My garden is a sermon

As I work in the garden, I am repeatedly struck by the thought that there is a sermon somewhere in the dirt and weeds and vegetables.

¹⁷ Do not let your heart envy sinners,
   but always be zealous for the fear of the LORD.
¹⁸ There is surely a future hope for you,
   and your hope will not be cut off.

Proverbs 23

Do not let your heart envy sinners – in the garden, I suppose the sinners are the ones with picture-perfect, weed-free gardens bought at the price of industrial agriculture’s cancer-causing chemicals. In truth, I don’t envy those gardeners – they have sold their souls (and our children’s future) for pretty gardens. A few weeds or bugs aren’t the end of the world, and really, we’d all be better off if we spent some time on our knees in the garden, separating the weeds from the vegetables. Yeah, I'll admit that I’d love a garden like the ones at the English castles but really … I’m fortunate to have so much land, and the time to work it. Even if it’s never as pretty as Prince Charlie’s lovely gardens, I’ll still enjoy the potatoes and carrots.

There is surely a future hope for you – yep, gardeners always hope. Next year, we say, next year, the quack grass will be under control, I’ll get the seedlings in a bit earlier under cover, more of the tomato plants will survive. And really, each year has been a little better than the last. Learning to garden in each place takes time and practice – no two garden plots are the same. What worked in my city backyard doesn’t work in my country garden, and it’s taking me awhile to learn what will work out here. That’s okay – I am learning it, and that’s the important thing. Next year will be better. :)

It’s true that my garden isn’t any kind of prize winning space – although, all things considered, it really has come a long way. When I started this spring, the entire plot was filled with runaway quack grass, and now, at the midpoint of our growing season, there are some potatoes, several carrots, a few rows of beets, a few tomato plants and one pepper plant that looks like it might actually make it. There’s a sunflower coming up along the edge, and two morning glories … the grape vines survived the winter and being munched by sheep … the compact cranberry bushes that I thought dead have new leaves and are grateful for the breathing room my regular weeding has provided. Some of the pea plants came up. There are six or eight corn plants growing. The lettuce is nearly big enough to eat, and there are four squash plants of some kind or other (I can’t remember what I planted) that have big leaves, even if there are no blossoms yet. There is hope of a harvest, even if it is smaller than I had dreamed.

The garden is full of lessons. like the lesson of the mulch and the quack grass, which is one I am given to contemplate almost every time I’m out there.

Digging up quack grass roots, I have discovered that the areas where I tried to mulch the stuff into submission with straw and newspaper developed the thickest mats of roots. You can’t cover this stuff up and expect it to go away – the grass just winds it’s way through the mulch, forming new roots as it goes, creating an even more solid mass of weeds that’s twice as much work to remove. In the areas where the stuff was dug out at the beginning and the new shoots were pulled more or less as they appeared, the soil is nearly clear of runners and roots, and keeping it weeded is a much simpler matter. Where it was left to hide under layers of straw, it takes some serious muscle to haul up the tangled mess of roots and nodules, and a day or two of inattention is all it takes for green shoots to reappear in those places.

This lesson, of course, strikes home. A bunch of really unpleasant stuff happened to me, back in my Other Life. I never tried to pretend it hadn’t occurred … I always admitted that these events had happened, that it had hurt, and that it was really a rough time. But once I admitted it, I did only the bare minimum to deal with it: I mulched my troubles, hoping that under the weight of day to day life and the passage of time, the roots of the pain would die out and I’d be left with a clean inner landscape.

Of course, it doesn’t work that way. You need to dig it all out at the start - look at those ugly white roots, shake the dirt off of them and toss them out of your garden so they don’t take root again. If you mulch your troubles, when the green shoots of those old troubles finally poke through, you discover that you have no choice: you have to dig up the whole thing, including the additional mess of roots and tangles that grew while it was all under cover and you weren’t paying attention. It’s way more work than if you’d just taken care of it at the start, but you know, we all do the best we can, and sometimes, a season or two of mulch is the best response we can muster at the time. The mulch didn’t help the actual problem – in fact, the problem got bigger while it was buried – but in the meantime, the garden wasn’t entirely unproductive. Yes, there were a few more weeds in the vegetables than if I’d taken the time to get it all cleared out at the start, but honestly, I didn’t have the time or resources to get it all cleared and a few weeds were the price I had to pay for just getting on with growing things.

