Annie, welcome. I hope you’ll stay. The proportion of vegetables to knitting here is perhaps uncharacteristically high, this time of year. I’m rarely as interesting on knitting as you are, however.

[While we’re here, and prompted by Annie’s remarks about famine in Wales, I’d like to say that I’ll be glad when the Queen is safely home this afternoon. I’m glad her visit to Ireland has been a success. It felt kind of phoney, to me. The newspapers we read have touched on grievances on both sides – you’d think the English had constructed phytophthora infestans in their laboratories – but have totally failed to mention the assassination of the British ambassador to Dublin in 1976. I doubt if the Queen has forgotten. Even the most absurd of rogue states, world-wide, tend to hold back from assassinating ambassadors.]

Knitting

I finished ribbing the Aran sweater yesterday, and have got the patterns set – the scary bit. I thought maybe yesterday that I’d practice EZ’s “sheepfold” pattern before I started – but it turned out to be circular-needles-only, with action on every round. It’s going very well, fortunately.

And that settles the steek question – I’ll have to continue in the round up to the neck.

I surprised myself yesterday by finishing the first ball of yarn. I’ve got seven, meant to be more than enough. The first was diminished by two large swatches, of course. The thing to do is to finish the next ball, take the thing off the needles and measure the circumference carefully, calculate from that what the appropriate total length will be, and from that, with a bit of on-the-safe-side guessing, how much yarn I’ll need.

There should be enough for a pic in a day or two. I am particularly looking forward to seeing a second knit-through of the meandering Celtic pattern stacked on top of the first – but that won’t happen for a while.

That happy morning I spent in Alice Starmore’s class last summer was devoted to just this sort of thing – her unvention of cable patterns that spring up in the middle of anywhere by virtue of major increases in a single stitch. I think she got to it before Lavold. I looked it up, last year.

Vegetable-growing

Thank you for the RHS link, Isabella. I have read with interest and perhaps some enlightenment, clicking on links.

I was most interested to read in Stout ["Gardening Without Work" -- see yesterday] that July is the only month when she was confident of not having frost – snap, sister! She gardened in CT, with which I am at least somewhat acquainted as my sister lives there. The difference (between CT and Strathardle) is that Stout grew all sorts of things which would be impossible for me, sweet corn and squashes, in those precious weeks between the last June frost and the first late-August one.

That steamy American heat being the deciding factor.