Eloquent Pedestrian

Remember reading? I used to read. Before all of this craziness with the mittens started, before I became a glove making fiend, before the holidays came and put a whirlwind through my house. In the push to get things done before Christmas, I had to put aside my reading in favor of knitting my fingers off. This was especially unfortunate as I get most of my reading from the Library, which means all of my reading has a due date. Just like being back in school. So of course now would be the time that several books I had been waiting for finally came to me, and have sat next to my bed and collected dust for weeks. Now that Christmas is past (though I do still have a glove to knit, more on that later) I am able to pick up some of those books. Fortunately some of them are e-books, and can be read while knitting, since I don't need my hands to keep them open. Here's everything I have, and how long I have to read it: Summer Knight: 5 Days. This is the fourth book in the Dresden C...

My brain is broken. It's beginning to look a lot like a brown Christmas here in Minnesota, all of our snow seems to have gone to Kansas, judging by the stock footage on the news. Our Christmas tree looks lovely: And I have finished three pairs of mittens. More or less. Or at least the knitting part. That counts, right? Getting mittens to match has proven more than a little problematic. I still have ends to weave in on the lotus mittens. And I have to create a button and button loop on the "alpaca" flip tops. Now those... lovelies I'm proud of. As I sat down to dinner with my friends, Gingersnap Mitten recipient looked at the flip tops and said "How is that harder than mine?" And I said, "Well, there are 8 cables in both of your mittens. There are 27 cables in one of these." That's right, I counted. Here they are in all their knotted glory: The flip tops and the Lotus mittens were both knit out of Caron Simply Soft, which is one of my ...

I actually wrote this post a week ago, but I didn't finish it, so I'm posting it now. Man-mitten project, entry two. I have three mittens knit. "That's great Sybylla. Who's mittens do you have done?" No one's. That's right. Three people to knit for and I knit one mitten for each of them. The one on the needles is done now, I just haven't gotten around to taking a picture of it. The fact is, the second mitten is never as fun.  Whether it's figuring out a pattern and cursing as the yarn or the needles or the pattern aren't right, first mittens are anything but boring. It's always exciting to work through a new pattern, see it coming out, finish it off and try on what you've done. But second mittens are so "been there, done that." The pattern's figured out, at least as much as it's going to be. You're using the same needles and same yarn. You still have to do all of that ribbing on the cuff (which I...

So it's time again to check my temperature and adjust my medication, because I must be crazy. It all started with the Eugenia mitten. Let me see if I have a picture...  I'll add it later. They were made with the leftover yarn from the Serenity blanket. This yarn was a gift from a friend of my mother's. It is Italian, I believe, by a brand called Gedifra, and it feels funny. I don't feel ungrateful saying that because it's the exact reason it was given to me. Anyway, the Eugenia looks lovely, feels a bit odd, and was crazy fast to knit. Which is when the crazy struck. I decided, if mittens were so quick to knit, why not knit them for Christmas presents? Next thing I know I've got four ravelry patterns and I'm at Joann's looking for an odd set of yarns.  The four mittens will be for my three best friends and my mother. Now, I took a year and a half to knit a guy a scarf once, so I was expecting time and dedication to be an issue. But it soon ...

Sock knitting aside (now I'm working on my Eugenia mittens again), I'd like to share a few new goals I have for this non-gardening season, also known as knitting season. Finish all of the Neil Gaiman books I've started. This may seem like a strange goal, but at one point recently, I counted five books by the same author which I had begun and not completed. This meant I'd never finished a novel of his. This wrong must be righted. Knit gifts for my friends, family, and boss.  That sounds much more daunting than it is. By friends, I mean my three best friends. By family, I mean my mother. And I only have one boss. Still, this probably won't entirely happen.  Actually read my garden books.  I have a bunch of gardening books from this year. One of them was lent me by a friend in May. That's six months ago for you keeping score. I cracked it open for the first time today. Never lend me a book.  Plan out next year's garden on paper.  This is a unique goal bec...

