cosmicpluto knits!

happenings

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The beans have really popped! I harvested by first beans today – a good handful of Royal Burgundy and Provider bush beans. I sauteed them briefly in a little olive oil, then sprinkled them with salt and downed them right quick. Yum. About ten minutes from plant to mouth. I love growing things.

Other stuff in the garden is going crazy too – this is actually two zucchini plants. They’re huge! No fruit yet, but I’m hoping for soon.

I also finally have a couple of teeny tomatoes. Things have been so slow this year, but my tomato plants are starting to outgrow their cages and they look super.

Two weeks ago or so I planted some rainbow chard in a pot – it’s still very tiny, but it won’t take too long for it to get a whole lot bigger (I hope).

On a completely unrelated topic, I’ve got some awesome (lightly worn) shoes for sale that I’m hoping someone out there can use -

Dansko Mylas – brown, women’s size 38. I loved these shoes, but they just didn’t love me and my orthotics. Danskos rule! Click on the photo for more info. I paid $120, asking $65 including shipping to the US or Canada.

Adbusters Blackspots – the “World’s Most Ethical Shoes”, apparently – they look similar to Converse Allstars, but with a hemp upper, handdrawn logo and sweet spot, and are built in a union shop in Portugal. They also feel more substantial than Chucks, with a lot more cushioning in the sole.

Women’s size 7 – they turned out to be a little too small for me, but I’m totally going to buy a bigger pair because they’re really cool and comfy. I paid $90 Canadian, asking $50 USD including shipping. You can tell they’re very lightly worn because the toe caps are still white!

Email me if you’re interested in either pair – they’re great shoes, and I’m sad that they didn’t work out for me! I have such trouble buying shoes, sigh. Does anyone have recommendations for shoes that work okay with orthotics (preferably with a removable insole) and are somewhat stylish?

Still with me? Want some eye candy?

I’m knitting a sample shawl for the store out of Louet Mooi – apparently it’s pronounced “moi”, but I keep thinking “mooey” in my head. It’s bison, bamboo and cashmere, and pretty spendy…but this red colour is gorgeous and it’s working up really nicely!

state of the garden

Someone asked for an update on how my garden was going – I’m more than happy to oblige! I took a bunch of photos today while out doing some watering. The constant rain for awhile there was irritating, but at least I didn’t have to get dressed, go outside and water every day!

In the top row, L-R:
1. Cucumber. Doing pretty well, looks healthy, with one yellow flower so far. I think I might let it just sprawl on the ground although I’m still wavering on whether to trellis it. That was the original plan, and it’s planted just at the bottom of the stair railing to the deck. I’ve got other squash plants planted next to the cucumber, and while they aren’t big yet (actually, two of them died and I just reseeded, ugh) it might get really crowded, really fast. Maybe I will set up a trellis so the cucumber will grow up along the railing.

2. A puny tomato plant. Maybe purple ball? I can’t remember (but they’ve got tags in the ground). I’d originally planted a few of my tomato seedlings in a different spot, and although they all look healthy, they just weren’t growing much. I think once the leaves really came in on the trees in my yard they got shaded out. So this weekend I went out, turned some other crap under (green onions that weren’t doing so well) and moved the tomatoes to a sunnier spot. I hope they catch up!

3. Bush beans (Royal Burgundy). They’re kinda leggy from being grown in the pot, but they look leafy and healthy and have lots of pretty purple flowers. I’m hoping that the taller stems will make it easier to find and pick the beans! These are so easy to grow, and satisfying – for those that don’t know, they’re normal “green bean” type beans, but are dark purple on the outside. And they turn green when they’re cooked!

Bottom row:
4. Flower on the biggest tomato plant in my wee garden – which is in a container. It’s a “Lemon Boy” variety that I bought on a whim at Canadian Tire and was the first one that I planted out. It’s almost as tall as its cage now, and has a couple of blossoms.

5. An heirloom tomato growing with a basil plant in a recycling bin. The tomatoes that I planted in the bins are doing somewhat surprisingly well, so I’m happy. I think this one is a “Tigerella” variety. The basil’s doing great, too!

6. This one cropped kind of weird, but it’s another tomato + basil in a recycling bin. This one’s “White Queen” – white beefsteak-type tomatoes! Doing quite well too.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how things are going. The squashes could be growing a little faster, but at least they’re alive; it seems like everything’s a little slow this year. I hope the sunshine and heat predicted for the next little while helps things along, even if I do have to be out there watering!

And I’m keeping my cool knitting hemp (in my AC’d house, but anyway…) – this is the “cool hemp ponchette” by Hemp for Knitting, in the new AllHemp6 Lux. It’s smoother and silkier than the usual AllHemp6, and really quite nice to knit with! This one’s a shop sample, and it’s almost done.

weaving and growing

Still not much knitting going on around here, I’m afraid! I’ve been weaving up a storm for the Etsy shop, including this scarf out of Dream in Color Smooshy in “Gothic Rose” with a teeny stripe of Fleece Artist Silken in the warp.

Hopefully I’ll have a few more scarves up by the end of the week – I’m currently working on one in Sea Silk. Yum!

