The O-Zone

We finally finished the painting and most of the woodwork in the house; the only room we haven’t done anything with yet is our bedroom. That will be next but this week we get to play instead of work.

It was so nice to take down the stupid shelving the former owners had scattered around the walls, above windows for the most part, which served no useful purpose other than collecting dust and annoying my sense of style. We had tons of holes in the walls to fix as the shelving was in hollow wall anchors instead of being screwed into studs; they couldn’t take any weight on the shelves themselves without detaching from the walls and dumping everything on the floor.

Then Dan took down the paddle fan in the living room and replaced it with a much brighter light which will be perfect for knitting. Both those changes make the ceilings seem higher and the rooms feel more spacious.

I repainted the wood boards surrounding the rock where our pellet stove sits. I really like that color better than white; that looked like they primed it and forgot to paint it – more of their industrial loft concept in decor.

Most of the woodwork is done, the hardest part anyway which was around all the doors. We had to stop doing that because we ran out of varnished boards. I still have ten of them left to varnish and I’ll take care of that this week.

Even with lights out, the rooms feel lighter.

So yay! Finished with the bulk of renovations. Just one room to go and we can rest on our laurels.

Took some knitting pictures with my phone and found some summer pictures that we’d forgotten about.

Thanks to all the rain we had in the spring and summer, we have the tallest grass and weeds we’ve seen in the last couple of years we’ve been here. Same holds true for this entire area. All the grazing animals have it easy, and so do the grasshoppers! There must be literally millions of those things around here right now much to the dismay of some of our garden plants. The turkeys are delighted by the bounty of grasshoppers.

Now the grass is all dry and brown/yellow. A friend suggested a herd of Guinea Pigs for mowing purposes since Dan won’t let me have sheep or cashmere goats (too many predators right down the hill along the creek). I have to say the idea of a herd of piggies makes me laugh every time I think of it.

Speaking of piggies, this morning we had at least 20 wild turkeys in the yard, all trying to sort out their pecking order for the coming fall. Some were continuing to snack on grasshoppers while the rest were swirling around and chasing each other, carrying on cranky. It was quite fun to watch.

Anyway back to summer.

The green was almost iridescent, it was so bright. There was a lot of snowfall last winter and lots of rain, and despite all that the creek didn’t flood. Kind of surprising, really. Such a peaceful place to rest and relax, sitting by the creek.

On to the knitting project which has been taking all my spare time for the last couple of months.

The yarn is so thin that the overhead lights in the kitchen reflect off the countertop and through the shawl. The first step is to thread a nylon yarn (not stretchy and slick so it won’t hang up on the shawl itself) through the points on the edges of the border. It is a somewhat tedious process trying to get the blocking yarn the right length on each side of the shawl. Then it’s time to get it wet.

Soaking the shawl for about an hour gets the yarn good and saturated with water.

While it was soaking we retrieved the blue solid foam panels I needed for blocking from the storage shed. So the first step for this process was actually killing the wasp nest they had built right above the storage shed door. Getting the panels out was a little exciting because a lot of wasps, which weren’t killed at the nest in the morning, were still inside the storage shed. We might be waiting for freezing weather before we try to do anything else in that shed!

Success, wasps mostly dead and foam boards are in the house. We laid them out on the counter top and covered them with a flannel sheet. Then it was time to block the shawl. I had to spray it with water frequently while I was blocking it, again because the yarn is so thin it dries very quickly.

Poor Mishkin kept running for cover. The “Cat Attitude Readjustment Tool,” CART for short, was going off unexpectedly and even though he wasn’t doing anything mischievous at the time it always pays to be proactive about avoiding drops of water. Oro just thought the entire thing was very exciting.

The idea behind blocking is to stretch the wet yarn as far as possible in all directions. The project retains that shape once it is all dry. Now it was just waiting until everything dried less than 24 hours later.

This morning it was all dry and I could remove all the t-pins and blocking yarn.

I had to feed the cat first, of course, before I worked on my project. Must always get the priorities right or there would be trouble.

Feels really weird not to be knitting something. I’m not sure how long I can let that go on. But we have other things to do. Today we’re removing all the shelves which are above the window (like the one above my head for example) and then patching holes in the sheet-rock. Painting the interior is in our immediate future.