I'm going to skip talking about putting the garden to bed, and get right to my exciting knitting projects. Despite being discouraged by my discovery that I had been doing one of the most basic stitches in knitting wrong, I persisted in my quest to knit myself a pair of socks. I've learned a lot from this project. First of all, I hate knitting things to fit. This is the first time I've done that, excluding making scarves long enough which doesn't count, and I don't like it. I like to pick up a pattern, knit it according to what it says, and be done with it. But since I have big calves, and the wrong needles, that wasn't going to happen with a pair of socks. So I experimented, knowing I'd probably have to rip back and start over, and my enthusiasm died. The pair of socks sat by where I sit to watch tv for weeks. I'd look at it and think really hard about knitting it, but I never really had the urge to pick it up. So instead I went to JoAnn's, bough...

The first part of the title is supposed to be to the tune of the Chia Pet commercials. It doesn't really work with chives, unless you hear it... and this is a blog... and I'm spending far too much time explaining a joke... ANYWAY! The season is done. I'm sorry if this is news to anyone, as it is, after all, October. Other balmier climates may still be growing and harvesting things, but one good frost will kill off my few remaining plants here in Minnesota. But I'm alright with that, because in exchange, I get this: And just in time for my birthday! My 25th birthday has come and gone. I went to gamble with my friends. That was totally unprecedented for me. But I digress. The garden is done. All that is left are the marigolds and nasturtiums, blooming their little hearts out. They really are a joy to see, especially since they're covered in BEES. I would guess they are the final source of nectar in the area. It's time to start planting bulbs which will...

I thought I would take a moment and tell you all about one of my major hobbies besides gardening, especially since it will soon be dominating what I talk about here. It's still cold, and the post-summer drear has settled in. There are rumors of 80 degree weather, but I'm not sure I believe them. ANYWAY. I knit. This is what I was doing in the middle of the summer when it was too hot to go outside and play in the dirt: When finished that is the Serenity blanket. The subtitle is "I am a Leaf on the Wind" and if you don't know what that means, you need to go straight to Hulu or Netflix or more morally ambiguous sources and find the greatest Sci Fi tv show ever created, Firefly. Expect to spend the weekend watching it. Anyway- it was a significant project for me, because it was my first major expedition into the jungle of lace. It's nothing fancy to lace knitters, but knitting cables in the round, and looking up completely new stitch abbreviations. It too...

Long ago I wrote about the magical properties of beans, and compared them to the fairy tale of Jack and the Beanstalk? Remember the lessons in fairy tales? Obey your parents, don't wander off, and again and again when something looks too good to be true, it probably is. Here's a picture of the beans when the sprouts first showed up: And about the time I was posting about the wonders of beans: And within a few weeks: I attempted to give the beans a place to grow, tying string between the two poles, from the overgrown pole to the failed pole. See all the runners reaching out for somewhere to grow? They were headed towards the fence. If I find a picture of the beans in between I will put it here, but to keep it fairly short- they overgrew the second pole. The strings did not last long, the beans were too heavy, but then they started making their own way, growing around each other and reaching over to the other pole. As the overgrown pole began to pull itself towar...

I haven't been out in the garden in almost a month. That is to say, I've been physically present in the garden almost every day this month, but only as long as it took to de-beetle the roses, pick a few beans, ooh and aaah at the tomatoes and then run back inside. And I've been blaming my lack of attentions on a lot of things: mosquitoes (our state bird), "it's too hot", "it's too cold", "I don't have the time", "I went to the state fair and ate my body weight in carbs and have slipped into a diabetic coma" But they were all just excuses. The garden's gone wild with marigolds and tomato bushes, beans breaking their poles and lettuce gone to seed (deliberately). Time to get out there... Any second now... Okay I'm going.

It was late coming, and it may be short lived, but we are living in the time of the tomato. This year I decided to give heirloom tomatoes a try. Two plants, nothing crazy just two specific types I'd heard good things about- the Brandywine and the Kellogg's Breakfast. The plants quickly turned into huge tomato monsters. Unfortunately the 103 degree weather hit right as the tomatoes should have been setting fruit. Apparently when it's that hot, the tomato loves to grow vines and the flowers dry up on the vine. So it wasn't until recently that we even saw the small green beginnings of proper tomatoes. Now the nay-sayers are telling us that there's no chance of our little greenies are ever going to ripen into fruit. I am putting my faith in the long season promised by Paul Douglas and the Farmer's Almanac, and in the taste of fried green tomatoes. So far I'm pretty impressed with my Brandywine heirloom tomato. It doesn't just taste like any tomato, it...