By mulching my troubles I was able to get on with life for a few years. In the end, of course, it caught up with me, and I am sad to look back on my life and see how these buried troubles poked their heads up and caused me to behave badly without actually realizing what was going on. At the same time, I know that I did what I had to do to get from one day to the next, and I know that as soon as I realized the extent of the problem, I stopped mulching and started weeding in earnest. Now I’m digging up all the old roots of hurt and pain and fear and anger, knocking the dirt off, and tossing them out of the garden. I’ll always have to watch for those little green shoots, but if I can take the time now to really get things cleared out, then I’ll have a better harvest next year, and the year after that.

There’s always hope.

Fibre Week 2011

I am fortunate to live within reasonably easy driving distance of Olds, Alberta and to have a supportive family who cheerfully send me off to spend several days each summer at Fibre Week. There, I can be surrounded by beautiful fibre, meet interesting people who share my love of wool and wheels, visit friends I don’t see often enough, and attend classes that expand my knowledge and improve my skills.

This year, the first class I took was titled “Coils With a Twist: Beehives and Seashells”, by Caroline Sommerfeld. We made funky art yarn in bright colours: randomly spaced bumps shaped like beehives or seashells, depending on your technique (and your perception), strung between lengths of thinner yarn. Caroline is a fabulous teacher – happy to share her knowledge with the students, encouraging of all your efforts (“it’s art yarn! you can’t DO it wrong!”), and cheerfully dismissive of ‘conventional wisdom’ when it doesn’t apply. The dyed rovings have colour repeats that are too close together? Well, okay, so they won’t work well if you spin them up for a knitted item … but they are perfect for seashells and beehives, where short colour repeats give you really interesting effects. The yarn isn’t perfectly even? Well, go look at your local yarn store and find the most expensive wool yarn in there … chances are that it’s been made with a really funky construction technique involving uneven singles put together to produce textured yarn. See? You made the expensive stuff! Cool.

By paying attention to the things that matter (the finished yarn needs to hang together and not fall apart, and the little bumpy bits need to be tight enough that they don’t pill and fuzz) while otherwise throwing caution to the wind, we were able to create sturdy, mostly-balanced (or completely balanced, depending on a few variables) colourful, fascinating yarn.

I knit mine up into a headband.

The next two days were spent in a class titled “Designing Your Own Yarn”, by Dora Mushka. Dora is an Olds-certified Master Spinner who created this class to help those spinners not pursuing the master spinner levels (or not pursuing them at the moment) to build on the skills they have and learn to create different styles of yarn. Our class was provided with the most amazing array of colourful fibres and we experimented for two whole days, discovering what happens if you spin different colours together without blending them on carders first, then what happens if you do card them; played with dyed and blended batts and rovings and discovered the different results you can get when you spin them in different ways; used thick and thin yarns to create texture; and (my favourite of all), added bits of ‘yarn shrapnel’ to our fibre and made “garneted yarn” and “wild yarn”. Our garneted yarn started as a lovely soft grey batt, over which we sprinkled handfuls of cut up yarn bits of various colours, carded it all, then spun and plied the usual way. The resulting yarn was a lovely grey with specks of colour throughout – an effect that varies from subtle to stunningly bright, depending how generous you were when adding yarn bits! We also used shredded sari silk (plus more bits of coloured yarn) to make “totally overboard and bright” yarn, which was a lot of fun. By the end of the second day, our classroom looked like a bunch of kindergarten students had thrown a party in there – bits of coloured wool were all over the floor and skeins of bright and beautiful yarn were draped over every table.

The best part of the class was the fun and excitement of experimentation. As I so rarely work with coloured fibre I found the experience especially thrilling … my instructor and my classmates were generously tolerant of my frequent outbursts of “ooooh! it turns green!” or “whoa, coooooooooool … ” I am definitely going to be dyeing more batts and rovings, just because the process of spinning from multicoloured fibre is so much fun. I mean, yes, spinning is always fun, but when you get to watch the transformation of “lump of weirdly coloured stuff” into “beautifully patterned yarn that I couldn’t possibly have predicted based on the look of the batt” … well, that’s just too much fun to pass up.

