Weave in the Winter, Weed in the Summer

 Part of the cycle of my life here on the farm is the switching from summer work on the farm to winter work in the studio.  I weave in the winter, I weed in the summer.  So this time of year I am gearing up to make almost all of the product that I will have to sell at the Market this summer.  I work in the studio daily through about the middle of April and then keep the looms warped up so that I can periodically take a break and weave a few more inches.

I currently have 4 looms, 2 table looms and 2 floor looms.  I try to keep at least 3 of them warped all the time as I like to switch around between projects.  Each one is different and if I start to loose steam or get bored with one I can switch to another one and keep going.  I get a lot more done that way.

The picture above is one of the table looms where I am now working on the novelty yarn scarves.  I have several more warped up and ready to when this one is finished. I will tie the new warp onto the end of this one to save time and yarn.

 I am putting a warp to make crackle scarves on the 8 harness loom.  This pattern on the cover of the book above has been one that I've wanted to weave ever since I got the book years ago.  It's a complicated pattern and I want to take my time with it so it's a good one to start this time of year when I don't feel as much time pressure as I will by the end of March.

To keep track of the threading I've got a bookmark held against the threading chart so I don't loose my place.  Slow and steady is the way not to get lost in something like this.  I do love working on complicated patterns.

My big loom was warped up for more rag rugs.  I got about 5 inches woven a couple of days ago when one of the metal bars that connect the treadles to the harnesses snapped from metal fatigue.  I've had this loom for over 12 years and it was used when I got it so it has gotten lots and lots of use.  Joel has been my hero and rescuer and has spent the last 2 days taking it all apart and taking the rivets out of the metal bars and replacing them all.  Not going to wait until another one snaps.  It has been a major project but she should be good to go for another 20 years.

Of course, I had to unweave and unthread everything so the loom could be taken apart.  But the warp is still would on the warp beam so tomorrow I start rethreading the whole thing.  I hope to be back in the weaving in a coupe of days.

Winter Garden

 I found the first snowdrops today.  After a week of cold weather with the ground frozen solid the temperatures have now risen into the high 40's and things are thinking spring has come.  A lot of things are probably in for a bit of a shock to come.  But the snowdrops can take such weather vagaries.  They'll keep on blooming through snow and sleet and, well, you know.

Also, the hazelnuts catkins are coming out.  These are the first trees to bloom.  They are wind pollinated so don't have to wake for any bugs to wake up in the spring.

Meanwhile there is still plenty of food in the garden.  Brussels sprouts are one of our all time favorite vegetables and these little guys will feed us for another month or so.  One of my daughters called them "Fairy Cabbages" and thus they remain to our family.

Admittedly the winter cabbages look rather sad after having been frozen for a number of days but these guys will surprise you.  Cut them and peel off the damaged outer leaves and inside are delicious, sweet, juicy cabbages. 

The chard is starting to grow again after the freeze.  All the outer leaves froze but new ones are already poking through.
There are still boxes of squash and bags of onions behind the bed and apples, beets, carrots and potatoes stored in the greenhouse.  There is an amazing plenty of food on this farm.

Happy New Year

A new year is beginning again.  On the farm the years have a rhythm, a sameness that you can count on.  The seasons follow one after another in a dependable way and the chores are determined by that cycle.  Now the land is mostly asleep, frozen hard this week by an outbreak of cold air from the interior of Canada.  But the winter jasmine is blooming, and the hellebores are poking their flowers up.  They let us know that another cycle is in full swing and soon it will be spring again.  Already I can sense that the days are longer.  Every minute counts.

Some things are the same and some things change.  I have decided after 12 years of knitting hats for sale, making a bit over 1200 hats in that time, that I am tired of making hats.  I still like them, I still enjoy knitting but I really don't want to crank out another 100 hats this year.  So one of the things I am doing is making up some scarves out of the baskets of novelty yarns that I collected over the years to decorate the felted hats.  I saw something similar to this on a Facebook weaving page and grabbed a handful of coordinating yarns and wound a warp.  I wasn't quite sure that the fuzzy mohair boucle yarn would work very well as a warp.  I was afraid that it would tangle and clog up the work, but to my amazement and pleasure it has given no problem.  I love the colors.  It is weaving up very nicely.  I'll post pictures when it's done.  I think I will make up a bunch of these and use up a bunch of that leftover yarn.  I do love to do stash reduction projects like this.

May Flowers

 April is always so full of promise but it is hard to be patient for things to really and truly start blooming.  Thank goodness for the bulbs like daffodils and tulips, but it is in May that the shrubs and perennials suddenly burst out with flowers.  Above is a lovely pale pink weigela that just started to bloom.

 And the peonies..... We wait literally for weeks as the buds swell just a little bit more each day for those gorgeous flowers to burst into bloom. 

 And then there are the irises. 