It's been slow in the garden lately, but I think I'll post a few things at once that I've been thinking of for awhile. The first thing I've got planned to talk about are my allies in the war on sure plant destruction. All of the flowers you see here were planted as seeds this year. The lilypad looking leaves with orange and red leaves are nasturtiums. They aren't as impressive as they were last year (I'll look through my old pictures to see if I can find the small trees they grew into last year), but the nasturtiums are very reliable for color and to freak out visitors to the garden by popping a flower into your mouth. The leaves are also supposedly edible, but I've only eaten the flowers, which are peppery and really pretty on a salad.  According to my reading Nasturtiums are good for the soil, especially planted around apple trees, which I have yet to do with our apple tree, and can be mild pest deterrents. I'm also told to be cautious as they are sup...

The Japanese beetles continue to pester me, though they don't show up a dozen at a time anymore. My Love and Peace rose is blooming and looking awful for all the damage they've done. All of this tragedy just highlights how amazing my Champlain rose is. So I thought I'd tell you a little more about it. Last year I was forced to keep my gardening ambitions limited. I wrote a little bit about this in one of my first posts. But I was absolutely determined to get myself one red rose bush. So for once in the history of my whole garden, I did my homework. I started with the  Friends School Plant Sale  catalog, which contains tons of good information about each of the roses it sells. This was where I first heard of the Champlain. It was called a Canadian rose, very hardy, and the catalog also mentioned it was planted outside of Patrick's Cabaret, which would be helpful, if the catalog didn't come out while there was still snow on the ground. But I looked it up on the int...

So as soon as I said something about the heat, the heat wave broke. Not entirely, mind you, God forbid we should be comfortable, but it's not nearly as hot, and the rain storms keep everything a little cooler. So today we're laying low for the heat to dissipate so we can really whip the garden back into shape tomorrow. The weeds have grown as much as the plants, as I've mentioned, and really need to be managed. But they are not the infestation I'm worried about. What worries me are these guys: Japanese Beetles are beautiful little bastards with iridescent green and brown exoskeletons. They have voracious appetites and a serious taste for my roses. Last year I had to aggressively check for them and kill them, but I could do it with a good squish to them one by one. This year, I have been noticing more and more of them eating the buds before they can even flower. I thought things had gotten pretty bad when, yesterday, I went out and saw about a dozen of them on each of...

So we've broken a few records here and I haven't really seen my garden in days. That's because the temperature is in the nineties, and so is the humidity. Oh wait, it's only in the eighties, that's not so bad, right? The good news is that I haven't had to water, because the air is full of it and because we've had occasional thunderstorms. The thunderstorms don't relieve the heat, but at least they give me an excuse not to go out in it. From what I can tell on my short journey from the garage to the house, all of my plants seem to be loving it. Especially the Pineapple Sage (picture later) which is from Guatemala and probably thinks it's died and gone home. It's gotten very large, which is fine with me as it's a wonderful smelling plant. Fingers crossed for red flowers on that one. The broccoli is flowering, and the lettuce. These are things a city girl who shops in a grocery store never knew existed. I didn't even realize the broccoli...

Remember Jack and the Beanstalk? A young boy gets duped into buying magic beans. His mother tosses them out the window and they grow into a "stairway to heaven" that predated Zeppelin? Rings a bell? Good. I can't say I ever gave much thought as a child to why it was a beanstalk and not a cucumber vine, or a giant head of cabbage. That is because I'd never planted beans before. And then it was obvious to me that neither had Jack's mother, or she would know that all beans are magic. Planning for the garden this year involved a lot of talk about small space/high yield plants for food. We do have a spacious yard, but not much of it was cultivated, and so we ruled out melons and cucumbers and any other plant that requires an acre to really be worth it. Then mom said "well, there's always beans." And I shrugged and said, "Sure. I like beans." And I do like beans. I read up on them and found out that beans, like peanuts, are legumes.  And le...

