horticulture

Well last night was the first night it has hailed so far this year. Yesterday was so hot (please humor me if you live somewhere that gets really hot, I have lived in the tropics, I know of what I speak), and the thunder started rumbling in the distance at about 10:00pm, and as we lay in bed the hail started, and I feared for my flax.

I jumped out of bed this morning and ran out to check on it:

See it is verdant and not in least trampled to the ground. Jon tells me that if it were trampled to the ground it would make me a real Saskatchewanian — because I would have lost a crop to hail. The summer is new: it may happen yet.

The cauliflower is also okay:

Taking pictures of cauliflower makes me think of Kaffe Fassett — he was the first designer who got me really excited about knitting, though I started with needlepoint. I think my cauliflower would be different from Kaffe’s (see Glorious Needlepoint): I think I would put some weeds in mine and holes where the bugs have eaten their share. I made his pear panel, and now it occurs to me that all these years later I still haven’t made in into a cushion or anything.

I like having a blog because it makes me complete things — under your watchful eyes I feel I need to produce something worth telling about. The knitting is running apace, but I am mired in projects I can’t write about. One think I will tell you is that I have a design coming out in Knitting in the Sun by Kristi Porter, which will be published next spring barring a flood or something. I sent the pattern on Sunday, and I am almost finished my sample. I am also very excited to be published in the same book as Stefanie Japel (see here). It makes me feel very accomplished and important.

I love early summer, I think it must be my favourite season — though I suppose that really one should still consider this late spring. I walk to and from work and it is so beautiful that I walk along in a bit of a daze staring up at the trees:

Saskatoon has been very lucky so far in that dutch elm disease hasn’t struck here yet, so all the streets in the old parts of town are lined with elms, but at any time they could all be gone.

On a smaller scale my flax is up and multi-leaved, which apparently makes it more frost tolerant — this is surely ironic as when it is two leaved there is a much greater likelihood of frost. Look at how pretty it is:

I think I may have got a little too excited when I scattered the seed. See here:

And here:

Any thoughts on what I should do? I guess I could try to thin it, but there is no where to walk without stepping on flax — I guess rows have a purpose after all, who knew?

I just followed the method my father-in-law told me from when he grew up on the farm: you scatter the seed with your hand. I may just leave it, maybe spindly plants give softer fibre or something.

The flax has sprouted:

Or else I have very well behaved and uniformly sized weeds, but I figure the weeds look more like this:

I am a little worried I have cleared away some perfectly verdant vegetation, made the backyard look like the surface of the moon and planted something that won’t grow.

I started digging the garden today in my quest for my own home grown flax:

I am quite tired now. I have spent practically my entire adult life living in apartments and am wimpy about digging. I figure that if I dig about this much every day left this week, I will be ready to plant on the weekend.

It is not as hard as I anticipated. I grew up on glacial till, and there are more rocks in that dirt than you can shake a stick at. It might have given me a distorted view of how hard gardening is.

I plan on going to my local yarn store and looking at spinning wheels etc. on the weekend. It’s all coming together.

And now for a horse of a different colour . . .

I have never managed to grow orchids very well before. They usually died and certainly never bloomed, but now my orchid has bloomed, not the flowers that come on it from the store, but real live blooms that grew in my own house.