Here ends the fibre talk, now it’s onto the gardening – I spent a good amount of time this weekend working on my garden at home. No allotment garden this year, I’m just making do with space in my (rather large, really) yard at home. Saturday I dug out a LOT of overgrown raspberry bush to make room for my squash plants.

Right up to the bricks was raspberry bush; I took out way more on the other side! I know I’ll have to keep on top of the raspberries invading back into the space, but I tried my best to dig up as many roots as I could (those suckers are crazy pervasive). The plant on the left is a slicing cucumber plant; I’ve never grown cucumbers before! I’m going to (hopefully) get it to grow up and around the deck stairs bannister and railing, just to the left of the photo. The other mounds there are different types of summer squash – “Black Beauty” (normal green), “Flying Saucer” (a scallop-type squash) and “Cocozelle” (striped green). I’ve also planted “Eight Ball” (green and round) and “Sunburst” (another scallop).

The Sunburst I planted in a container, and the seedlings just popped up in the hot weather!

And because it’s getting late and I’m trying to get to bed earlier these days (yeah, right), some concluding photos of my container deck garden. I’ve planted two varieties of bush beans, lots of basil, some tomatoes (in old recycling bins! yay repurposing), spinach and parsley. The rest of the tomatoes will go in the ground, along with the aforementioned squashes and some other stuff already planted (peas, coriander, green onions). More info if you click on through to my Flickr!

I’m getting excited about this year’s garden – lots more varieties of tomatoes, and lots of squash – I really don’t think I can ever get enough zucchini (also my family is five people, so we can eat a lot of it).

Now if it would stop raining for long enough so that I can get the rest of the tomatoes in the ground!

in progress

Knitting:

Just needs the other sleeve sewn in. And the ends. And buttons. And a good blocking.

Spinning:

About 700 yards of fingering weight merino/silk. Off the wheel, technically! But it’s the first completed yarn I’ve made in months.

Gardening:

A mini bed in front of my back deck. I’m not doing the allotment garden this year (too big, too much work by myself, not sure if I’ll be around all summer) but I am trying to get my crops in among my parents’ plants! This area was pretty sad, a few raspberry offshoots (scraggly ones) and not much else. So I dug up the plants (very tough) and planted about four feet of shelling peas in double rows and four feet of “mammoth melting” snow peas against the deck. Then in front of them I planted green onions, coriander (cilantro) and chives. I need some kind of border stones or something…

Tomatoes, of course – I’m rather behind this year but I think I’m ok. Varieties: Purple Calabash, Eva Purple Ball, White Queen (they’re white!), Tigerella, Matt’s Wild Cherry.

Reading:

Buffy Season 8, Volume 1. Oh yeah.

weekend = work week

Not a lot of time to blog at the moment, since I’ve got to get off to work, but I thought I’d let you all know how the knitting’s going! Seraphim has been my obsession, of course, and I’ve gotten a lot done this week.

This photo was taken on Tuesday, so I’m rather far behind on my photo-documenting, but I’m much farther now! I’m more than halfway through Chart #3, then it’s the edge chart, and then I’m done! It’s shaping up to be quite big – I usually favour smaller shawls, but I just blindly followed the pattern on this one. I’m sure it’ll be fine.

And since I haven’t said anything about the garden lately, that’s going well too. The tomatoes are just everywhere, and I’ve been canning – so far I’ve done fourteen pint jars and four litre jars. I need to do the canning about once a week or so, to rotate through the tomatoes that are ripe enough and such. I’ve got two heaping baskets of tomatoes ripening on the counter (3L each) so I’m hoping they’ll be good to go on Tuesday or so. The litre jars hold a lot more each, but I can only fit four in at a time, maybe five – the four jars that I did the other day held about 8 dozen tomatoes. So maybe another batch of litre jars next time.

We also harvested and ate our very own watermelon!

It was actually ripe, and delicious! Unfortunately our plant got a bit stunted and only gave the one watermelon before dying. But it was super sweet (also super seedy). And hey, we made a watermelon by sticking a seed in the ground! Growing stuff is awesome.

belly party

Following a rather mad dash to the finishing line (involving me spending pretty much an entire week knitting squares to fill in the gaps) the ladies of the lettuce knit SnB presented our three preggers ladies with blankets!

Jen, Joyce, and Mel got heaps of presents and lots of handknits, obviously! I, being the genuis that I am, forgot to photograph my finished wee sweaters before I gifted them, so perhaps the ladies would be so kind as to send me something to post?

(more photo on my flickr.)

The rush of blanket finishing plus working and all that left little time for other fibrey pursuits, but I finally brought my wheel home from the store (it had been living there for wheel classes for the last six weeks or so) and have been slowly returning to the spinning. If I’m going to make it to Rhinebeck, I’d better spin up at least part of all that fibre I bought last year!

The crocheted red skirt (herringbone skirt from Knitscene) is thisclose to being done – definitely time for an FO around here! In the meanwhile, I’ve been playing with another toy this week…

That pile of noodles was actually just test flour-water dough to clean out the machine – we made tortellini filled with ricotta and basil, with fresh homemade tomato sauce with tomatoes from the garden, of course! Does anyone know where I can buy or borrow a pressure canner from? It would be oh so much faster than the boiling water canner once I start canning (I’m currently gearing up for it, the tomatoes are coming in pretty fast).

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