using ingredients from the garden. we made pasta with fish and loads of fresh basil and oregano. not exactly a vegetable meal, but it was doubly good with the fresh herbs.

the squash are just a few days too young to throw into this dish with the rest, but by the weekend, we should have several fingerlings we can eat

(and judging by its progress toward maturity, by next week i may be making a fool of myself all along the block, trying to get rid of it, heh).

i think janel really enjoyed her first visit here (cookie is a veteran); we celebrated her birthday with strawberry shortcake and had a relaxing two days of talking, planning, and knitting with david on hand to keep things lively (haha). it was lovely and we both miss them already (they left yesterday to teach at knitters connection).

i wish we’d had more garden produce to eat, but the flowering things made up for that—lilies, yucca, hydrangeas, and wild flowers are all busting out this week.

i don’t have much knitting to show you today; all my knitting time the last couple for days was spent on a secret project and on writing up the pattern for the shawlette. in fact, my desk looks like a tornado hit it—papers everywhere. i’ve done a ton of knitting in the last couple of weeks, but no pattern writing, so i need to catch up. if i had a mortgage on my desk work, it would be underwater at this point.

i did however, do some blocking yesterday morning, while our guests slept in a bit (don’t get me started on how early i’ve been waking up lately, after just a few hours sleep; what’s UP with that??)

this is another sample of the new shawlette that i knit in briar rose sea pearl. the first prototype in the gold sunsilk yarn is a size i love for a scarf,

but it took much less than the full 400 yards available and i wanted to see how it would be if i made it a little bigger to take better advantage of the yardage in the full skein.

i didn’t have any more of the silk yarn, so i went to my stash for something similar and thought this sea pearl would be nice (a light bamboo blend would also be great; kim will be test knitting it in her pandora sock).

i LOVE the yarn and the colorway, but i’m afraid i still like the smaller shawlette better for the scarf size

(no worries—there will be several sizes; i simply wanted to decide on how big the smallest scarf should be). the other sizes will be incrementally bigger, based on the mini.

once i had that blocked out, i was good to go for the pattern writing and i stayed at my desk well past midnight, getting the bulk of it done (i can knit on the road, but i can’t do all of the ancillary stuff that i need for the pattern). i’ll finish it up today and send it to ronni for proofing and to my good friend kim for test knitting.

the rest of my knitting time for the next two weeks is a bit tied up in secret projects, but i do have the baby blanket and scarf to work on as well, so we’ll have some goodies to look at here and there. i’ll try to make the garden as entertaining as possible.

i also have a LOAD of news, yarn, and goodies from TNNA to show you—there’s enough to fill a whole post, so i’ll be preparing that for friday.

and that’s all i have for now—i think i said something about finishing up a shawlette pattern, so i better get cracking.

in the meantime, here’s a shot of my pink astilbe; isn’t it pretty?

30 thoughts on “underwater

  1. That sunsilk shawlette just glows! And I love the scalloped edging.

    I was feeling pretty good about the three green cherry tomatoes spied in my garden last night till I saw all your progress! Your garden is so far ahead of mine. I do have sugar snaps ready to blossom, though. They love rain!

  2. We’ve had lots of rain too–I told my son he has to weed tomorrow before the crabgrass and thistles get ahold of everything. I’m so excited for Friday’s post! Your garden looks great. You should have a little sidebar for your recipes 🙂

  3. The shawl is lovely – I love the stictches down the center.

    We have had scads of rain as well. My garden consists of three tomato plans, in pots, but they are thriving. I’ve never heard of pruning tomato plants before – can you offer advice?

  4. Northeast Kansas and Missouri has had too much rain as well. We don’t know when it will dry out.
    Do you find putting down straw helps with weeds?

  5. What a wonderful shawlette; the pattern reminds me of your Flaming Desire socks, which I keep knitting in different colors because it’s such a nice mix of curves and lines.

  6. Yummy! Everything looks so delicious. I didn’t want the veggie pictures to end. How fun to grow and eat your own food. Closest I can get is joining the local CSA (which is also quite fun).

    Thanks for the inspiration in the garden, kitchen and knit nook.

  7. your garden looks wonderful, so lush. We’ve been holding our own against the woodchuck invasion! Glad you are home – enjoy your garden date this weekend!

