Now Norma Knits

It Was A Social Media Vacation

I took a couple days off and withdrew from the world, from social media, even from Mr. Jefferies. He was not amused. He was pretty damn glad when I got home, I'll tell you that. 

While I was gone, some carpenters were working on replacing and repairing and releveling parts of the deck. Ahhhhhh, it's all clean and straight and white and beautiful.

Mind you, they are not finished all the work yet. But at least this part is finally done. I've been waiting for this for a lonnnnnng time. I just can't stop gazing at it. 

I also came home to find that the beautiful Stella D'Oro daylilies are open and there are pints of blueberries to be picked and broccoli to be harvested, among other things.

(The netting keeps the birds away.)

A lot of beautiful things can happen in a couple of days.

All this helps me to find a little bit of zen and keeps my mind off the fact that I also came home to find that the Japanese beetles are having a convention an orgy on the asparagus ferns. 

Fuckers.

Garden Shots and Notes

This year I have decided that I am a fan of the everbearing strawberries I planted the year before last (or was it last year? I can't quite remember). I underappreciated them last year to the point of letting them rot on the vine. For one thing, something else was nibbling on them, which made me discouraged. A strawberry would be just about ready to be picked "tomorrow," and when I got up "tomorrow," something had either eaten it completely or taken big nibbles out. 

Last week it started happening again. So a couple nights ago, I decided to start picking the berries when they are not quite ripe. I feared that their flavor would suffer, but boy was I wrong. First of all, they ripen beautifully literally overnight. I pick them with some white still on them in the evening, and the next morning there are enough that have turned fully ripe so that David and I can both have a good serving for breakfast. And more ripen throughout the day so that we can graze on a few here and there throughout the day. It's like magic. And they are SO delicious!

Despite all the rain and the strange flip-flopping weather, in general things in the garden are doing well. The bed in the foreground below is all planted up with seedlings that I started in the house in the late winter, and that I planted under the coldframe in this bed in unsettled weather on April 1st, unceremoniously and without hardening off. Red cabbage, kale of a couple different varieties, broccoli, lettuces (many of which we have already eaten and I've pulled up), collards, and to the right of the red cabbage in the foreground is a volunteer potato plant (started from an old potato that was in the kitchen clippings that I threw in the grow bed last fall) that I decided to leave as is and nurture along.

Speaking of broccoli, here is a closeup of one of them in that grow bed:

And the garlic scapes have started to curl in the last day or two. I think this is a bit later than usual. This means we've got at least another month before the garlic is ready to harvest. This garlic is all "free" -- it is seed garlic from the garlic I grew last year. I love it when that happens.

This has nothing to do with the garden, but when I'm sitting at my office chair and happen to look down, this is often what I see:

...looking up at me with complete adoration. He will stand there like that for HOURS. 

Mr. Jefferies got a haircut this week. I love it when his hair is short, because his ears look so adorably huge.

Terrier Tuesday -- The Sashimi Edition

Dear Readers,

Alpha apologizes that the photo of me and my minion (which, by the way, look at how it is still holding up after all this time!) is out of focus. 

She was really just intent on making sure to get a good photo of the gigantic bowl of spinach she had just brought in from the garden:

She was pretty damned excited, because though she said she got pretty crappy germination of her spinach seeds, all the rainy weather has turned out a fabulous spinach crop. 

I guess we know what's important to her and what's not.

*pout*

But that's all right. Two can play this game. I've been eating pretty high off the hog, myself. You know how she's been trying to teach me to do the "roll over" trick, and how I have been refusing because it's just downright demeaning? (The nerve of her to even ask me!)

Well, last week she gave me raw salmon every time I rolled over like she asked. 

I guess I gave her what she wanted right quick. 

I have told her in no uncertain terms, I will not do it, even for steak tartare. Not top-shelf enough. But I do love me some sashimi. 

Love,

 

Mr. Jefferies

P.S. So yeah, roll over. Whatever. Just show me the money. 