Summer is coming to an end and the ‘ber’ months are almost here. Fall is the best time of year! We have seen the last heat wave over 100+ temperatures for the year (hopefully).

The more I work on this project the more I love it. This was earlier in the month. I’ve made much more progress.

And in the middle of the blankie which is under the shawl is a cat who was hiding from a contractor fixing the new roof we had done last fall. It was leaking due to faulty installation and now it should be all ok. Yay!

Plus this new contractor may be able to fit in enclosing part of the back deck to make a new room. And at the same time he’d create a sidewalk off the front porch. He is checking his schedule and will get back to us. We’ll see. That would be cool if it happens this fall. I guess we have recovered from the trauma of contractors underfoot all last year! It would give us a place for a pantry cabinet, and a chest freezer, and a work bench, plus Oro’s cage so when he decides to go mental and yell a lot we can simply close the door and cut the sound down to a dull roar. We thought about putting a chest freezer on the back deck but I kept imaging our black bear friend who likes to visit in the middle of the night enjoying that too much. A room would be better.

September (next week!!) we’re going to start painting the interior of the house and replacing the wood trim around the floor and doorways, but that’s just us and no contractors inside the house. That’s much easier to deal with.

We went out to the garden in the morning and picked peppers, an onion and some swiss chard leaves for breakfast. It’s like shopping.

Then I cooked the fresh vegetables and added some finely chopped extra firm tofu and melted Chao cheese on top of the mixture and made breakfast. It’s amazing how much better really fresh vegetables taste.

The garden is starting to produce stuff and soon it will get ahead of us.

The potato plants got hit hard by grasshoppers so a lot of the potatoes are pretty small. But there are enough of them for many meals. They are drying off now and tomorrow I’ll brush them off and clean them up and put them in the fridge.

We picked a few carrots to see what they tasted like and they are really delicious! I’ll be roasting some, along with some potatoes, in the immediate future.

I’ll put most of this into a lasagna. There are so many peppers on the plants, it’s really surprising. Our greenhouse never gave us this amount of production, and we think it’s because it got too hot. There are some tomatoes which are starting to turn color and once that happens we will have so many tomatoes to deal with.

I made this last night, so really first we need to eat that before I get carried away with a bunch more cooking. We had some for breakfast this morning. It’s totally delicious.

There’s not much going on around here except watering the garden and lawn (such as it is), pulling weeds, harvesting things as they get ripe, and knitting as much as my shoulder will allow.

Unfortunately the yellow jackets also love the bird bath and in the afternoon they keep everybody out of it. We are going to pick up some yellow jacket traps to set up out there and see if we can knock the numbers down. They make walking around near that part of the yard a bit adventurous.

Speaking of birds, the hummingbirds are gathering and getting ready to migrate south. Last night we had around a dozen birds at both our hummingbird feeders who were having a riot. Some were tanking up and others were having aerial dog fights around the feeders and the house. It was so much fun! A lot of the wild flowers are done doing their thing so our feeders are very popular.

Now I just have to do what I already knitted again as a mirror image. The fabric doesn’t seem to weigh anything at all. I’m very excited to see how it looks all blocked. But at the rate I can knit it’s going to take much longer than I had hoped. And it will take even longer if Mish gets his little paws on it.

So this morning Dan looked to see what harvesting he could do on one of the yellow potato plants. They would have done better if we’d hilled the plants; we’ll know for next year. We might also want to use a mesh plant cover of some sort to keep the grasshoppers off the plants.

This year was all about seeing how the soil is, what we need to do to improve it and what plant varieties like to grow.

The zucchini is doing great. The butternut squash has yet to bloom so we’re not going to get anything off those plants. Both melon plants have a blossom but nothing has set so doubtful we’ll see any melons. Cucumber plants are blooming and there’s one baby cucumber growing.

The tomatoes and peppers are doing really well though nothing is ripe enough to pick. And we’re enjoying lettuce.

Some plants just obviously need to be started earlier as seeds and then set out in the garden as plants. Next year. 🙂

Lots of fun things for us to see recently.