But it isn't just the garden flowers that are bursting into bloom.  The wild Rosa nutkana are starting to bloom and in the woods is this lovely hawthorn tree.  I'm not sure what variety it actually is.  It isn't quite like the English hawthorn that has seeded itself all over the place and is also in bloom.  It's more delicate and taller, but it also doesn't quite fit the description of native hawthorns that I've found.  It may well be a cross with an English hawthorn.  Whatever it is, it is so lovely in its woodland glade.

New Growth

 Little plants coming up everywhere.   Above are tomato seedlings getting ready to be put into the hoophouse for the  indoor tomato crop.

 Delphinium seedlings

 Gai Lon plants ready to go out in the garden. And summer squash just coming up.

Not much to eat in the garden quite yet but there is hope and promise in these little plants.

Spring has Sprung

 Spring has sprung.  it was actually 66 F the other day.  Took my sweater off, opened all the doors and aired out the house.  Hung laundry on the line outside.  Whoopee.

 And, of course, the spring work has begun.  Joel planted out 540 little lettuce plants.  They are under a cover of Remay to keep the golden crowned sparrows from eating them and to give them a bit of extra warmth as the nights are still cold.  That was about a week ago and they are 3 times that size now.  Yay!!  Can't wait for the first salad.  We do buy the occasional head of Romaine from the grocery store but are mainly eating purple sprouting broccoli and kale these days.  Good stuff but the first fresh lettuce from the garden is like an elixir.

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 Daffodils and hellebores and the first tulips, grape hyacinths, early plum blossoms and forsythia are blooming.  The grass is green and even needed to be mowed yesterday.

 I'm cleaning marigold seeds that I saved from last year.  I never fail to be amazed by the bounty of nature.  All these seeds from a handful of seed pods.  If left to their own devices most would never get a chance to grow but would either be a gift to seeds eaters like birds or bugs, or be reabsorbed back into the soil by bacteria. 

All winter I have been weaving and knitting up a storm.  Now I have to get everything hemmed and fringed and ironed and finished and tagged.  The first Farmers Market is April 12.  We won't have a lot of vegetables yet but I will have lots of rugs and potholders and tea towels.

We're off on another year.

Last Breath of Winter (We Hope)

 Just about the time we are really thinking about spring, the seed orders are here and organized into boxes for planting, the snowdrops are about at the end of their bloom,

 and the daffodils are poking their heads up and their buds are swelling.......we get 8 inches of snow.  This isn't the first blast of winter this year.  We've had two episodes of the dry cold NE'r we get here as icy cold dry air streams down the Fraser Canyon in Canada from the Arctic and blasts us with high winds that freeze and dry everything out.  And a previous short term snowstorm, but so far we haven't had any really serious snow.  Until yesterday when it snowed all day and just kept snowing in spite of weather predictions that had it turning to rain in the afternoon.  Which it didn't do. By evening it was a winter wonderland of trees covered with snow, fields white and beautiful.  We went for a walk down to the beach in a virtual winter fairyland.

 Today it is clear and sunny and above freezing.  But it is going to take a while to melt all that snow.  One of the chickens has had enough of cold feet and flew up into a rose bush to get off the ground.

 Joel went out several times yesterday to dump the heavy wet snow off the hoophouse roofs to keep them from collapsing.

But....inside one of them we have planted peas and sweet peas.  It may not be toasty in there but it is warm enough for them.  It gives us hope of spring.

Snow

We don't get snow all that often here so when we do I have to rush out and document it.  This is what we woke up to this morning.  This would normally be a harvest day for Market but knowing it was supposed to snow we did all that yesterday.  As we are harvesting mainly root crops they hold really well and won't be  hurt by the extra day.  It is supposed to turn to rain any minute now so we're enjoying it while it lasts.

Marmalade

When we go to England there are several typically English foods that we have to eat: Cream teas, Ribena, (black currant juice drink), draft hard cider, fish and chips, English bacon and....marmalade.  You can get English marmalade here but you have to hunt a bit for it and there are so many more brands over there.  In the olden days before terrorists plots in shampoo bottles we used to bring back a bunch of it with us.  Now I have to make my own.

I get my bitter Seville  oranges from a place in California called Ripe to You who specializes in unique citrus varieties.  My favorite recipe is one from David Lebovitz.  I've got the first part of the first batch simmering on the stove right now.  I'm all out of last year's batch so I can't wait. 

Hunkered Down

 Almost every winter at some point we get a NE'er.  Arctic air from the interior of Canada flows down the Fraser Canyon and swoops down upon us with its icy blast.  We rarely every manage to get snow first as this air is very, very dry so without the snow to mulch and protect plants we have been hustling around mulching vulnerable things like the dahlias.  In this climate dahlias can't survive unprotectd but a good thick mulch of leaves has brought them through winter after winter and it is much easier than digging them.  I will dig them every 3 or 4 years as the plants get so big we can't get between them to harvest the flowers.

