Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Patience

Gardening

I spend an awful lot of time outside looking at my little garden and cheering on the plants. Despite a spell of good weather a week ago, it took longer than I expected for the peas, spinach, and lettuce to sprout. But lo, a pea shoot:

The plants from Sky Nursery are generally doing pretty well. I'm a little concerned by the yellowing of the Chinese Cabbage (background), but the broccoli (foreground) looks good.


There's still no signs of potato sprouts. I think I may have planted them too soon, or too deep, or too something. We've had a good bit of rain, and it's supposed to warm up this weekend. If they don't start sprouting, I'll do a little excavation to see if they rotted.

Excercise

I've started another long-term project...again. I've once again embarked on the couch potato to 5K plan. I tried it last year, then I tried jogging again last fall, in a less structured way. Starting didn't hurt nearly so much this time around. Either I have a tiny bit of lingering fitness from the last bout of running, or I've finally learned to jog slow enough to not kill myself.

Finished things

My friend Kristin is having a baby girl, which gave me an excuse to do some really girly knitting and sewing. I made a sweater

and a matching outfit.

And a quilt covered in ribbons.


Unfinished things
Remember how I said I was going to finish all those unfinished sweaters this year? I worked very diligently on Trent's fisherman sweater for awhile, almost finishing one sleeve. Then he tried it on, and the sleeve is too big. Not too long - too big around. So I'm going to have to rip the whole thing out and reknit it, starting with fewer stitches (I have a plan for that) and decreasing more rapidly. I could cry. Consequently, I've been knitting other things. Hopefully I'll make it back to the unfinished sweaters at some point.

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Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Progress

There’s been great progress on the garden, and I’ve got the blisters to prove it.

The potatoes went in last Thursday. I need to lay chicken wire or something over the bed because the frakking neighborhood cats are using it as a litterbox.

I eventually had topsoil delivered from Viking Topsoil. He was very efficient and more reasonable than Pacific Topsoil’s delivery. So, Mt. Dirt arrived Monday.


On Monday, I also broke up the subsoil in the base of the bed. Tuesday, I moved Mt. Dirt to the raised bed with the aid of Nancy’s wheelbarrow. Here's the before (actually, after about 4 wheelbarrow loads).

That’s when the blisters really came up. But here's the after:

As the cold, cold rain started to fall Tuesday afternoon, I planted the starts I bought at Sky nursery last week (kale, collards, broccoli, and Chinese cabbage). Then I used my frozen fingers to poke some Cascadia pea seeds in, and sowed a row of spinach seed (Tyee hybrid) and some mesclun mix. I covered the whole thing with a floating row cover, held down with some convenient rocks that I dug out of the subsoil.

It’s a good thing I used the row cover, since it’s snowing today. Oh, and here's a cheerful article about our likely spring weather.

Tuesday evening, after I took a dose of Ibuprofen and a shower, Trent and I joined up with our friends Melissa and Paul to celebrate their 2nd wedding anniversary (we didn’t invite ourselves to their anniversary – they invited us). We had a lovely dinner with them, then headed to the Triple Door to see Habib Koite. We not only found street parking within a block, we also had a front row table. It was an amazing show. We’ve seen Habib Koite 2 times before, and this was by far the best show. We didn’t get home until midnight, and I had to be up at 6 this morning, but it was worth it.

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