Happy Independence day, four people from facebook who read my blog! Every time I log onto blogger and see I have one follower I get all excited only to suddenly recall that I followed myself early on when I was figuring out how everything worked. *le sigh* Moving on... The bees are back! While this might have caused me a great deal of panic two years ago, gardening has brought me to peace with my bee brethren (or presumably mostly sistren). This last cold week, leading up to the nasty heat I wrote about, I noticed a conspicuous lack of buzzing in my patch. This is a problem, as several things are blooming right now, and I know that bee activity is essential to getting fruit from my plants. The weather heated up so much that the bees decided to stick it out and didn't show up again until things cooled down over the holiday weekend. I was excited to get them back, even the big scary wasps, and comforted at the sight of my friend, I call it Bumbledore. When I started to call it th...

Here in Minnesota the weather isn't known for its heat. Around here it gets to below freezing around Halloween, just in time to ruin children's costumes, and the thermometer parks there until about Easter, when everything melts and we move into the wet and ugly season. People here are proud of the endurance in the cold. We do stupid things out in the cold like ice fishing and polar bear swims. Our summers are not record breaking by comparison (International Falls is the coldest place in the country, look it up), every Minnesotan is quick to point out that the humidity is truly frightening here. We have more than 10,000 lakes and they turn us into a lovely sauna on the hottest of days. It doesn't get better at night, it doesn't let up in the shade. You just kick up your heels and swim wherever you're going.  I have to say I'm a fairly typical Minnesotan in that the heat makes me as whiney as a contestant on The Bachelor. I hate sweating, I hate humidity, and I...

A week ago I was going to write about pest control, but the idea of reliving picking soft squishy little caterpillars off of my broccoli and then accidentally squishing them and watching  dark green goo go all over the leaves.... makes me gag. Then I was going to write about how wet and cold it's been. But today the sun came out, and so I don't want to think about that anymore either. Instead I want to talk about how this is both my favorite time in gardening, and the most excruciating. You see, this is the time when everything has properly taken off. My tomatoes are turning into bushes (yay! I didn't kill the tomato when I snapped the stem planting it!), my severely pruned chives are coming back, as mom says "the Champlain is more rose than bush", and all of the roses are covered in blossoms, and my beans are looking like they might actually produce something. So it's wonderfully exciting, to see two months(at least) of work and worry starting to pay off....

This is my garden, it says hi.   If you had told me at graduation that I'd be spending ten hours a week playing in the dirt in my backyard, I would not have believed you. We moved into this house when I was four years old. My mother did some gardening the first few years we were here, but I only have vague memories of those. There were two plots permanently marked out in our backyard when we moved in. Since the year that raccoons climbed into the backyard and ate mom's corn, there hasn't been any gardening on our property. We have perennials from those early days left on one side: hostas and peonies. And occasionally our neighbor's plants will grow under the fences and make their way into our yard. Quickly moving through the years, I did not do any yard work growing up beyond helping to bag leaves in the fall. But something got into me last year, and I started harassing my mother ( it is her house) to see if I could do some gardening. She was skeptical that anythi...

Last Monday it was 103 degrees (F) here in Minneapolis (the hottest it's been in the state since the 80's), and today we almost hit 70 in the sun. Dramatic weather is the norm for a Minnesota spring, but this week really pushed the extremes. I, personally, was glad to see the sun on Monday. My garden has been looking a little shrimpy so far this year, and the lovely sun, followed by some rain and more sun, has put everything into overdrive. Some of my plants have doubled in size, and it's starting to look like a proper garden, rather than a row of seedlings. Even better, the flowers have finally come out to play. First, the Champlain red rose: Then the deep pink Winnipeg Parks: And finally the volunteer Irises from our next door neighbor's yard: The peonies were already in bloom: And the dianthus plants (more about them later): In Minnesota, we put up with a lot to get to our beautiful springs. This last winter we had record breaking snows on top of the cold a...