Really organized students take index cards and attach little samples of each thing they made with a label explaining how it was done. I’m  never going to be that organized, and I’d probably lose the cards before I got home anyway. What I did was knit up a sampler scarf out of all the neat stuff we made in class – the completed one in the picture is the “What I learned in Design Your Yarns class” scarf, and the one on the needles is the coils & beehives headband pictured previously. From the yarn itself I can tell which technique I used, and our instructor kindly provided a handout with explanations of how, precisely, to do each thing we tried, so I can reference that if I end up being vague on the details later on.

Here’s another yarn photo – all of this is stuff I made in class:

Left to right we’ve got some beautiful stuff made from a blended batt that included silk (so very soft), the garneted yarn (subtle rather than wild), a cabled yarn (two 2-ply yarns plied together – it ends up looking like lucet cord, and is very strong), and some more seashell-and-beehive yarn.

Of course, just being here at Fibre Week you see all sorts of neat things. The level 4 instructor makes spinning wheels and assorted spinning tools as well as teaching – and he made this spinning chair. Enlarge the picture so you can see the carving in it … it’s stunning.

Coming here is a wonderful experience, and I am truly grateful that my family makes this possible for me every year. I’ve improved my skills and been able to visit with friends (I stay with my good friend Flannelberry who lives too far to visit easily, and we really enjoy having this week to hang out!).

I also discovered that I have an inner magpie longing for expression through colour and sparkle.

Who knew?

It’s been a blast, and I have thoroughly enjoyed myself. If you are a fibre artist and there’s an event like this near you, do yourself a favour and go for a visit. I was really  nervous the first time I came here – what if everyone else is really amazing and talented and I’m this useless rookie who can’t keep up? what if I get lost? what if my wheel isn’t the right kind? What I discovered was that everyone is here to learn – even the experts – and everyone is willing to share their ideas. I am glad I took the risk that first year, I’ve learned so much and met so many great people. Try it, you’ll be glad you did!

Still here

I’m still here – and thank you so very much to those who pinged me to ask if I was all right and to check on me after so long without a blog post. You make me feel so special, truly, you do. Thanks. :)

This whole recovery thing is very challenging: I still have chest pain, though nowhere near as bad as it was to start, and I either have a lot of energy (but don’t know what to do with it) or I’m suddenly very worn out. It’s an odd place to be for someone who has spent most of her life being very driven, always going from one thing to the next, refusing to take a break until “all the work was done”. Clearly that wasn’t a healthy way to live and now I’m going to have to figure out what a reasonable pace looks like. So far, I’m still floundering, but I’m floundering more slowly, so maybe that counts as progress.

Regardless, the world continues it’s circuit around the sun with no attention paid to the status of my mental health. The pasture grass is growing: we had a lot of hay this past year, so we were able to keep the sheep off the pastures a little longer in the spring and let the grass get a good head start (which, after two years of drought, was needed). They’re now out there happily mowing the knee-high grass, and identifying all the weak spots in the fences that we haven’t yet patched.

The garden is off to a slow start – the battle against the quackgrass continues, and I’m making headway but it takes a lot of persistent tilling and weeding. I did get the tomatoes transplanted outside and they lived comfortably under the hooped row cover The Boy made for a week – a week of steady rain. At least they didn’t bake to death in the heat, there wasn’t any heat. The peppers are still inside, but we have a few sunny days forecast, so they will go out shortly. Maybe tomorrow.

The corn is poking it’s head up, but the beans are still sulking underground. The cranberry bushes that I uncovered when removing the last traces of quack grass from that corner of the garden seem to be doing quite well – maybe if I can keep them clear, they’ll actually give us berries in a few years! The grape vines have new leaves as well, as do the raspberries, and that’s all very encouraging.

My big focus the last few weeks has been getting ready to go to Olds for Fibre Week: I’ll be taking classes Sunday through Tuesday, but staying the entire week. I figure I’ll probably pace myself better if I stay for the entire time rather than try to fit all the fun into a few packed days, and since I travel in the motorhome, I have a comfortable, peaceful place to rest. Last year I had one day between my classes and I spent the day working on a new sock pattern: it was like a self-directed workshop and I really enjoyed it. I may do that kind of thing again … I’ll certainly be taking a lot of raw materials with me, just in case I am overcome with the need to start another project.

