[gardening] Critters

Lots of creatures to keep me company while I do my gardening. This little guy is named Chipper:



There's one more whose name is Shredder. Chipper Shredder. I was leaving little mounds of birdseed for him, here and there. Apparently I was rather stingy with it- he found where the birdseed bag was in the garage, ripped a hole in the bottom and spilled it all. over. the. garage. floor. I swept up what I could salvage and put in into a covered plastic bin. The rest was unreachable under a couple shelving units. Now the chipmunks run into the garage whenever they hear the large bay doors open to grab as much of the remaining seeds as possible. Whatever. At least they're cleaning it up for me.

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail butterfly:



White Admiral butterfly:



An empty next I found on the ground, under a maple tree, after a particularly windy night. Didn't see any eggs anywhere:



Not shown:

Snakes. Everywhere. Little ones, big ones. Just walking across the lawn, I'm bound to be startled by one slithering away underfoot.

Groundhogs. Everywhere. They're eating an overly-generous amount of perennials that I wish they wouldn't. Last night Dollar and I hung out on the front porch and there were three woodchucks out. One perched on a rock only 50 feet away, not bothered by our talking. Dollar likes all the animals. I wish the woodchucks would simply move away.

Fox. There's one hanging out kind of close to the house. Early this spring a fox grabbed a woodchuck down by the side door at the end of the house. Even though it was a bloodless death, it was kind of horrible to see happen so close. Last weekend, Dollar was mowing a lower lawn slope and wasn't aware that the fox was on an upper level watching him. But I could see from the house and scared the fox off.

Deer. I'm diligently spraying my hostas and daylilies. You're not getting them this year, you bastards.

[misc] Penny Wednesday

This past Sunday was a clean-all-the-things day. Dollar vacuumed the lawns while I mowed all the floors in the house. Wait- I might have that backwards. Laundry ran all day and Penny still wanted to be in the hot, clean clothes.



Even on a 90 degree day. Even if it means melting into a puddle of fur.



She eventually realized she had made a huge mistake and jumped out to lay on the cool wood floors.

[knitting] Moonlight Sonata: Halfway

The linen shawl so far:



Just keep swimming, just keep swimming...

[misc] Murderface Monday

Happy Summer Solstice. Murderface is in full-on summer mode:



Had a good weekend. Spent Saturday at my Grandmother's. She's sorting through some of her things and wanted my sister and I to start taking stuff. My car was completely loaded with boxes, which have since been transferred to the dining room. Now to take everything out and start organizing. 

Made good progress on my linen shawl. I'm only about halfway where I want to be so I've got to knit my little heart out all week, to bind off and block the shawl by this weekend.

We need rain rain rain rain rain. The brook by the new lower flower bed is so low, I can't even fill up my watering jug. I've been watering the veg garden with the hose.

[knitting] Girlie-girl sweater

Made this at the start of the year but only just got around to taking a picture:



Pattern is Quickie (5-hour) Baby Sweater. It came out way too big for a newborn so I'm saving it for Christmas. Which might actually be perfect because I used Cascade 220 Superwash wool- this sweater probably would have been too warm for this summer.

I used my Embellish-Knit tool to quickly crank out the i-cord. I will probably add a few buttons before gifting.

Thing are going well on the linen shawl. I'm nearly done with the 2nd pattern repeat. Will do at least 7 more. I started gathering/piling-up all the fiber I want to spin for Tour de Fleece (Team Catitude). And need to pick a few baby projects to work on during the flights for the upcoming trip. Small, portable, cuuuuuuuuute projects.

[gardening] What's flowering in mid-June

Every day after work I take a walk around the flower beds to see what's blooming but also to see if there are any insects/pests doing any damage. The woodchuck babies have come out and started eating down a few things (salvia, purple coneflower, coreospsis, rudbeckia... I could go on but this is starting to get depressing). Whatever. I'm not even angry any more- I just spray liquid fence in the hopes that the stinky smell will salvage what little remains. Meanwhile, there are plenty of other things that do well and aren't gobbled up.

Hardy geranium:



I got two little divisions of this from my mom. It has done really well- low and mounding ground cover with hot pink flowers all summer. Love it.



