Tuesday, May 29, 2018


We’ll start with the pictures I couldn’t persuade the iPad to let go of yesterday.

Here’s the Good King Henry patch:




You can see why we lazy gardeners are disappointed that it tastes so bad. I don’t expect anything of the fermentation flavour-wise. It’s strictly an experiment. But I did hope for some vigorous bubbling, and it’s not happening, so far. Tomorrow is the crux, the 48-hour point.

Here’s the fruit hedge and the cat:



And here are the flowers on that hitherto unproductive apple tree:



Two more pictures. My husband’s beloved rose:



I have never been able to identify it. It blooms late in the season (no buds yet), sprays of flowers in the floribunda style, single, a good red. It’s growing on its own roots. We bought the house 54 years ago (or was it 55?) – the plant wasn’t new then. It’s looking very happy this year. Taking care of it is always the first gardening I do. 

And here’s our white lilac, a recent and unusually successful planting. There always was a lilac there – you can see parts of its corpse in the foreground. I was sorry not to see it in full bloom -- other people's lilacs are fully out. But that was better than missing it by a week.



Knitting

I scarcely did a stitch while we were away, and at the moment, in fact, I am slightly less far on than I was when we left.

I have embarked on the second broad Fair Isle stripe. I have six colours to play with, plus red for the centre, and I chose badly. The colours for the first four rows didn’t have enough contrast. I thought that maybe when we got on to the next pair, the contrast between them would lead the viewer’s eye to discern the overall pattern. But I reached that point last night, and it didn’t work. A nun at the school in which I used to teach taught me the useful maxim, “When in doubt, take it out.”

So I did. I have picked up the stitches successfully, and established the pattern anew, with a better pair of colours. Some stitches were sitting wrongly on the needle. Some had been split in the picking-up. While attending to those problems, I occasionally got the pattern wrong. So that first round was slow. But I’m now on track.

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:22 PM

    Have you tried eating your Good King Henry before it flowers? Many plants turn bitter or at least unpleasant once they begin to flower - lettuce, cilantro, dill. Could that be part of the problem?

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    Replies
    1. Anonymous10:22 PM

      Oops, that was me, Beverly in NJ.

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  2. Matthew3:54 AM

    And the cats... now that you've returned with them, did they both come to sleep or fall into their old city ways?

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  3. So much fun to see your beloved garden! A knitting friend's maxim that works for me is "If you look at it three times still thinking there's a problem, take it out." Working out the contrast in Fair Isle, especially with those heathered yarns, can be tricky.

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  4. =Tamar2:38 PM

    Somewhere I read that you can check colors for contrast by taking a black-and-white Xerox or printer scan of them (or a color scan and then use a program to make it greyscale). If they contrast in greyscale, they'll contrast as colors.

    Just personal taste, but I find that too strong a contrast can be an irritant, too; I once had a single round of just the wrong color in a hat. (I replaced it by using a yarn needle to thread a better color along its pathway through other stitches and then pulling the old strand out, and felt very smug.)

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