Spring garden update...

Sitting in our home office this morning I noticed movement far out in the back yard.  

Swapping out my computer glasses for my regular glasses, I could see it was two rabbits chasing each other in and out of the garden.  I am reminded that a couple of days ago, I found half of my green bean seedlings were nibbled off.  I imagine now they are finishing off the rest. Yesterday I planted new seeds to replace the chewed off seedlings, and as soon as it's dry enough, I'll replant more, if needed.  And then spread some bone meal to try to deter the voracious bunnies.

Spring has been beautiful here - rainy and lush.  Some hot days in the mix, but mostly, it's been pleasant.  The only problem I'm encountering is because of so much rain, I can't finish getting my garden put in.  Greg reminds me it's still early, but somehow I feel behind.  Ah well, I don't control the weather, and even though it's 60 degrees outside today, and perfect for planting, the heavy rain last night has undoubtedly saturated the ground again.  A commitment tomorrow means Thursday afternoon/evening and Friday are my best opportunities to plant more seeds before it rains again.  Hopefully, the soil will dry out enough to plant, but still be soft enough to easily remove weeds that are proliferating out there. 

Meanwhile, I've given over the asparagus patch to fern for the rest of the spring and summer.  It was a pitiful harvest, but I'm going to try some suggestions I've found online and in comments some of you have left to see if this patch can produce some healthier looking spears next year. I do wonder if it's just growing old...

Strawberry picking started this week.  It seems early, but I'm excited that the patch is producing nicely after thinning it out last autumn.  

Some of the strawberries get taken out daily by critters, but I still pick enough that for the previous two springs, and again this spring, I've decided I preferred sharing over netting the plants - and unnetting, and re-netting every other day or so until the plants finish producing.

The sour cherries are starting to ripen, and itty bitty peaches are appearing, so it's time to get serious about clearing out the frozen fruit again.  In spite of giving away fresh strawberries, eating them to our hearts' content, and baking for others, there is still plenty to freeze.  Add sour cherries and peaches, and we can never seem to manage to use up all the frozen fruit I freeze before the next fruit season is upon us.  That said, I haven't bought frozen fruit for a few years now, so there is that!  Even though I am not a big fruit eater, thinking we'll possibly live long enough to have to move from here someday, I imagine I will miss the easy, and essentially free, fruit.

While I wait for the garden soil to dry out, I'm making plans for what else to plant.

I'm not going to buy and transplant so many tomato plants this year, or even peppers, but green beans, cucumbers, zucchini and yellow squash are on the docket, and I'm imaging growing some fun pumpkins and a few flowers again.  Maybe even watermelon.  Though, I'm not sure the garden is big enough for more than one or two vining plants (that need ground space).  And while last autumn I told myself I wanted to till up some more earth to enlarge the garden, I'm not so sure about that at this point.  For now, it's pleasant to imagine summer's harvest, knowing I'll accept whatever limitations (or even failures) present themselves.  Whatever grows that we can eat and share - it's all good.

To close, the irises have faded since the weekend, and I'm so glad I snapped some pictures:

Busting through the stash...

I'm happy to finally be joining my fellow YOPers again with a yarny post.  This past week, I finished the Granny Goes Large blanket I started in late February.  It was a super easy make.  But as it grew larger, it did start to become a bit of a drag with each round increasing the whole thing in length and width by about 2 inches.  At some point, I realized it was just too big and cumbersome, so I ripped back probably 8 to 10 rounds.  But at that point, knowing I wanted to finish it off with a bright color, I thought I should strategize the colors leading up to the border so the bold finish would look intentional.  And that meant I needed to re-crochet some rounds.  At this point I truly just wanted to be done already. 

But I took a deep breath, held steady, and stuck with it.

I'm not sure it needed so much thought, but you know...  it's what I do.  

And I was so happy when I finally finished it.  Happy to be done, for sure.  But also happy with how it turned out.

My inspiration for the bright green border came from a fellow Raveler.  I wish I was clever or brave enough to have thought of it myself.  But when I saw another blanket finished similarly (with a bit different shade), I knew that bright green was the color I was going to make my border in.

