The O-Zone

We got a little bit of snow in December, which promptly melted. Then it snowed again. Then it melted again. Since the weather has been a little boring we’ve been keeping up with that theme and not doing much.

The trees are so beautiful with their frosting of snowflakes. Because the temperature was just barely below freezing, it felt like spring more than a week before the Winter Solstice. It didn’t last as the temperatures went near 40F and everything melted again. It’s been a very easy winter for the deer and other animals. Food has been much easier to come by.

The buds on the lilac are already much bigger than previous years. I hope they have a sense of humor as the temperatures predicted in a few days are -6F. We hope our strawberry plants also have a sense of humor! They will have no protective blanket of snow.

Then I had fun with knitting.

So I got that out of my system for the moment. And I ran out of beads and haven’t gone shopping. So on to a new larger project.

It’s amazing how huge the size 1 US needles feel after all the bead knitted purses which were made using size 0000 US steel needles.

It’s pretty amazing! We’ve never seen the snow this low around here. The mountains around us are also extremely low on snow pack, which means this next summer could be “interesting” in terms of forest fires unless a miracle happens.

Managed to not knit something for several days.

Takes longer to string all the little beads onto the perl cotton thread than it does to knit this pattern. Just a fun little project.

Yesterday afternoon I blocked my knitting project.

Then I had to do more waiting until this morning when it was completely dry to remove all the pins and blocking yarns.

Light as a feather. Very pleased with this project and loved knitting the pattern. Yay!

It’s time to make one of our most favorite bread recipes. It’s amazing what happens when I’m not being obsessed with knitting all day long.

I have fiddled with this recipe off and on for years because I can’t seem to resist doing that, and it’s gluten free. This is the stickiest dough and it gets on everything. The benefit though, of being gluten free, is that I don’t have to let it rise first. Make the cheese filling first, divide it into fourths and set it aside. Make the dough and divide it into four parts and then divide each quarter into four little balls of dough and set all the dough aside covered with more plastic wrap to keep it from drying out. Then I can make sixteen rolls.

I use a lot of plastic wrap making these because it is so incredibly sticky. One benefit of this is that the rolling pin stays clean. Washing my hands between every four rolls keeps my cup of tea clean as well.

Halfway done. Yay! Time to wash hands yet again and then drink some tea.

Now the hard part. Waiting 25 minutes.

The good news is one can eat the evidence.

As if!!

Oro is waiting almost patiently for his little piece of cheese cushion. I better get with the program.

We used to make our own yogurt, years ago. Somehow we got out of the habit.

Knitting is finished and off the needles; all yarn ends have been woven in where they belong. All that’s left now is blocking which is a whole other project. Maybe tomorrow I’ll tackle that.

This was the most complicated pattern I’ve ever made but in actuality one of the easiest to follow on the chart because it was so complicated. Except for the outside border part which put me to sleep.

It should look spectacular once it’s all blocked.

This was our beet harvest, for the most part. We didn’t plant very much this time around. And we also ate some fresh in mid summer, roasted in the oven. Very delicious! Now the jars have to sit for a couple of months to become well and truly pickled. We can start eating them in January which will be here before we know it.

We can’t really tell what it is that they are harvesting but they have been super busy the last couple of weeks. Mishkin has a fit when he sees them on the porch and he chirps at them. They are unimpressed.

We hadn’t been seeing them by the house until late this summer, probably because the last people here had dogs. It could be bad news next year for our red currants as chipmunks totally adore those and will harvest them incredibly quick. We know they are just fancy mice, but we love these little guys and it’s much fun seeing them so close. They have already gotten tame as far as seeing us outside. At first they would run and hide and now they just take a quick look to see what we’re up to, and then resume their important work of storing seeds for the coming winter.

Winter storm predicted for today which is just absurd for October. Then we saw a pickup truck drive past our place, from up the road, all covered with snow. Shortly thereafter this happened.

See?

Didn’t stick down here. Right up the hill from us the trees are white and what we can see of the mountains is also snowy. Ye gads.

Mish has the right idea.

Remember the old story about the princess and the pea? Well, is he the princess or the pea? I know which one I’m voting for.

Just twenty-four left to knit, and then the top border which is the equivalent of another 39 rows, stitch count-wise.

We picked a bunch of things from the garden today.

We already roasted some earlier, so these are the remaining beets and I’ll make pickled beets out of them this week. A couple of the beets are huge!

The slender carrots are called sugar snax and they are very sweet. I think I’ll slice them up and steam them and then freeze them in small batches to be added to tofu scrambles. The larger carrots are nantes and they are delicious roasted with potatoes.

I’m making a cake and we can eat these for dessert this evening with cake and whipped cream. Dessert? I think it will just be dinner instead.

That is all the harvesting. There were some neat colors in the garden.

If the amount of fronds we have are any indication, next spring we should have more asparagus than we know what to do with.

Our two blueberry plants are still so tiny. It may be quite a few years before we see much of any production from them.

These plants did really well this year for what is basically the first year they actually grew. Next year we should be able to freeze some and make jam. I love this color on their leaves and it’s so interesting how dark purple their canes are.

This gooseberry plant has fall colors which look like the ripe fruit does.

Probably going to be a couple of years before we get any fruit from the peach tree, but it’s so amazing that the fall colors of the leaves is a peach color.

Somebody or something tried to climb the fence! And they had to be pretty strong to have bent the top of the wire this much. We are assuming a bear. The fencing near the ground also has some bending so they were pretty heavy, which lead us to think this was a black bear. They didn’t actually get into the garden. If the corn had grown properly I bet they would have tried harder. Probably black bears are any fonder of zuchinni than we are!

So that’s the end of gardening for the year. Next year will be better.

The end is starting to be in sight.

I’ve finished the center panel and now working on the inner border that surrounds the center panel.

Mishkin is amazed, apparently.