  8. Your garden looks delicious! All of it (even the swiss chard, which I can’t stand – yuck!). And your garden looks about a month ahead of ours. Lovely post! Your dinner looked wonderful.

  9. Love the shawlette and the great garden shots. Looking forward to Friday’s post. I am still amazed at how much you accomplish.

  10. Your garden is doing so well & I am sure you will be having a great harvest soon. I love the lace edging on the shawlette – it’s really pretty.

  11. You should be proud that mushrooms choose your garden as their ‘fruiting’ place – if you want to help identification, dig the stem/stipe from the base, measure the stem length, note if the stem is brittle when fresh or if it’s flexible/woody – cut off the top of two of the fresh mushrooms (just opened) and put one gill side down on white paper, one on black paper/print. Record what color the spores are after you leave it overnight away from drafts – put a glass over it to keep the spores on the paper. Give these clues to the person you want to help with ID. From a knitting amateur mycologist whose often known to bring a sock in progress along on mushroom forays.

  12. I do like this shawl! The zig-zaggy tracing down the center back is a unique detail. Another lovely knit!

  13. i am really feeling the serendipity of you putting together this shawlette pattern just as i happened to buy a delectable skein of stricken smitten’s “smarvelous” yarn, which seems like it will be perfect for this. and i love the center-stitch zig-zag! p.s. the woman i was sitting next to on the plane this afternoon could not stop cooing over my in-progress campanula scarf. 🙂

  14. We mushroom hunt all summer long and don’t bother with those. I believe those are inky caps if I am not mistaken. Those are about the only ones I don’t gather. In fact I brought home a whole gallon bucket of coral mushrooms last weekend, yum.

  15. How do you prune tomatoes so as to not reduce their yield?? Last year my big Early Girl overgrew its cage so much that I had to lash the cage to the chain-link fence to keep it from going down and smashing the string beans. This year I have two Early Girls and I’m soon going to have to do the same thing.

  16. i am so envious of your vegetation already sprouting forth and producing. the first round of beans got eaten by slugs (as did the corn and zucchini). the zuch and corn re-seeding is going well, but the beans are not having it. on the tenth we had already were at the second wettest june in history…by the 10TH!!!

    please keep showing your lush and green garden, it gives me hope.

  17. I like that the shawlette does NOT have pointy points! And I really like the look of the garter stitch.

    So what do you do? Harvest the mushrooms and save them until you can find out if they’re poisonous or not? And if the mushroom expert says that they’re “okay,” have him eat the first one? 🙂

  18. LOVE the shawlette. Looking forward to the pattern when it’s ready.

    Aren’t the miracles of Mother Nature amazing!! What starts as a small seed grows into wonderful food to nourish us.

  19. I am LOVING this new shawlette….can’t wait for the pattern!!!!!

    And boy, do I wish I lived next door to you so I could sneak over for a meal every once in a while….oh, to eat as well as you do!!!!

  20. Beautiful shawlette, what will you be calling the new shawlette?? I am looking forward to buy the pattern.

  21. wow – very nice garden! Goes to show that sometimes order is a good thing. . . . I do have all my carrots in the same [general] spot – but beans are everywhere I could find a spare vacancy! We seem to get mushrooms whether there’s a lot of rain or no. . . . I have no idea who to consult about which (if any) are edible! If you find out, do please let me know. Oh, and no. . . . I haven’t even started the pine and ivy shawl. [sigh]

  22. LOVE the new shawlette. stunning.
    and we are very much underwater out here too – I think only about 5 days of sunshine in the last month – yet your garden still is gorgeous.

  23. That shawlette is fabulous! I do believe I’m going to spend the rest of my life knitting nothing but shawls. 🙂

    Much rain here, too, and heat…oy, the heat. Glad you had a good time at TNNA.

  24. What a lovely veggie garden, as always. Your tomatoes looks scrumptious. Sadly, I’ll have to live vicariously through you. Over the past year I’ve developed an allergy to raw tomatoes. So eat some for me, just don’t tell me about it.

    Oh, and that business about waking up after only a few hours of sleep? Hate to tell you this, but it comes with age. Ask me how I know.

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