Somehow there’s nothing funnier than cows which are outside of our gate and fences. The next-door cattle rancher has drastically reduced the number of cattle they have and they do try to keep them home but they are sneaky guys and as soon as they see the rancher and his kids coming on their four-wheelers they all scatter into the trees and pretend they are squirrels. We find this continuing rodeo very funny because they cannot get into our yard as of yet.

So that’s a very fun thing to see.

Progress is slow because I hurt my shoulder somehow and knitting more than a couple of rows a day really hurts. So this may be a year long project. Hopefully a chiropractor I’m going to see in a couple of weeks is useful.

Still fun to see some progress.

They were delicious. We have more to be picked today and I will put them raw into a pasta salad. I have lettuce from the garden to add to the salad, but so far nothing else is big enough.

So fun to see this for breakfast. I think I’ll do that again tomorrow morning, actually.

Finally, we have finished building the garden. All the infrastructure is in place except for drip irrigation which we are thinking about but haven’t gone so far as figuring out how to install it. The bark mulch took forever to put down but it is done and it helps enormously to limit the amount of weeds. We still have weeds to contend with but only 1% of what used to be there instead of basically solid weeds. Yay!

This side of the garden has two rows of raspberry plants which are finally starting to grow a bit but not really tall enough to see them unless you know what you’re looking for. A few of them have even set fruit and Dan ate a raspberry yesterday. Progress! The peach tree is taller than I am, and the apricot tree is also putting on some new growth. Herbs are going well in their little bed between the trees.

This is looking due west. The new growth on the peach tree closest to me when I took the picture is the lighter colored leaves. It’s grown almost two feet so far.

It is so fun watching these plants grow. Right now it looks kind of funny to see little plants spaced so far apart but we tried to make sure they have enough room to grow to full size without crowding each other. Hopefully we left enough room.

These are pictures of the first row of raised beds.

We’ve been able to eat a few strawberries but nothing like what we are anticipating in a couple of years. They taste delicious and the Robins love them a bit too much; we’ll have to use floating row covers next year.

See the bird house on the garden fence? We had a pair of Tree Swallows raise two batches of babies in it. Yay! Next year we’ll put up some more nest boxes in a couple of other places because there’s nothing so cool as baby birds.

We planted two varieties – a russet which is a late harvest variety, and a yellow potato which is a mid-season harvest.

We need to pick some more peas and I can thin the onions and use them in various ways. When they are completely grown I’ll chop them finely and freeze them for instant additions to anything I want to cook over the winter.

The middle row has these things planted.

The lettuce varieties are sweet and tender at this point. I’ll plant some more seeds in a couple of weeks for late season harvesting. The swiss chard needs to be thinned so it will grow better.

In between the carrots and beets is room for second planting of lettuce

I’ll freeze and pickle beans that we don’t eat fresh. The plants have a ton of blossoms and are already growing tiny thin beans.

We’ll definitely have an abundance of zucchini; there are lots of blossoms on the plant and some are already starting to grow.

That’s all the second row.

The last row of raised beds has these plants.

There are a couple of tiny cucumbers starting to grow. When these plants get big they get carried away. Can’t wait!

There are a few baby tomatoes growing and it once they start producing we’ll have luscious tomatoes to eat the rest of the summer and fall. I’ll make some tomato sauce and can it with the roma tomatoes once they get going.

There are some small jalapeno peppers growing, and a couple of anaheim have also set fruit. The bell pepper plants are proving to be disappointing so far.

Next year we will have our own plants we start from seeds and that will work a lot better.

So lots of fun things to look at now in the garden, and weeds are under control. They aren’t gone but it’s feasible to keep them under control at this point.

We aren’t finished with creating the garden, but we are definitely getting closer. We planted two blueberry plants, and one more Josta Berry, plus a rhubarb. Definitely worried about the rhubarb as both leaves it had when we transplanted it are now dead and I am not sure there is a new leaf somewhere just waiting to pop up and surprise us. Can’t worry about that one right now as we have bigger fish to fry.

First we had to build two new small raised beds for our herb gardens. We put both of them in between the fruit trees. But before we could do that we needed to lay down the ground cloth. That proved to be difficult to walk on without bark mulch. It was incredibly easy to trip on the unsecured ground cloth.