In the meantime, I have been knitting a lot: I finished a large lace shawl (the Midnight Stole), which was made in black bamboo/silk for a friend’s wedding. I did the whole thing in seven weeks, which felt like a lot of time when I cast on, but the pattern was much more complicated than I anticipated and as a result I was much slower at knitting than I usually am. Still, I made the deadline and the shawl will be at the wedding this weekend. Yay! The recipient is very special to me, and I am honoured to have been able to make something that suits her so very well for such a wonderful occasion. I’ve got a few other projects on the go as well (don’t I always?) and I’ve been spinning up the fleeces that have been hanging in my fibre room for much, much too long. I needed to give my wheels a test run before Fibre Week, which was the initial incentive to spin, but I’m finding it really enjoyable just now, so I think I’ll be doing more of it. I am dyeing the resulting yarns as I spin, so I just keep the crock pot going and add a skein when I’m done, trying different things to see what I can do for colour variations and so on. I discovered a fun trick the other day: skein up the yarn, then twist it into a long snake (like you would if you were going to store it) and tie it in an overhand knot after it’s twisted. Put it in the dyepot just like that: no tangles, for one thing, and you get really neat tie-dye effects on the finished yarn! I’m thinking this could be a fun trick for overdyeing: do it once with a light colour, reskein it, and do it again with a darker colour. That could be interesting!

So, stay tuned for more wooly updates – the next week or so is likely to be heavy on spinning content!

Tea on a hot day

It’s been getting quite warm in the daytime – though at night it still drops to freezing – and so I’ve been making sun-tea.

I tried to grow a few things for tea last year but most didn’t take, so I put two decaf tea bags from the store into a glass milk bottle along with a few pinches of dried chocolate mint, which did grow nicely in the garden last summer and which I dehydrated in the fall. Placed in a sunny window or outside on the deck during the day, the water heats and the flavours blend … strain it and put it in the fridge and voila, you have a lovely refreshing beverage for the next warm afternoon.

Marvellous.

Quack grass is not a weed…

… it is a force of nature, in the same category as rivers and wind. It will grow through anything – clay, soil, landscape fabric, your carrots and potatoes. I’m convinced the stuff would grow through concrete given half a chance.

This year is the year that I finally take on the quack grass in the garden. You see, up until last summer, I thought I was dealing with some form of “sod” out there – you know, just grass of one kind or another (or more likely, several kinds mixed together – this is old pasture land after all). The conventional wisdom when gardening over sod is “dig it up, turn it over, put more dirt on top, mulch around it, and it’ll just compost down into the soil and you’ll have a lovely garden in no time!”

This does not apply when the grass in question is quack grass.

Quack grass forms long (and I mean long, we’re talking metres long) roots with nodules on them that run along under the soil and pop up new shoots every so often. You know you are dealing with quack grass when, upon pulling out a sheaf of the stuff, you also get a handful of dirt trailing stringy, tough, long white roots that are a good two millimetres around with periodic little bumps on them. If you see that … give up any ideas you may have had about mulching, turning sod, raised beds, and landscape fabric. You need a whole different strategy.

First of all: you have to clear the space. All of it. You can’t have grass walkways between your beds – that just gives the quack grass a source of nutrition for the roots that will reach from the walkway into your garden bed and crowd out your vegetables. You need to clear the entire garden area and at least a 1 metre border all around – two is better. If you can do this in late fall, that’s great, early spring works too. Start by tilling it all up: rake out any big chunks of roots and nodules and toss them outside the garden, then let the turned earth and roots dry out in the sun and wind for a week or two … then do it again. The idea is to kill off the new plants as they get settled in, cutting them off from their source of energy before they get a chance to feed the roots and start again. Eventually, you’ll have brown dirt with just a few quack grass plants popping up every so often. Pull them out when you see them, or slice them off with a hoe – the objective is to starve the root system by removing any green leaves as soon as they appear. This will be your ongoing job … if you let it take hold, before you know it the entire garden will be overrun and you’ll be back at it again.

Don’t despair if you get a little behind though … I noticed that the areas that had never truly been cleared were far worse to dig out than the areas that were clear last summer, but had gotten over grown by fall. Stay ahead of it as much as you can, knowing that the longer you keep the entire area clear, the more likely you are to truly eradicate the stuff completely.

