I am beginning to feel somewhat recovered, and should perhaps touch on actual knitting.

I did pretty well with the final pink Araucania sleeve while we were away. I had only just cast it on, the time before.

Here, I finished a second swatch of the meandering Celtic pattern last night, liked it better knit with a larger needle, made some calculations – I do hate thinking – and cast on the sweater. I eliminated various patterns from my original draft, but even so, it looks large. (I’m aiming, roughly, at a 30” child-sized circumference.) I considered starting again, and decided against it. The worst case scenario is having to order more yarn. If I press on briskly as intended, there may not even be a dye-lot problem.

And as for ordering yarn, I emailed Loop about what seemed to me continuing gaps in their madeleinetosh sock yarn page. I didn’t entirely understand their reply, which indicated that they hadn’t entirely understood my email and also said something about July. I decided to give up, concentrate on the colour-ways which (a) are illustrated and (b) offer enough skeins for my purposes, and just order. I’ve gone for “Cosmos”.

Vegetable-growing

I am very interested in Ruth Stout’s book, “Gardening Without Work”. The idea can be expressed in a sentence – cover everything with a thick layer of organic mulch. But the book is also delightful, and thought-provoking.

I don’t think my husband is likely to let me order in a load of spoiled hay. But I think I can muster enough compost & manure & grass-cuttings & bracken & what-not to try it on parts of the garden anyway. Stout says, start NOW. I am at the one moment of the year when I can’t do that, because the vegetable seedlings are so tiny. I can at least start throwing stuff at the potatoes, instead of earthing them up, and intend to do so.

She mentions two problems, lime and nitrogen.

I don’t understand lime AT ALL. If what I say below is right, it is only because I have learned it by rote.

We have acid soil, that means low-lime, that means rhododendrons and blueberries are happy and most vegetables not. Lime seems to be a sort of insulin for soil – not itself a nutrient, but necessary in most cases for plants to make full use of what is there. Stout seems to hope that her system keeps things right, without the need for added lime.

I had thought the opposite. I thought adding manure & compost makes soil more acid, even if it wasn’t already. That is, that lime and manure complement and in a sense oppose each other. There is after all that old farmer’s saying, “Lime and lime without manure/ something something something sure”.

And someone told her that her system was short on nitrogen, so she scatters something I have never heard of on top of the hay in the fall. I’m not too worried about that one. Peas and beans fix nitrogen in the soil, to begin with. And I intend to go on, whatever happens, sprinkling blood, hoof and bone meal along the soil when I am about to put seeds in.