A busy day and a shawl

Today was a busy day. It started out with Field Day at Valerie's school. I volunteered to help out. My station was the hurdle station. The kids came through one class at a time and we had them run in pairs. They could go over, under or zig-zag around them. It was entertaining. Unfortunately, Valerie tripped over the starting cone and was so upset about it that she could hardly finish. I do think she had a good time at the rest of the stations. I did get to see her in the sack race (at a distance) at the tug of war (her group won 4), dribbling basketballs (difficult for most of them in Kindergarten) and a game where they were tossing balls over a high rope. It appeared that any balls that were caught were taken out of play until they were gone. Afterward, we handed out popsicles to Valerie's class. It was a good morning.

I went to Panera for lunch then took some cucumber seedlings and a bean seedling to Carol's for an upcoming plant swap that I won't be able to go to. She gave me 6 wild strawberry plants and 8 non-wild strawberry plants. We have an area in our back yard that used to be filled with what may be forsythia. It was a large area that was covered. When my parents were here a while back, Dad cut them back quite a bit and we discovered that there are only 4 main shrubs, but where the branches touched the ground, they rooted. That left an area that was about 4 feet wide and probably 12 feet long that was bare ground. We put grass seed in it last weekend, but then Carol mentioned strawberries and I thought that that area would be a great place for a strawberry patch. When I got home with the plants, I finished clipping back the shrubs so that they are no more than hip high and I pulled out what I found of the secondary plants. I had to rake out the area as well. That opened up that area even more and I would love it if the strawberries took over that area. My garden is really looking like a garden

Tomatoes, basil, beans, onions and peas

Tomatoes, Cucumbers, basil and carrots

Lettuce, the taller planted as plants, the shorter as seeds), broccoli, sage (in the pot) and green onions.

The peas again, bell peppers, broccoli, carrots, green onions, onions. After clearing out the forsythia and planting the strawberries, I walked to go get Valerie. I decided I was too worn out to also walk to get Cordelia, so I took the van. I spent a couple hours in the evening cutting up the pile of stuff I cut off of the forsythia and out of the herb garden. The city empties our bins on Friday morning. My two compost bins are now full again. Soon it will be time to cut back our lilacs (along with some other shrubs in the yard), so I think I'll be filling the bins most weeks for the summer. There is so much to do in our yard yet, but I'm still mostly enjoying it. I sort of wish I had more garden space, but I need to know I'll continue to be interested through the course of the summer. I was pulling some thistles from the thistle garden earlier in the week and discovered that the poison ivy in there is more widespread than I originally thought. It is time to do something about it. I have recommendations to use Roundup to get rid of it. On the half with the poison ivy, there is a half dead evergreen shrub and a shrub with thorns on it, both of which I don't care if it kills them. That goes for the ground cover in there as well.

I'm working on knitting a shawl. Following this website: http://theworkisgettingtome.blogspot.ca/2011/09/how-to-dye-long-gradient-with-wool-and.html I dyed a skein of Fisherman's wool with Kool Aid. My plan was to dye with purple then, rather than leaving it fade to white, dye the other end with red and have the two colors meet in the middle. The thing with the Fisherman's wool is that the skeins are quite large. I ended up with it being whiter in the middle than I had planned, but the specks of pink and purple do overlap in the middle a bit. I'm very happy with how it turned out. I'm making a plain garter stitch shawl. I'm loving how the color is turning out. For a bit I thought I might want to do something more interesting than garter stitch, but this will show off the color best. It inspired someone to try it with sock yarn already. Greg even looked suitably impressed when I showed it to him. I've done a bit more than what's shown in this picture. The rows are getting quite long already and I'm in the middle of the skein.