Back in the Gardening Business

When I talked to my sister last Sunday, she said that I should hurry and finish her quilt because it's almost gardening time.  That thought had already occurred to me, but I figured I had a few more weeks before planting time.  The garden centers here aren't yet stocking their early vegetables, like broccoli and cabbage, and probably won't have them until at least the first of March.  I have sweet pea seeds, and fava bean seeds, both of which could be planted now, but, to tell you the truth, I've been kind of bummed out on gardening.  Last year's summer vegetable garden was such a phenomenal flop that I didn't even plant the fall crop seeds I'd bought.  I had decided to cut back this year - maybe just a few tomato and squash plants - and it won't be time to plant those things for a couple of months.

Yesterday afternoon, I came home from work, put on my "house clothes," and went to the quilting machine, thinking I'd knock out the rest of my sister's quilt.  (I only lack about a foot being done with the quilting.)  I'd just tightened the knobs on the quilting frame and was sliding the machine into position when the telephone rang.  It was my daughter-in-law, telling me that they were across the road at Nanny's house, and I'd have time to grab hugs from the grandsons if I'd come on down.  I jumped into some shoes and walked down the driveway.

Long before I reached the house, I saw a wide strip of freshly-plowed earth in the garden spot.  What in the world was up?  The garden never gets officially plowed this early!  For years, I've begged Pop-Pop to plow the garden for an early crop, but he has never, ever done it.  But there sat the little tractor, with the disk attachment hooked to it, fresh dirt on its blades. 

It was a pleasant evening, and everybody was out in the yard.  Pop-Pop was sitting, smoking a cigarette, in the doorway of the tractor shed.  I said hello to everybody, then turned to Pop-Pop.  "What got into you?" I asked him, nodding toward the garden.

"Time to plant 'taters," he replied. 
Taters?  Who said anything about planting taters?  I surely hadn't!  I'd tried growing potatoes a few years ago - you can probably read about it in my 2008 posts - and it was a screaming failure. 

"I figure 25 pounds of seed taters ought to do it," Pop-Pop added.  He thumped his ashes. 

Twenty-five pounds?  Good grief!  My one attempt at growing potatoes involved only a 5-pound bag of seed potatoes, just two half-rows, and that little bit nearly worked me to death.  I had permanently marked potatoes off my list of things to grow.

"Well, allright," I said.  "I'll go find some before the weekend."

He said he was going to disk it again today. 

"Put a couple more rows on it," I told him.  "I have some seeds...."

Learning Things the Hard Way

I should be quilting.  Or, more exactly, UN-quilting.  But I get so dang frustrated that sometimes I just have to say, "Scr*w this for a while," and go do something else.

The quilt I mentioned in the previous blog is about 90% finished.  A tip from a mailing list convinced me to first quilt all the way across the top border, then quilt the area between the side borders (leaving the side borders free), then quilt all the way across the bottom border.  I then unloaded the quilt from the frame and re-loaded it sideways, the point being to enable me to quilt the side borders in one long stretch, rather than in short bursts, as I would have done.

I have been dreading this point for weeks.  First, I was almost dreading unrolling the quilt and seeing the whole project in all (or 90% of) it's glory.  Up to now, I'd only seen 9"-wide stretches of the quilt.  I knew that I'd encountered multiple little problems along the way, and I hadn't always been happy with the way I'd fixed them.  Would the sum total of all these little messes make the whole thing look shabby?  Secondly,
this is my first "real" quilt with this machine; turning this quilt in the frame during the quilting process is a step I had not practiced. 

Note to self:  don't try a new technique on something important, as there will always be unanticipated kinks.

I unloaded the quilt a couple of days ago.  Before re-loading it, I spread it out on a bed to examine it.  Thankfully, though it is far from perfect, the overall effect was not as bad as I had feared.)  Deeming it worthy of finishing, I re-loaded it into the frame.  It took several tries to get it right.  I had trouble getting the borders to lie flat and straight.  I had trouble transferring my quilting design to the fabric.  Then, when I finally began to quilt, I had trouble with extra fullness in the border.

