Mending and Muscari

One of my favorite wool sweaters finally wore a hole in the elbow.  It was from the thrift store and had quite a bit of wear when I found it, but I liked the blue-grey color, and I’m always a sucker for wool.

Unfortunately, I didn’t realize there was a hole in the elbow until we were on our way out the door, and my eldest pointed it out to me.  With no time to darn it, I sent her back into the house for a block of foam, some roving and a needle-felting needle – I’d have to mend it while we were out and about.  Once we reached our destination, a few minutes of work and it was repaired, with a turqouise swirl and some polka dots for decoration.

A week later, and the patch has held up quite well.  Ruth and I spent some time together planting Muscari bulbs under the Bavay’s Green Gage Plum, and I was glad to have my workhorse of a wool sweater on.

Muscari are one of my favorite spring flowers, and the milder weather this week has allowed us to plant many more bulbs.  These delicate little blossoms do more than provide beauty for the gardener – all spring bulbs help suppress the growth of grass.  Grass fights its own battle, attempting to inhibit the growth of the fruit trees that shade it out, so planting bulbs naturally aids the fruit trees which they encircle.  

While we were kneeling in the mulch to plant, Bumblebee, our Welsh Harlequin, came over to Ruth, begging for attention.  All the poultry know that Ruth will always drop what she’s doing to give scritches. 

In the winter, the poultry are loose in the yard, eating slugs, slug eggs, weed seeds, adding fertility to all the garden beds.  The trick has been how to keep them out of the beds already planted with garlic and mulched with straw (chickens relish scratching all the straw out of the beds and into the path).  They inevitably get under or over any temporary fencing we put up.  The solution has been to stake the fencing flat – so try as she might, Cookie can’t destroy the garlic bed with her scratching while we have our backs turned – but she can peck and find any seeds leftover in the straw.  (In the spring, when the birds return to their run in the orchard, the fencing comes up just as the garlic is germinating.)

Joining the KCCO today.  Back to tomorrow for the Yarn Along if I have time in the midst of Thanksgiving preparations and the girls’ derby scrimmage.