I’ve given up on raised beds in my garden and am going with raised rows instead: when the weeds come up along the edges of the raised beds, you can’t easily attack them with your weeding tool as the wood of the raised bed gets in the way, so the weeds take root and then you’ve lost that part of the battle. With raised rows, the edges of the rows just gradually fall into the paths between the beds – you can dig weeds out of the paths as well as the beds with the same ease, and walking on the paths compacts them and defines them in contrast to the raised piles of soil that form the beds themselves.

My research tells me that the most important thing with quack grass is to keep that clear perimeter: if you can keep one metre around your garden clear of the stuff, then it won’t poke up between your garden plants, and you can harvest carrots that don’t have stringy quack grass nodules growing through them like some kind of alien tentacle. I’m going to try growing potatoes in the perimeter: since you have to hill up the ground over the potatoes during the growing season, you’re weeding as you do that anyway – and apparently they can outcompete quack grass to some extent anyway. I’m sure I’ll have a few tubers with weird tentacles grown through them, but I can live with that.

So far, I’ve completed most of the tilling: about 800 of the 900 square feet of my garden has been cleared and is presently drying out in the sun and wind. Landscape fabric was the worst mistake I made: it didn’t work, as the roots of the quack grass had just grown right through it, and removing it was hard work as the soil on top was so heavy that lifting the fabric just caused it to tear and hacking through it with the mattock just resulted in tangles of fabric and roots. Ugh. I won’t make that mistake again. When there’s quack grass near your garden, you want a free hand to get down into the dirt and pull the stuff out – landscape fabric and raised bed borders just get in the way.

It does feel good to see so much clear brown dirt out there. With my new arched row covers that The Boy made me for Christmas, I can probably even plant a few cold tolerant things this week!

Once I get the garden cleared and re-fenced, I’m seriously considering housing some geese in a moat around the outer edge. They eat grass shoots, I hear…

Aubertin, the tiny spinning wheel

Through the amazing Ravelry network, I am now honoured to be the caretaker/owner of Aubertin, a very small little wheel from France.

Here’s Aubertin at the start of his journey, in a backyard in France:

There is a LOT of shellac on this wheel. It took a lot of scrubbing with methyl hydrate to uncover the wood beneath – which is beautiful – and in the end, I gave up and left quite a bit of the shellac still there, as I was tired of scrubbing.

There were quite a few small repairs needed, which I knew when I got the wheel – the lady in France who found the wheel and shipped it here had my tiny budget in mind as she searched, and we both knew that with the bargain basement budget I had, repairs were going to be part of the project. That’s not a problem for me, I think they are part of the fun!

The mother of all was nailed in place, for starters, which would make tension adjustment impossible… and the nails were embedded right into the wood. Fortunately I was able to slip a hacksaw blade in the gap between the supports and the mother of all and cut it free, which was interesting. There were quite a few cracks and one large break that had to be glued and clamped to stabilize things, and another large break that needed wired together for better bracing and support. All that was fairly straightforward, though, and with a generous coat of tung oil after hours and hours of scrubbing off ancient shellac, the wheel is beautiful.

The little cup is for water – not for drinking, but for dipping your fingers in. This wheel would’ve been used to spin flax, and you need to wet your fingers periodically when spinning flax to smooth it down, so flax wheels often have a cup or a little dish to hold water. The tiny white nubbins on the wheel and decorating the ends of various sticky-outy-bits appear to be ivory – I’ll have to look closer, but when one of them popped out today,  the underside looked a whole lot like a tooth that’s fallen out, so I am leaning towards ivory rather than bone or antler, though any of those materials would be common.

And, despite the very rusty and wobbly flyer hooks, I was able to spin too! Super exciting. It treadles way more easily than I would have expected, and although it is a fragile little thing, it definitely was built to work. It’s not as odd as you might think having the orifice down so low – the angle of entry of fibre into the orifice of the wheel doesn’t really make much difference for most spinning (big bulky art yarns might be an exception), though modern wheels almost always have the orifice up near the level of your hands.

I used a blue drive band because blue seemed like a good French colour – I imagined an artistic gentleman walking to the café on the corner for his morning croissant and latté, wearing a blue beret. You can see the  stamp of the maker’s name on the back bar – it says Aubertin, which is where the wheel gets it’s name. I have no idea who Aubertin was, or how old this wheel might be … I’ll see if I can find anything out. (Oh yeah, ignore my toes in that picture too … I didn’t notice they were in there until after I posted the image!)