First day lily to bloom:



Can't remember the name of the cultivar but this is one that I got from Olallie Daylily Gardens a couple years ago. It has been steadily blooming for a couple weeks now. I've been pretty diligent about spraying with liquid fence- a deer (I assume) came through last year and ate off lots of the unopened buds.


Centauria Montana:



This is one that the woodchucks like. It could do with being divided next year. Might have to rethink were I put it.


Common purple Siberian irises have come and gone:




These yellow bearded irises started blooming June 2 and are still going strong 2 weeks later:



This is the first year I've had columbine blooms at the house. These flowers are so crazy-looking:





I planted the above two from seed last year in the new part-shade bed. The blooms are really long-lasting. Because I couldn't help myself, I bought two discounted columbine plants at the garden store:





Columbine might be my new favorite.

I have several dianthus. Hot pink 'Firewitch':



Bright. Long lasting blooms. Tidy mounding habit. No real fragrance, though, which is a little disappointing for dianthis. I have some in a lighter pink, which I got as divisions from a friend:



I have a few nice clumps of this, next to a pink dwarf lilac what was blooming at the same time:



Both are right in front of the house and fragrant. It's nice to have the windows open and have the smell waft in on the occasional breeze.

Sweet William is blooming now:



Hens and chicks in the rock garden are doing well:





Gotta pluck off the chicks and put them in new places.

Some wild roses are growing behind the new flower bed bed.



Wild Oxeye daisies are blooming at the corner of my veg garden:



Now I can begin my summer-long game of "Find the perfect daisy". My Alaska shasta daisies are not blooming yet- and if I remember correctly, I think they don't start until late summer? Hm.

Catmint is blooming everywhere:



I can't say enough nice stuff about catmint. The animals leave it alone. It's doing well wherever I put it (full sun or part shade). I think I bought 2 plants 5 years ago. I divided those two plants into something like 8, gave a couple away and put the rest in new places. It's doing well everywhere.

Green Wizard coneflower:



I love green flowers. This coneflower has very broad, dark green leaves and I have it planted with the regular purple coneflower. The woodchucks have eaten some of the purple coneflower leaves but not any of the leaves on this one, so... I may take a division of this and move it to the lower flower bed.

Lastly: angelina sedum in the front, yellow loosestrife in the back:



That sedum I'm so happy with. I bought two little sad, dying sedums on sale at a Lowe's last year. $1.50 each. The wintered fine and are thriving. This one is such a great lemon-lime color.

Those are all the perennials blooming now. I don't really have many annuals this year- other than the marigold, pansies, geraniums in the new flower bed. And those are just for color and to fill in space until the perennials I planted down there take hold and spread.

[knitting] Moonlight Sonata

I'm traveling to warmer climes in a couple weeks and decided that I simply must (MUST) have a linen shawl to bring with me. I tossed aside Freia Freya to start Moonlight Sonata:



The yarn is a Finnish 100% linen. My sister's co-worker gave me a sack of linen yarn in various colors and there were several skeins of gray I pulled for this pattern. I would definitely like to use all the other colors for weaving... if I ever want to focus and try to get more comfortable with my loom.

I've never knit with 100% linen before. It's interesting trying to do k3tog with yarn that has zero elasticity. I've read that the fiber really softens up after an aggressive wash/block. I hope so. The pattern has a seriously wonky chart and I had a couple false starts. I can't really read my knitting to see what's going on yet. I have to keep repeating, "I will not hate this shawl, I will not hate this shawl" to myself. Which kind of makes me hate it more. I'll complete one pattern repeat and see if things start to flow better because right now, knitting on this thing is a constant struggle of self-doubt.

[knitting] Freia Freya

Started a new shawl:



Yarn is Freia Ombre Lace. Pattern is called Freya. Hence "Freia Freya". It was actually completely unintentional to pair the two- I had the ombre lace in my stash and the Freya pattern is free and had a scalloped shape to it, which I thought would work well for the gradient colorway.

I'm a bit further along that the picture above but I had to put this project aside in order to start another. More on that tomorrow...

[misc] Murderface Monday

My sweet old guy:



Weather has dipped back down with highs in the mid-50's. Saturday morning, before the rain came, I worked down in the veg garden. I raked up some raised beds and took out clods of weeds.