P.P.S. Alpha says she saw a big fat rabbit over by the rose bushes at dusk last night. I didn't see it, or if I did, it would have been DINNER. I'm not kidding. But she's been moaning and groaning a little bit about that for a couple of reasons: Well, DUH, her garden, and also because she thinks it's rabbits and their leavings that have made me get coccidiosis every summer. She is not a happy camper about that rabbit hanging around. Personally, I think I oughta do something about that.

 

Terrier Tuesday -- The Entertaining Myself Edition

Dear Readers,

Like a certain famous dog...

...I have had to learn to become resourceful at entertaining myself when Alpha is working. She says I'm very good at it this summer, and she is very proud of me. I love being outside with her, so it's easy. But don't tell her I said that.

She's been pulling a lot of weeds. And those weeds are TALL and THICK!

Sometimes I tunnel into the big tall weeds and pretend I'm not a canine at all, but a big and fierce FELINE in a jungle.

I hide in the weeds, and I am sure she cannot see those grasses moving where I'm tunneling. I make her call my name and say, HEY, HEY! GET OVER HERE! and I'm just hiding silently and I'm just waiting to POUNCE on her when she's least expecting it. Or come out of the jungle and look at her from the edge, like, "What?"

And then she laughs and says, "good boy, good boy!" and then I do it all over again.

And then, if I bark and growl and cajole her enough, she will throw the rubber chicken for me. And she gives me rides in the weedbarrow, and that's a whole lot of fun. 

She says I need to go to the groomer, and that is NOT a lot of fun. But it will be nice to be a bit cooler in this hot weather. 

Did I mention, I love summer?

And I love Alpha too.

Oh, and I love YOU too.

 

Love,

 

Your jungle-dweller

Mr. Jefferies

 

 

Hell Yeah

My Long-Weekend Sunday went like this:

Breakfast.  

Knitting. Yes, knitting! I'm working on the raisin brown Iceling baby sweater. Love it. I ordered a whole bunch of buttons to try with it -- a variety of wooden, bone, and antler ones. I'll be sure to show them to you when they get here.

Running. Yes, running! I went to the track with the idea that I would go back to square one on the Couch to 5K program, which would be mostly walking, with spurts of a minute running here and there. I hemmed and hawed over whether to stick with my favorite Nike Free Run+ shoes or to use the Gel Cumulus. I decided to stick with the Nikes because I love them so much, but I put in the Superfeet inserts that that orthopedic guy recommended I get. I figured that was a sensible compromise, and when I put them on my feet like that, it felt good and seemed like The Right Thing To Do.

When I got to the track, it was in use by a group, so I couldn't use it. I had to use the trail. Though it's not rubberized and is a hard paved surface with some imperfections, it is mostly flat, with some gentle slopes and only a couple little hills, so I thought I'd be fine. But also when I got there, I just could not bring myself to go back to literally square one. I thought I might die of boredom, and I also felt that I could handle more of a challenge than that. When I left off with the program and hurt my ankle, I was repeating Week 7 of the program, so I don't really know why I chose Week 4 yesterday, but I did. Another compromise that seemed like The Right Thing To Do.

And it was! 

I ran the course with ease, did not feel any pain whatsoever, and ended up with no swelling -- no new swelling, at least. I felt great. GREAT, I tell you!

Lunch. Healthy and delicious. Grilled salmon burgers and see below.

Gardening. Oh yes, four more hours in the garden doing the heavy lifting and moving of bags of composted manure and cleaning out the compost bins, digging and dividing of perennials, planting, turning soil, and etcetera and so forth. 

I harvested this, which served as the focal point for lunch.

Dinner. With friends.

More Knitting while

Watching South Riding.

It was a verra good day. Mr. Jefferies says so, too. 

The Weatherman Was Wrong Again, But This Time The Doctor Seems To Have Been Right

It wasn't supposed to rain yesterday. Well, I guess you could technically say that was correct, since it POURED BUCKETS. But at least it waited till the late afternoon, and I was able to put in a good six hours in the garden before it hit.

