Thursday, May 3, 2012

Swapping red for green

If you've been reading this blog for a while, then you are awesome.  And you may remember that while I love plants, I don't always have the greenest thumb.  Except when it comes to my Christmas Cactus- that thing is amazing and I don't know what I'm doing that it loves so much- seriously, it's been blooming non-stop since Thanksgiving, but took the week of Christmas off for the sake of irony.

Anyhow, I planted an herb garden almost 2 months ago with the thought that the freakishly warm weather would allow an extra long planting season this year.  The little plants all sprouted and were on their second or third sets of leaves when I left town for a week.  I asked someone to check on them and when I got back, half were bone-dry, half were drowned, all were dead except for two really determined little cucumbers and some basil.

So I planted again, and checked on them dutifully.  But for some reason, I can't seem to find my green thumb this year.  Yesterday was very humid and quite warm, so I decided it was time to move the sprouts up from the basement to the screened in porch.  Here is the start of my "garden" so far... I have lots of herbs (lavender, tarragon, parsley, basil, catnip and a few others that I can't remember right now) and three pots of cucumbers started (bottom).  Guess which plant is the catnip?  (It's stolen from my g-ma's house, I can never seem to keep it alive long enough for it to get to this point).


And for those of you wanting a little fiber arts content, here is some handspun that is just about dry...
It's about 7 ounces of merino (3 braids) that I got forever ago at A Good Yarn in Sarasota on one of my first trips there. It's a heavy fingering weight, and while my handspun seems to eat fiber and is incredibly dense but not overly long, I think that I should still have enough for some socks, especially if I knit them on 2's.  This is very dense though, and the resulting socks will probably outlive me because of it.  I am heading down to Sarasota again May 11th, so I think I'll take it with me so I have a sock project while I'm there.

It's been a while since I spun, but I'm very pleased with this latest hank of yarn.