Finishing with such a fun color was a nice reward after pushing through all my frogging and re-crocheting.

~~~~~

With that project finished, for some irrational reason I felt the urge to start another many-colored, hundreds-of-ends-to-weave-in project.  Lucy's Hexagon blanket at Attic 24 fit the bill.  And before I knew it, I had made four hexagons, joined them, and just like that...  another blanket was begun.

This project will likely take me a much longer time to finish than my large granny square blanket did.  I picture myself making hexagons as the spirit leads, and some day, some year, I'll have enough joined that it will be a whole blanket.  

Wish me well!

The promise of produce...

Almost two weeks since my last post, rain has prevented me from doing much outside - which has been fine by me.  But now that the temperatures look more consistently warm, and the rains seems to be drying up a bit, there is no more putting off outdoor work.  I'm not ready for it, but feeling thankful all the same.

It's good exercise.  My muscles are both telling me how out of shape they still are, and at the same time showing me they are stronger than they were a year ago.  For example, I am able to (fairly) easily get up and down from a kneeling position, which, while it may not be the prettiest of pictures, it sure feels good to recognize I'm more limber than I was last spring.  Remembering the scenario last year, where I was weak (though determined) in the spring, and undeniably stronger by summer and autumn, I'm looking forward to seeing how much stronger I may be come summer and fall this time around.  

Yesterday, I cleaned up the straw mulch I had laid last autumn to protect the strawberry plants from harsh winter weather.  

While I uncovered the plants, I decided to leave some straw under and around the plants this year to see if that improves weed control throughout the summer. 

I originally thought I'd dig up one of three sections in this strawberry bed and replace old plants with new, so I left that section uncovered all winter. I expected to see brown crispy plants destroyed by winter's freezes, but it appears that most of the plants survived not being covered at all.  That said, a large number of weeds also survived and sprang up in that section compared to the mulched sections.  I wish I'd taken a picture before I started working on it - you would have been impressed by the number and size of the dandelion plants I pulled and bagged.  So... going forward, regardless of any future plans I may think I have for the strawberry beds, I will aim to cover it all up with straw mulch to lesson the weed clean-up in the spring.

The bottom posts of the border are all rotting, and they've gotten out of kilter.  Greg bought some more posts yesterday for us to try to neaten things up.  And that front section (that I intended to let die off and replant) it needs some work still, but that's for another day.

The asparagus bed has me feeling a little hesitant about what to do.  We covered it with shredded leaves last autumn, and this spring the shoots seem slower to appear.  But we do have some: 

While these shoots give me hope there will soon be asparagus on the dinner plate, I want very much to rid the bed of weeds that will soon overtake it:  

The problem is, I can't see where most of the asparagus will shoot up, and I'm afraid of walking all over the bed, digging weeds, out of fear that I'll destroy some perfectly good asparagus shoots trying to make their way through all that leaf mulch.  

Every autumn since moving here I've put the asparagus bed to rest for the winter, hoping I haven't ruined the patch, and every spring the shoots appear (though last spring's were skinnier and not quite as prolific).  My hope with the thick leaf mulch is that the asparagus plants will receive nourishment and will produce better than last year.  At the moment, I'm a little concerned they might be smothered.  I'm thinking another week will either relieve my mind or confirm my fears.

Moving around the yard, I see we'll likely have a bumper crop of sour cherries.

And the Red Bud tree is gorgeous again.

I hope April is beautiful where you are!

Spring...

 

I didn't keep close track of online weather maps this week, but I'm thinking most of the Midwest saw spring storms on Wednesday.  High temperatures here made for instability in the weather when the winds finally blew in the rain. Tornadoes were sighted all around the Indianapolis area, and south of us, but on our little spot on the map we woke up yesterday morning to a freshly washed landscape and hardly any tree debris on the ground.

Bradford Pear blossoms

While the forecast predicts a welcomed cool down though most of next week, it is undeniably spring here.  White-blossomed Bradford Pear (which is, I'm sad to say, an invasive at this point) now dot the landscape along the highways.  Sprinkled amongst them are redbud trees, and all kinds of other trees just beginning to leaf out.  

Everything here is growing fast! Sedum, daylilies, irises, clematis, daffodils, forsythia, garlic, onions...  

Sedum, last week🠝 and today🠟

~~~~

Daylilies a week ago🠝 and today🠟

~~~~

Iris growth a week ago🠝

Irises today🠟

~~~~

This Clematis will soon be looking gorgeous.

Forsythia's bloom is about finished, though.

As are the daffodils, I suspect.

Garlic planted in the fall is looking good!

And walking onions planted from the 

bulbils of last year's onions are thriving.

And it looks like we'll have peaches again this year!