We also through a mulch of leaves over the last of the potatoes and several layers of Remay floating row covers over some of the carrots,

 Joel dug about 175 lbs. of beets and about 50 lbs. of our yellow carrots and put them on a pit with a foot or so of dirt over them.  That will keep them fine for several months.  He harvested a bunch of cabbages and kohlrabi and rutabagas which can be kept just fine in the greenhouse which being unheated just manages to stay above freezing in this sort of weather.  We will sell them at market this month.

Joel's Mom brought us the last bud of her Graham Thomas rose today before the cold weather killed the flower.  Such a pretty thing and it reminds us that spring will be just around the corner.

Last Day of Exploration

 Before we started out again we wanted to explore the village of Haworth a bit especially the church and parsonage, now the Bronte Museum where the Bronte sisters and family lived.  Finding out that the museum wasn't open until 11:00 Siri took off to walk as far as she could across the moors to Top Withens, the accepted site of Wuthering Heights.  As it was a 4 miles hike from the village she ended up turning around before she got all the way there.  I spent the time perusing the gift shop and book store and buying two books by Anne Bronte, a Bronte sister I was unfamiliar with, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.  Both of which I have really enjoyed reading.  I plan on going through all the other Bronte books this winter as it has been way too long since I read most of them.

After we left Haworth Siri navigated us to Malham Cove another one of those wonderful limestone gorges in the area.  Up on top of the gorge was this wonderful eroded limestone pavement.   She particularly wanted to see this because part of the 1992 movie of Wuthering Heights was filmed here.  I took one look at the area and realized that a scene in the next to the last Harry Potter movie had also been filmed there and I remembered that when I was watching that movie I wondered where  in the world that scene had been filmed.

In between the limestone rocks are the most lovely little plants, ferns and wildflowers taking advantage of the shelter the stones give them.  An amazing landscape.

 Then we headed north again to what is probably my favorite part of England (do I have to choose a favorite??) the Yorkshire Dales.  This is James Herriot country where the fictional (and the actual vet who wrote the books) drove over these incredible winding steep roads to visit the isolated farmhouses in the deep dales and top of the high moors.  This country is so beautiful.  I've been here twice before the first time on my very first trip and I keep coming back.

My incentive for dragging us all the way back here to North Yorkshire was a bit part to meet Pat, a woman who I had only known through her blog, The Weaver of Grass.  She writes about the life of her and her husband who she calls the Farmer on their farm near Leyburn.  The idea of meeting these people in person was such a wonderful idea.  When I emailed Pat telling her that we were coming over and suggesting we get together for lunch or something she invited us to come to the farm and spend the night.  We were delighted.  And it was such a lovely time.  We went for a walk with the Farmer around the farm in the late afternoon and Pat cooked us a delicious dinner with lots of local food and enjoyed telling us where it came from and whose farm it was raised on.  We spent the evening talking as if we had known each other for ages.  And well, we had, through our blogs.  I love the internet and the way it has opened up the world.  I am so so much richer for it.

Thank you, Pat, and the Farmer, for your hospitality and friendship and the great dinner and breakfast and all the sandwiches you made us for the train trip back to London.  It was the perfect ending for such a perfect trip.

And then the next morning we drove our heroic car that had survived all those narrow twisty roads, steep grades, all our stuff and muddy feet and Joel's driving on the "other" side of the road to York where we left it and took the train to London.  We found our hotel not far from Kings Cross station where we came in and where we would get our train out to Gatwick the next day.  None of us really wanted to go out and see any of London so we holed up in the hotel, ate the rest of Pat's sandwiches for dinner and watched an episode of Autumnwatch on the BBC.  And then we went home.  And started dreaming about going back.  I love England.

Peak District to Bronte country

  We headed into the Peak District National Park and stopped at Winnats Pass, a steep gorge surrounded by limestone cliffs.  We drove down to the bottom of the pass  and  Joel and I walked about 2/3 of the way back up through this gate into a field full of sheep.

 Siri climbed all the way back up to the top.

We headed north through the park trying again to avoid big cities, this time Sheffield and Manchester.  I had never been in this part of the country and it was so beautiful.  The fall colors were lovely all through the trip but here we often saw larch trees in their lovely golden fall color. 

 We were headed to Haworth for the night, the town the Brontes lived in.  We passed a bit of the Rochdale Canal and decided that there was still enough daylight to stop and look at the canal boats for a little bit.  We keep dreaming of renting one and exploring some of the countryside this way.

The Haworth hostel was in a big old 19th century manor house with one of the loveliest stained glass windows I think I've ever seen, pomegranates and swallows.

Photos of the stained glass window were taken by Siri Thorson.

In search of roses

 In the morning we headed north again toward the Peak District a part of England none of had seen and were eager to explore.  First, though we stopped at the Rollright Stones.