Then I ran down to buy vegetables and compost:



It rained the rest of Saturday, so I had to wait until Sunday morning to plant everything:



Corn, cucumbers (in the containers in the back), birdhouse gourd, tomatoes, peppers, brussels sprouts, yellow summer squash. And I have another long bed I've leveled off where I will plant lettuce and radish seeds.

[cooking] Homemade Cheese-its

My mom gave me one of those 3-lb bricks of Cabot sharp cheddar. I used my food processor to turn the entire block into shredded cheddar in about two minutes. But it was a mountain of shredded cheese. I made two casserole dishes of mac & cheese (one for me, one for my sister). I made a quiche. I made triple batch of dough for cheese crackers:



These taste exactly like Cheez-Its, only I can call them Cheese-its because it's real cheese. The recipe is from a cracker class that I took at King Arthur Flour last year. Ingredients are simply: butter, shredded cheese, flour, salt, chili power, cayenne, pepper, paprika, touch of cold water. I used my ravioli cutter to make serrated edges.

Now to figure out how to use up all the shredded cheese I still have left. Maybe chive and cheddar scones this weekend?

[knitting] Baby Surprise Jacket

After the big bolero, I chose a finer yarn and smaller needle for my 2nd attempt at a Baby Surprise Jacket. I completed it after a few days:



Garter stitch blob. So nice to work the entire thing in one piece. Then you fold it up, sew it up and add some buttons:



So cute- so cuuuuuuuuute! Truly newborn sized. If fact, I'm dropping it off at my sister's after work today so my niece can wear it before she grows out of it. Plus, it's been a little chilly recently.

[knitting] Baby Surprise Bolero

I've wanted to knit Elizabeth Zimmerman's Baby Surprise Jacket for ages. Now that I have a niece, the time has come.



But it's more of a bolero than jacket. I used my own handspun and quickly ran out of yarn. I stopped after all the increases but before you start working back-and-forth across the middle 90 stitches. This made a nice little cropped cardigan that can be folded and seamed along the sleeves. Since the yarn is DK-weight and it was knit on size 6 needles, this is large enough for a one-year-old.

The instructions were good, if a little... wordy. I haven't knit an EZ pattern in ages and I've forgotten how chatty she could be. I prefer the 'pithy' version of instruction. I spent way too much time trying to decipher what she meant a couple times.

So this will be saved until the niece is older- back to the drawing board (or, yarn basket) to to find yarn/needles to knit a smaller one.

The yarn is a superwash merino and tencel that I spun back in 2009.

[knitting] Holden

I've had one skein of Green Mountain Spinnery's Simply Fine in my stash for ages. It's a natural colorway which gradually changes from light to dark to light, etc. After searching Ravelry, I saw many people used the Holden shawlette pattern for it, to great effect. So, I tried it as well:



Yeah, it works. It's really nice. I only made a couple modifications: I did M1R and M1L increases down the center spine, rather than YOs. And I didn't have enough yarn for the picot bind-off because I did a few more lace repeats to make the shawl larger.



I'm back in the shawl game. My craft room desk currently looks like:



As I try to decide what pattern to do next, what yarn to wind, what beads to choose... Decisions, decisions

[gardening] Vacation

I had a stay-at-home vacation last week and spent 90% of my time gardening. It was fabulous weather to work outside every single day- the only rainy day was yesterday.

The big goal was to plant the large flowerbed that was put in last fall. At the start of the week, it looked like this:



Those are all weeds that need to be pulled up. I spent the first day of vacation weeding all the flower beds; this area is now the largest flower bed of them all.

Here it is 98% weeded, with a few things added:



That green thing in the foreground is an olde-tyme washtub that has been sitting at the edge of the woods forever. There was never any standing water in it, so I knew it drained and would make a nice planter. Dollar and I dragged it over. The bed frame in the back is something that we got from Dollar's mom- more on that later. And I put a whiskey barrel planter up on the tree stump.

I planted a billion plants and mulched:



Another angle:



The flower bed bed. Here you can see just the frame:



I measured the length and width of the inside mattress frame, went to Home Depot and had wood cut to fit. And I bought plain soil. Came home, put it all together:



Needs more soil. And annuals.



And done. Done done done done done done done. Hopefully sun and rain will take care of this bed the rest of the summer because I have too many other things to do.