Once this rain is over (early next week) I plan to uncover the strawberry plants and take stock of that situation.  I am eager to see if my thinning them out last autumn will have an impact on their production and strawberry size in a couple of months.

I'm not quite ready to throw myself into spring's outdoor work, but hopefully that's just inertia tugging at me to be lazy.  I still have time to think about it. With all the rain we've had, it will take a while for the soil to dry enough to work it, anyway.

Meanwhile, with more consistently warmer temps, I've set myself up again in the sunroom to stitch on my never-ending cross stitch sampler.  It's a great front-row seat for the annual spring show accompanied by birdsong.

Digital fast...

Some folks in our church (including myself) are participating in a digital fast during this Lent season.  To make it interesting and even a little fun, our churched purchased access to an app (called Aro) that keeps us connected and able to see how we are all doing in our successes. 

Some people are enjoying gamifying the app and turning this fast into a fun competition, but I suspect the majority of us simply see it as a tool that may help us get a bit better control of our time spent on our digital devices.  And yes...  We are all aware of the irony that using an app for this purpose requires use of our digital devices.  

Each person who's participating in this digital fast decides what the "fast" means for them, and the boundaries they put around their own digital fasting.  The point of the fast isn't to demonize phone use, or become critical of others' phone use.  In fact, others' use of their devices isn't what is publicly visible.  We can only see when someone has intentionally set aside time they might have been on their device(s) and are making a conscious choice to not be.  

The purpose is simply to make each participant more aware of how habitually and absent-mindedly s/he uses their phones, and other digital devices.  And to encourage each of us to be more mindful about our digital device usage.

And in this awareness, to recognize that while our digital devices are wonderful tools of the modern age, they also have the capacity to rob us of time we could use for doing things we'd actually rather be doing...   people we'd prefer to be interacting with in person...   creative activities we'd feel more satisfaction pursuing.  These are my words, but I think the writers of the book and workbook titled "The Digital Fast" would wholeheartedly approve of my take.

I thought this would be easy, to be honest.  A lot of days, whether I'm at home or out and about, I feel like I've got plenty of things going to keep me busy and my mind active. Some days I lay my phone down and hardly look at it for hours.  But then sometimes (usually late in the evening) I find myself scrolling through YouTube videos, looking for something that interests me - feeling myself growing more bored with each scroll of the screen.  Which, oddly, has the effect of making me scroll even more.  I say I want to break this habit, but summoning the willpower is hard.

While YouTube is a great treasure trove of information, and I am thankful for many things I've learned from videos there, I hate that I have become so attached to it.  That's putting it too nicely.  I'm just plain addicted to it.

Whatever I end up writing here about this experience is not meant to be any kind of screed on the problems of the internet and social media.  I'm a big fan, in all honesty.  I LOVE that I can have conversations with people who live across the ocean, or on the opposite side of the globe from me.  I love my fellow YOPers and enjoy the camaraderie of a creative online community.  I am all in for the wonderful benefits the internet can give us.

What I'm not so crazy about is, how mindlessly I can get sucked into the vortex of news stories that rarely say anything actually new.  I'm weary of the fact that algorithms keep us divided, and unable to see and hear what exactly is influencing people we think we disagree with. We don't even take in the same information; how on earth can we have productive conversations on issues we think are important?  People too easily talk past each other.  The internet allows this to happen at lightening speed.  Talking, talking, talking, hearing very little.

So...  while, to date, I'm somewhat failing in my goal of conquering the mindless taking in of Youtube content in the evenings, it remains my goal to do just that.

Some good things so far from this exercise:

We've been motivated to have some people from church over recently.  One of the encouragements of the fast is to replace screen time with community.  We're no strangers to having folks over, but it's easy to get lazy about it when weeks go by and we don't do it.

Greg and I have played games a couple of times.  Nothing very exciting, but it's good for us.  Good for our gray matter, good for our relationship.  We enjoy games.  We need to do it more.  I'm struck by how wholesome it is to just play a game with another person.

A few evenings ago we played Othello, last night Boggle. Other great two-person games we have:  Mastermind, Scrabble, Upwords, Battleship, Eclipse, Cathedral, Blokus, Tangoes, Chess, Checkers, Backgammon, and any number of card games or other games we tend to play with more people, but are probably fun for two.  

I'll write about some struggles, and attempts at solutions in my next post on the subject.  Meanwhile, thank you for being online and reading this post about me trying to spend less time online. 😆