We wanted to avoid driving through the big Midlands cities like Birmingham  so we swung west toward Shrewsbury.  Joel was driving and Siri navigating and as I don't remember a lot about this stretch of the journey I have a feeling I probably fell asleep in the back seat.  Sigh.  I can sleep at
home.

I have loved David Austin's English roses ever since I discovered them 20 or so years ago.  I have a couple of dozen of them planted around the place and am always willing to find a spot for another one.  So since we were passing though the area where they  have a 2 acre rose garden. we knew we needed to stop.  Since it was October we didn't expect to find  much in bloom but we were very pleasantly surprised.  The gardens were beautiful with an amazing lot of flowers still in bloom.  I made a list of new ones to find a spot for next spring.  And then we went to the Tea Room for a spot of tea and lunch.

That night we spent at the hostel at Hartington Hall, a wonderful old 17th century manor house that had a 13th century wall and where Bonnie Prince Charlie was reputed to have slept.

Northward

 The night before we were to leave Bere Regis and head north was the night of the big storm and we wondered if we would indeed be able to take off in the morning.  Luckily by morning the storm had blown itself out in our area and it was a sunny day.  Along the road we did see downed trees and there were flooded patches of road here and there but in general we didn't see too much damage.  This apple tree was in an orchard that the footpath to Cadbury Castle went through.  It had obviously gone down the night before as it looked fresh was covered with apples.  The footpath system in England is wonderful.  Public right of way footpaths go everywhere, through fields, along houses, through barnyards.  Where they cross a stone wall or fence there is often a stile or a painted section of wall to indicate that you should cross there.  That's so the farmer only has one piece of fence that needs repair from being climbed over.  Gates are to be left as found, open or closed.

Cadbury Castle is an iron age hill fort that is considered by many a likely site for Camelot.  We didn't take the time to climb the hill but we did enjoy the walk through the orchard.  Here we were not only following in the footsteps of the Arthurian legends but author Jack Whyte's wonderful Camulod series about England in the 5th century after the legions left.  We drove through Glastonbury and saw the Tor in the distance but took a wrong turn at a roundabout and decided to keep on going to Bath.

 Bath has been on my list of places to see for a long, long time.  I love stories of Roman Britain, and Jane Austen's Bath adventures.  The Roman Baths are as amazing as I thought they'd be.  The water is warm and a little smelly.  You can drink a little bit of sanitized water from a fountain but I did wonder if the sanitizing process might well take out all the virtue.  After all, Jane Austen didn't drink it  sanitized.

 We spent our first  night on the road in the hostel in Stow-on-theWold.  This is one of my favorite English towns and the third time I've been here.  It has a wonderful big market square surrounded by houses made of that lovely, lovely golden Cotswold stone.  Here the final battle of the English Civil War was fought.

When I went to England the first time 20 years ago with my friend, Alicia, I took a picture of this incredible door.  When I finally got the film developed I had no idea where it was.  This was, of course, before the internet, so I couldn't just Google the places I'd been until I found it.  When Siri and I went back 3 years later I took her to Stow-on-the-Wold just to show her some of the places I'd been before and lo and behold there was my marvelous door in the church of St. Edward.  This time I went on purpose to find it again.  Tolkien must have known about this door.  To me it looks so much like his drawing of the door to Moria. 

Bere Regis

 I already posted a picture of the little house we rented in Bere Regis so I thought that before we move on to other parts of the country I'd show a bit  more of the village.  The streets in many English villages are so narrow, having been built long before the advent of the automobile, that people just park on both sides of the street leaving a narrow space between the cars that you have to take turns to drive through.  You just have to look ahead to see if anyone else is coming the opposite way and pull out into a vacant space to let them pass or they do likewise for you.  I don't want to here any more complaints about parking in Friday Harbor!

This view is down the hill toward our little house, one of the village pubs is there to the left. We had dinner there one night to use the wifi and my lamb burger came with arugula (rocket) on it.  I commented to the waitress that the last time I was in England (10 years ago) I didn't find arugula all over the place.  "It's trendy", she said.  As an arugula grower that's a trend I can approve of.  Interestingly all of the salads we had in Iceland also had arugula in them.

 As we walked around the village one morning I saw this neat house with one tall blank wall and one round wall.  I wonder if at one time it was part of a bigger structure.

This part of England is Thomas Hardy country and Bere Regis was featured as the town of Kingsbere in Tess of the D'Urbervilles.  The church was were the D'Urberville family was buried.  We went through and all around it one morning and had a nice talk with the Vicar.  The church dates back to Saxon times and there is a bit a wall with the remains of Saxon stonework.  From there on the church as added onto century by century until it reached it's current size in the 19th century. The walls are made up of courses of stone and small blocks of flint.  For more information and pictures look here.