You see, I was doing it under doctor's orders. The mysterious ankle- or foot- or who-knows-what injury was not resolving, and so on Friday I ended up back at my primary care doc. I won't get into the whole thing, but in the end she and I decided that I should stop being inactive. It probably wasn't helping anything, and I have also wondered if just being active might help push those fluids out of their sluggishness. So she told me to walk a lot this weekend. I did intend to go and do some true "exercise" walking, and maybe even a teeny bit of running -- perhaps starting from square one of the Couch to 5K program again, because I am very eager to get back to that if at all possible.

I never made it to do that, but I did spend almost a full day in the garden, wearing my hiking boots and my SmartWool socks, and doing a LOT of climbing up and down our steep backyard hill, as well as carrying things. I came out of it with certainly no deleterious effects, and probably considerable positive effects. It was a deliciously sweaty day and a beautiful day. At the end of the day as I'm writing this, I definitely feel miles better physically and psychologically.

The water, though. OMG, the rain, it just won't stop. I put my seedlings in the wheelbarrow while I turned my back for a couple of hours to go to an appointment, and came back to them sitting in 4 inches of water.

I am very lucky that I live on a hill. My gardens are not soggy like the cornfields and hayfields and athletic fields and parks and basements (not ours, thank the goddess) around here. Everything I've planted is doing well. I stuck a few of the plants I bought recently into the ground without a whole lot of fanfare yesterday. If we don't get some sunshine, and it keeps pouring like this, many things won't amount to much anyway. Siiiiigh. 

Here is my best accidental discovery (is that redundant?) of this year:

Onions do incredibly well when mulched with shredded leaves. So now I'm doing it on purpose, and wow! I've never grown such lovely onions before!

My first planting of radishes is getting close to harvest-ready:

Those are baby Romaine lettuces in the foreground, and they are thriving.

I love baby bok choi, and so do the slugs. The bok choi are planted in a rather large bed of various types of lettuce and plants from the cruciferous family. They are the clear favorite of the slugs, which makes them sort of the sacrificial lambs of my garden at the moment. I did manage to get a few unchomped-on leaves to put in my salad yesterday. 

And the state of the compost bins is pretty sad:

Soggy and anaerobic. There are four of them that need to be emptied, aerated and relayered. 

I have no work scheduled for the next week, so now that it seems that I have a usable foot again, I will be able to peck away at some things that really need to get done around here, which will give my muscles a pretty good workout, too...

...in between torrential rainstorms, lightning storms and tornado watches. 

Garden Update: Not So Much

With the nearly nonstop rain and the leg/foot/ankle that swells up if I so much as look at it, as well as a nice healthy work schedule, I have not been able to get out and do much of anything in the garden. The weeds have taken over -- maybe permanently for this year. I'm thinking I'll just let much of everything go fallow this year. Our house and lot are starting to look seriously abandoned, and I don't even care.

But I am cutting asparagus and pulling a few scallions from time to time:

I do have some rather fabulous lettuce and other greens growing:

There's a fairly good bed of beets going:

And there's a nice bed of red and white Dutch onions, and more little lettuces, Swiss chard, and radishes that are all coming along quite nicely.

Though this little corner with a few spinach seedlings looks nice, I got my usual crappy germination with spinach and carrots.

Yesterday I went to the nursery and bought a bunch of veggie and herb plants, which is at least a start.

But by the time I got home and went out to consider planting them, I was a) driven in by the mosquitoes, and b) my leg couldn't take it.

I offered to throw a toy for Mr. Jefferies, and invited him to go inside to get a toy for the occasion, but he opted to bring out a rawhide bone and bury it instead.  

That dog. He is so smart, and he sure does make me smile. 

Wherein The Ankle Says HEY, STOP THAT

The sexy new ankle brace is miles better than the old getup I had, and it served me very well on my away job this week. It's not too bad looking, and I'm not limping much at all anymore. If I wear a lot of black, or some styling bootcut jeans, most people don't even notice I'm wearing a brace.