Now, a professional quilter would be wondering why I'm having so much trouble getting these side borders to lie flat, and might suspect that my borders weren't straight and flat to begin with, but that person would be wrong; I was meticulous in my measuring, cutting, and sewing; this sucker was straight and square, once upon a time.  A professional quilter might also wonder why I didn't transfer the quilting design to the fabric before I put the quilt back in the frame.  That person might be correct in suspecting that, in some things, I am just plain dumb.  In any case, after quilting the first row across the first side border, I found that there was a big mess of puckers under the quilt, where I hadn't been paying such close attention.  I'm going to have to take that row out. 

But not right now.

Drawing with Thread

Last fall, while on a camping trip, I visited a small-town quilt shop and, to make a long story short, came out with a used short-arm quilting machine and frame.  It came with a bunch of pantographs - or is it pantograms?  I never remember -  a laser pointer, a "Cruise Control" thing, and a DVD showing how to thread the machine.  It was just too good a deal to pass up.

I could not wait to get home and try it out.

I loaded a "sandwich" of old bed sheets and left-over batting into the frame and started practicing.  It didn't take long to figure out that pantographs (?) and laser pointers are not for me.  It makes me nervous not to watch the needle as it moves across the fabric.  I pulled up a chair, sat down in front of the machine, and soon realized that I could "draw" with thread.  My pantograph shelf is now a "stuff" shelf. 

The picture to the right is a shot of an "iris garden" quilt I'm working on.  The quilting machine did all of this.  It is a mish-mash of trial and error, but it's much more forgiving of the errors than one might think.  This is just the top; it has batting and backing behind it, but I intend to cut most of that away before making the final "quilt sandwich" for the quilting process.  (I'm hoping for a trapunto effect.  We'll see.)   Batting and backing are not necessary, as I learned while doing the borders without them.  Here are some other things I learned in the process:

1.  Stabilize the fabric you're about to embroider.  I did not stabilize mine, and am noticing some pulling around the design.  (Hopefully, this will "quilt out.")  Next time, I'll try something like iron-on interfacing or embroidery stabilizer. 

2.  Water-soluable stabilizer is great for transferring patterns to the fabric.  Draw/trace right onto the stabilizer and then pin it to the fabric.  It stays put very well.  Glad "Press & Seal" wrap also works well, though there'll be some debris to remove.  Paper patterns can be pinned or taped to the fabric and sewn over, too.  One word of caution:  if you intend to re-trace the design, whether on paper or Press & Seal, pull the paper off after the first stitching, as re-tracing the design will most certainly create tiny "bobble pockets" which won't want to give up the paper. 

3.  If your frame has any bumps - bolt heads, or seams in the metal - fix them before you start.

4.  Try the foot pedal rather than a speed controller for delicate or tight areas.

5.  Keep good tension on the sides of the fabric. 

6.  While "painting" the design, keep in mind the direction/shape of the object you're painting, and move the machine in that direction; when filling a circle, move the machine in circles.

7.  You don't have to fill every speck.  In fact, you can use empty spaces for highlights, just as you can when drawing with a pencil. 

8.  Create shading by putting down more thread on the dark side of objects, or by switching to a darker thread.  If a dark thread seems too dark, sew a lighter shade on top of it. 

9.  Vary your "filling" patterns for different objects.  Use long straight lines, meandering lines, tiny circles, cross-hatching.  You get the idea.

10.  Use whatever kind of top thread you want, but fill your bobbins with embroidery bobbin thread.  You won't have to change bobbins nearly as often.

11.  Do an internet search for "thread painting."  There are technique videos out there.  Some of them are done with machines that have a zig-zag stitch (my quilting machine does only a straight stitch), but you can still get ideas for filler patterns, etc.

Post-Season Analysis

It's raining here today.  Rain always makes me think about gardening, especially when there's been a long, dry spell, as there has been this year.

This year's garden was a flop.  It started well.  The garden plots were tilled and ready when planting time came, and most of what we planted thrived for a little while.  But we lost many of our tomato plants, first to rain, then to blight, then to heat.  We had a nice first picking of squash, then the vines - all of them, simultaneously - up and died on us.  The green beans came up, looked great, ran up their poles, and then didn't do squat all summer.  I never even got the butter beans planted.  Our only successes this year were with okra and purple hull peas.

I planted broad beans (should've planted them earlier than I did).  I had two packs of seeds; there were (maybe) 12 seeds in each pack.  About half of them came up, and some of those withered and died.  When it was all said and done, I had one or two massive bean plants.  They produced big old pods, and I figured I'd let them dry on the plant and at least have some seeds for next year.  The pods turned black and fell off before the beans matured. 