We now have our process much better defined. Use the string trimmer to shorten all the weeds and grass. Then we lay ground cloth, and last step is to add bark mulch to keep the ground cloth in place. Then repeat that process many more times to completely cover the garden. It took almost three hours of steady work by Dan to cover the first section of the garden between the corner and the first fence post with a layer of bark mulch. He totes bags and lifts barges in his spare time.

I used the string trimmer a couple of days ago and I’m still seriously limping around. My knees did not appreciate how heavy that thing is. Evidently I’m not actually still in my early 20’s. Who knew??? So alas, I can’t help with that part of the process again. Dan will get to do that part, too.

It makes the trees much easier to see when they aren’t against a background of a bazillion weeds and wild grasses. And the herb raised bed looks spiffy! It has Lemon Thyme, Chives and Italian Parsley. I also planted some Oregano seeds. Those seeds are so tiny!

The apple tree has four different varieties of apples on one root stock and one of the branches is an over-achiever with blossoms!

We won’t get any fruit from these because they need a pollinator and we don’t have one. None of the other branches have any blossoms. So we just merely get to admire these.

This herb bed has Rosemary and Sage, and I planted Basil seeds.

See how many weeds, etc.? It’s pretty thick! Each section of the garden between two fence posts takes three rows of ground cloth and one entire pallet of bark mulch. We now have some concept of how much bark mulch we have to order next. But the transformation is really dramatic and so we will continue on.

I put this little batch of flowers next to the fence, between the fruit trees and the raspberry canes.

It has radishes, four rows of lettuce, two rows of spinach and two rows of rainbow chard. The lettuce and radishes have real leaves and are growing really well. The lettuce is also starting to produce real leaves but the plants are still tiny. The chard just has baby leaves so I haven’t been able to thin them yet.

The one plant I’m really really wanting to mature quickly is the chard!

We planted two kinds of potatoes; the yellow potato is an early season, and the russet potatoes are a late season.

Waiting for the peas to start blooming and that will happen within the next couple of weeks. And then it seems like it will go quickly and we’ll have fresh green peas!

It will be quite a while before we have any peppers to harvest. These plants all seems to take the transplanting well.

Mostly we planted roma tomatoes so I can make tomato sauce. We also have a couple of eating tomato plants.

All in all the garden is just so much fun, even if it is a whole bunch of work getting it set up.

Flowers are blooming next to the house. I hope the burglar, err bearglar, enjoyed sniffing them!

We discovered we had a visitor last night, one who wreaked havoc on our front and back decks. Mainly he or she was looking for something to eat because no doubt some moron people have taught them to expect food next to a house.

Fortunately it didn’t taste good so the damage as of now is limited to these two places. The couch has been sitting on the deck waiting for our friend to come collect it. Timing is obviously everything because if he had been here on a more timely basis it wouldn’t have this damage. It’s not totally irreparable but won’t look anywhere near as nice now once the rips are repaired.

Grrrrrrrr. Isn’t that what you’d say to a bearglar who had just bearglarized your house? We will call the Fish & Game people tomorrow when they are back in the office and see if they can bring a live trap to capture this particular bear. We saw the F&G people hauling one of the culvert traps up the road a couple of weeks ago and we kind of suspect this might be the same guy causing trouble.

The last time we asked for a live culvert trap was in Montana when we had a black bear breaking into our garden. Imagine our surprise when we captured a large male Grizzly bear instead! I will never forget the sound that trapped bear made when I walked up to the culvert trap, or his extremely long claws he stuck out through the wire mesh. That won’t happen this time.

Finally got through the tedious border pattern repeats, 37 times at 340 stitches per pattern repeat. The good news is I did memorize the pattern!

Next I had to pick up all the stitches on the inside straight edge of the border. There are 296 stitches to be picked up.

The first row transfers all 296 stitches on the bottom border to my size 2.25mm (US 2) needles, and while I was knitting I also added an additional 7 stitches to the shawl body to bring the body of the shawl up to the 303 stitches I need for the pattern I created on my excel spreadsheet on the computer.

I added a stitch marker before the first 17 stitches in the first section next to the border on the odd row side of the pattern (which becomes the right side of the fabric I’m creating), then a bunch stitch markers every 30 stitches for the middle of the shawl, and finally the last 16 stitches in the last section.