I was feeling so chipper, in fact, that when I got home yesterday afternoon, I changed into some gardening clothes. While I was waiting for Mr. Jefferies to get home from his sleepover (He also became [one of the] Office Dog[s] at Burton Snowboards for three days, where he gained all sorts of new fans, I'm told. Dude.), I went out to survey what was happening in the garden. 

Given how well the ankle was doing over the past three days, and how well I was feeling overall, I thought that I might even be able to get some serious gardening done this weekend. Or if not serious, then at least semi-serious.

I did a few things -- I had quite a lot of asparagus that was ready to be cut, and quite a bit of lettuce and fresh mint -- which I gave to Mr. Jefferies' babysitter as a thank-you gift. I watered some things. I have new baby beets, spinach, carrots, onions, lettuces, and Swiss chard, and the plum trees are covered with blossoms. I have everbearing strawberry blossoms, and some pear blossoms. 

I removed the very lightweight coldframe from over the top of the lettuces and kales and cabbages, which can all now fend for themselves quite nicely, and moved it to a different bed where I put in some zucchini seeds. This is very early for those heat-loving zukes, but I'm betting that the cold frame will keep it warm like a hothouse and they'll be fine -- maybe even better than usual. And I sowed some broccoli seeds all over a 3X3 bed. I'll eat the babies, thinning them out to the six full-size plants that a bed that size can handle. 

And that was pretty much it. My ankle was letting me know then that, "Thank you, Norma, that is quite enough now."

Sigh. It's gonna be a while before I'm 100%. 

I had a picnic on my way home from my business trip: Oh-so-delicious leftover Biryani from the Bollywood Grill, where I had a wonderful dinner with Claudia and Sandy the night before last. The food was fabulous, the company was wonderful, and the waiter was flirty. What more could one wish for? Well, leftovers, of course! I took the leftovers with me and ate them outside, in the beautiful sunny and warm day, when I hit West Lebanon, NH. There was also a little bit of shopping at LLBean.

 

 

Mother's Day Asparagus

It was a beautiful day, but my Mother's Day was sort of a nonstarter because of my ankle injury which I'm now calling a leg/shin/calf (or what, I don't really know for sure) injury instead. It is quite clear to me, now that the swelling has gone down, that it is not a ligament or tendon injury, but seems like it almost certainly must be a hairline fracture, though none showed up on the x-rays. At least the radiologist's report didn't report one. But given the caliber of the rest of the hospital experience I had, I honestly don't put a whole lot of confidence in that report. To be fair, I am told that hairline fractures often don't show up until later, when they begin to heal. Or perhaps because I was so "sure" it was the ankle, and told them that, they did not x-ray up high enough on the shaft of the fib and tib. Who knows.

All I know is, it still really hurts to walk, but it doesn't hurt just sitting. And it still is prone to inflammation when it's not elevated. I simply can't wait to see my physical therapist Monday afternoon.

I'm quite sidelined by the whole thing, and I'm not a happy camper. There are only so many TV shows and movies one can watch in a 48-hour period without becoming quite despondent and nearly brain dead, even though I loved them all. (Answer: two entire seasons of Dexter; Salt, Gosford Park,... and my brain simply refuses to recall if there were any more.)

But this made it somewhat better:

I made my first asparagus harvest of the season. (Except one spear I cut last week.)

I sauteed it in a little bit of butter and served it on Ezekiel toast, for my very simple and light Mother's Day supper. It was fabulous.

 

H2O-LY CRAP

My photos really do not capture how much flooding there is here. The road leading to the Champlain Islands is just about down to one lane.

Too bad we can't send some of this water to places that are drought stricken. 

OMG, is it really May 1st? That fact just came as a true surprise to me as I was setting this thing to post. I really didn't intend to post twice yesterday, either. That just happened accidentally.