May

Here we are back in Edinburgh again. For the moment, sans illustration, as the camera battery was warning of flatness as I took the farewell pictures yesterday. I'll charge it and post them soon.

Starting with the usual garden one. Still not much to see, except rhubarb. But the eight water bottles which currently protect the newly-planted courgette (zucchini) seeds should be visible, and the runner bean teepee. I am sure it was runner bean seeds that Jack swapped the cow for. They are big and shiny and beautiful and under ideal conditions grow with something like fairy-tale speed.

The garden is planted. The first week we were there, the weather was as lovely as May can be. Pretty amazing. It passed for me in a sort of frenzy of anxiety -- would I get everything done before either the weather or my strength gave out? I did, and the rain came this week just as I was beginning to get more than a bit worried about dustiness. In the last 24 hours before we left, three different things appeared above ground: Indian mustard and mizuma among the saladings, and some cabbage elsewhere. And the potatoes planted in April are showing. The seedlings are too miniscule for photography, but I have tried to represent a potato. I had thought that rocket (arugula) would be the first to show, but there was no sign of it yesterday morning.

The pleasure in vegetable-growing, as in knitting, is largely but not entirely in the process. One of the happiest by-products of the former, for me, is the view. The grounds around our house look loved, I think, and to a degree, tended, but by no means manicured. I love the sense of order in the vegetable patch, those nearly-straight green rows, those few square yards of wilderness tamed.

The 2005 weeds haven't really hit their stride yet -- I was still able to make headway against them. This happy state fosters every year the illusion that this year I will tweak out every weed as it appears, so that in 2006 it will require no effort at all to get the ground ready for seeds. Not so, I am afraid.

All that, and the glorious light, and, best of all, no midges yet. The rest of the year is just there to lead up to and away from May.

I got quite a bit of knitting done on Rachel's Koigu sweater -- picture tomorrow, I hope -- due to coming in paralyzed with exhaustion and capable of nothing else for half an hour. Koigu is heaven on the fingers. The Clapotis was a bit hard to resume yesterday -- the 50% silk in the beautiful yarn seems very harsh and unyielding by comparison.

Amongst the knee-high pile of mail behind the door was a card from the Post Office about a package they couldn't deliver. That'll be my Merging Colors yarn, I hope. I'll go collect it today.