The even rows for the pattern are considered the back or “wrong” side of the fabric. To differentiate between the two sides of the fabric I used a blue stitch marker on the right side before the first 17 stitches. All of this set up will make sure I’m working on the right side of the pattern from my spreadsheet.

So now it’s just a lot of knitting, 624 rows plus a border at each end of the fabric, and a row of border stitches on each row I’m knitting. There are 39 border pattern repeats on each edge of the body, and each corner has it’s own border pattern repeat. All together it’s around 200,000 stitches. This is going to take at least several months. I’ll show pictures when I finish each 100 rows so I’m not boring people to death.

We looked at the garden today and there are some new seeds up which are teeny tiny and hard to tell which is a weed and which might be a spinach or a beet or a Swiss Chard. If the weather would warm up some, things would definitely put on some growth. There are even some peas peeking up!

Our first seeds are up! Nobody else has poked their heads above ground but we are cautiously optimistic. The ground is really dry which means not much organic matter in the top soil, so we’ll have to keep it damp.

The new couch is a success as far as our cat is concerned.

Well it keeps on snowing around here. It doesn’t stick to anything down low but let’s just say we’re really glad not to have to drive over the pass today! The mountains we can see to the east were very white this morning.

The garden doesn’t care about snow at this point!

As soon as we planted the two beds of strawberries winter came back with over a week of low temperatures between 23F and 30F and all their baby leaves they had when we planted them died off. But they survived! Most of the plants are putting on new leaves and looking quite perky. Even if some of the plants didn’t make it, it won’t matter as runners from the plants that did will fill in the raised bed.

This is such a tiny cherry tree, around two feet tall. It will be a good three years before we see any pie cherries from it. It will be worth the wait. There’s really nothing better than a cherry pie with freshly picked fruit.

This baby plant has lots of leaves and is starting to grow some formidable thorns. It’s a total adventure picking gooseberries and black raspberries. Dan will need to get some new welding gloves made with really thick leather and even then the thorns go right through the gloves unless you’re being really careful.

Both the red currant plants are doing great, lots of leaves which will become branches. Most likely next year we’ll have at least some red currants to play with and make into jelly.

So far none of the seeds I planted have germinated, though Dan thinks maybe some radishes are starting to come up. Personally I think it’s just weeds, but another few days will tell. Pretty soon this will be all full of green things.

We planted thirteen seed potatoes, 8 rows of green peas, a bunch of onions, two rows of radishes, four rows of salad greens, two rows of spinach, two rows of Swiss Chard, four rows of beets, and four rows of carrots. All of these seeds don’t mind cold weather and some actually prefer it. The warm weather, aka wimpy, seeds will all wait until the end of May.

At least this raised bed has some green things in it, a benefit of onion sets!

Our new project in the garden is to pick up all the rocks and lay out the ground cloth and then cover it all with bark mulch. It won’t be this next week as very cold wet weather is projected until next weekend.

The dark gray rain clouds behind the tree show what it is in store for us the rest of today. I took advantage of the break in the weather to take all these pictures.

The lilac bush is also getting ready to bloom and it does perfume the yard.

It was either buy a new couch or build a new room onto the house, and this was way more convenient and quicker. We thought Mishkin would really object to this change in his world, done once again without his permission, but he doesn’t mind it at all though he refused to hop onto it until both of us were sitting and then he jumped up and lay down between us and stretched out his full length to claim as much of the couch as he could cover.

Finally found a gluten free pie crust recipe that worked really well, even if the dough was extremely fragile. I think if I’d put it back into the fridge for an hour before rolling it out it might have been easier to work with. But regardless it was the right texture and taste. Yay!

For some reason I don’t seem to be able to memorize this border pattern yet. I am hoping I can keep it in my head by the time I start the body of the shawl. Because I haven’t memorized it yet progress is very slow and feels very tedious.

The hummingbirds really appreciated the feeder being under cover this morning when it was raining hard. They are so cute!!

We have both a pair of Mountain Bluebirds and Tree Swallows who are interested in the nest box we put on the outside of the garden fence. As of now we don’t know who is going to successfully claim that particular nest box.