The wheel is really, really, really tiny – tinier than you’d expect even from the pictures. Here is a group shot, just for perspective:

Before you ask, no, not all of those wheels are mine … although more of them are than I would’ve thought  possible a year ago. The great wheel is Grandma Shirley, then there’s Jacqueline the CPW sitting between another CPW and an upright castle wheel that are both being delivered to their new owners in a month or so, the little LIthuanian wheel, which lives here, and the Czech Republic wheel that is looking for a new home. That’s a lot of wheels, eh? Wow.

My next adventure will be to complete the refinishing of Grandma Shirley the great wheel: the verathane is mostly off but I need to sand it clean then finish with a coat of tung oil. I now have a minor’s head (no, it has nothing to do with the cranium of a very young kid nor one who digs coal for a living) and am anxious to learn the great wheel spinning dance.

Another graduate of the Home for Wayward Wheels, ready to go out into the world!

One of the Czech Republic/Sudetenland (1930's era or thereabouts) lateral treadle wheels is now ready to go to a new home!

The wheel originally looked like this, when I rescued her from a garage attic:

This wheel is bobbin-lead, flyer-brake, and you sit at it side-on. You can treadle with either foot, left or right, though treadling with the right tends to keep your body offset nicely so that the yarn heads into the orifice cleanly. It's really nice to be able to see the yarn winding onto the bobbin as you spin, and the angle of entry to the orifice doesn't seem to do anything strange to the yarn.

An interesting feature of this wheel is the original sliding hook flyer. It required a bit of fiddling to figure out the best way to thread it - the way I have it pictured here seems to work well. Even cooler, Kromski bobbins fit on this wheel, meaning you don't have a one-bobbin problem! (although it only comes with one for starters, you can easily acquire more). The bobbins do need buffering to prevent chatter: I've included removeable plastic sleeves for the flyer rod that work quite nicely, and since they are removeable, you can switch the flyer end for end if you want to use the smaller whorl. If you intend to do that often, one of the stretchy drive bands would probably be a good idea - currently, the wheel has a wrapped cotton band in place.

Here's the wheel as a whole:

There's a 'sweet spot' for your foot: heel in the little circle, and treadle just on the down stroke. The wheel itself has awesome momentum, so do watch out for continued spin when you stop. I would suggest this wheel is ideal for spinning low twist yarns, or for someone who drafts fairly slowly and wants time to see what they are doing. Then again, I use a CPW most of the time, so my sense of 'normal drafting speed' is a little bit warped. :) Despite the weight, I think it'd be an excellent wheel for taking places because it's so sturdy - you wouldn't worry at all about it being damaged, and the flyer comes off easily so you could pop that in your spinning bag, haul the wheel to where you're going, and then sit down and spin. Okay, you aren't likely to want to take it on a plane or lug it too far across a parking lot, but for your average spin-in-public thing, it'd be very cool. Especially 'cause it's so unusual!

There are worm holes, but no worms (one advantage of being stored in a garage attic through several cold winters!). The verathane has been removed (ugh), and there are traces of green paint/preservative that refused to come off - I believe it is stuff that was used to prevent the worms from doing more damage. Several coats of Danish oil have been used to bring the wood back to life - the last coats were Watco Dark Walnut, but for future maintenance, plain tung oil or whatever wood oil (Woodbeams, Howards Feed ‘n’ Wax) that you normally use would be healthy. Of course if you have Watco in the house, a coat every so often will bring out the shine, but it's not necessary.

Asking $325 for this wheel: pickup anywhere in the Edmonton(ish) area is easy, as is delivery to Olds Fibre Week, or Calgary. I'll be happy to pack and ship - this wheel's quite sturdy, and I think it would probably survive a trip on the Greyhound/Canda Post without incident (well packaged, of course). If you want to estimate shipping, go to CanadaPost.ca and use a weight of say, 20 lbs, and dimensions of 22x18x36 - to southern Ontario, for instance (I happen to remember my Grandma's old postal code!), the postage is about $80. The wheel itself weighs about 15 lbs, and is approximately 20x16x34", so round up for packing materials etc.

Happy to answer any questions, as always!