I planted black crowder peas and purple crowder peas.  There were precious few of those seeds, too, slightly less than enough for two half-rows each.  They struggled, but made peas.  Those peas dried up on the vines.  Pop-Pop may have picked them dry and saved them for seeds.  I hope he did.

The problem with all of these things was mostly neglect.  I worked more than usual at the office, traveled a little more than usual, had more than the usual number of things demand my attention.  And the heat...mercy, it was hot - weeks of temperatures near (and over) 100. 

But I intend to do better next year.

------------

Tomato Canning

I gave up on getting enough tomatoes from my own garden to make salsa, spaghetti sauce, and canned tomatoes, so Tuesday I stopped by a vegetable stand and bought a box of "seconds" tomatoes.  These are tomatoes that aren't quite perfect enough to be sold to the grocery stores but are fine for cooking/canning.  The box yielded 4 quarts of canned tomatoes and 8 pints of salsa.  Not bad.  I'm going back for more next week. 

And, next year, I'm taking a vacation from growing tomatoes.

Garden Bum

I was dreadfully lazy this morning, and so it was around noon before I summoned the gumption to get dressed and poke my head outside.  It was humid, but not as mercilessly hot as it has been for the past few days.  Thinking a walk to the big garden might help me shake the fuzzies out of my brain, I put on my gardening shoes and set off down Nanny's driveway.

As I walked, I noted the sound of a lawnmower running.  It was hard to tell which direction the sound was coming from.  I glanced around, but didn't see any of the neighbors mowing.  A few yards farther down the driveway, I realized that I was heading in the direction of the sound.  The lawnmower sounded stationary, as if it was just idling.  I figured that Pop-Pop was mechanicing on something in his shed, until I got close enough to realize that the noise was coming from behind the shed. 

Sure enough, it was a lawnmower, an old riding model that Pop-Pop has been trying to resuscitate, just sitting there idling.  Good job! I thought, and strode on toward the garden, wondering where Pop-Pop was. 

Then I noticed that there was a tautly-stretched rope tied to the back of the lawnmower.  I followed the rope with my eyes.  It disappeared over the little hill behind the shed.  Wondering what was going on, I veered toward the hill, just in time to see Pop-Pop's head poke up.  As I got closer, I could see that the other end of the rope was tied to the front axle of another lawnmower, the one Pop-Pop uses all the time, that was stranded just under the hill. 

"Need some help?" I called.

"Grass was slick," he replied.  He hitched up his britches and asked me to come give a little push while he gave a little pull.  I stationed myself at the back of the lawnmower while he limped over to climb onto the other one.  With his little pull and my little push, we brought the mower over the hill.  I un-tied the ropes for him, trying not to snicker.

Parts of the big garden are looking rough.  We've had a lot of rain this week, and the tomatoes in the low spot look pitiful.  The green beans, butterbeans, and crowder peas seem to be enjoying the water, though.  The second crop of squash plants are coming along. but no blooms yet.  On the two original zucchini plants, which have surved drought, floods, and grandchildren, I found five squash, each one a foot long and as big around as a baseball bat.  I saw some squash bugs scurrying around, though.  Note to self:  those new squash plants will need bug poison this late in the season.

Pop-Pop has mowed down the purple hull pea vines from the first crop, and says he's going to plow that spot for me to re-plant, once the ground dries up enough. I'm not sure we'll have enough time to make another crop, but it can't hurt to try, I reckon.


I pulled grass from between the green beans, checked the okra (it needs cutting), and inspected the tomatoes more closely.  My guess is that they're succombing to both rain and blight.  The only plants that look healthy are the mini-Roma tomatoes; they are dripping with fruit.  Tomorrow, if this lazy mood passes, I'm going to pick them and make spaghetti sauce with them.

4th of July

It's been alternately blistering hot and rainy for the past couple of weeks, and although I've kept up with the picking in the vegetable garden, I haven't done any weeding.  The grass is about to get out of control.  Yesterday morning, though, was lovely, and I decided to crank up the tiller and plow up some grass before the weekend festivities started.

While I was in Pop-Pop's shed gassing up the tiller, I heard a commotion - banging noises, and Nanny's high-pitched voice - on the back porch.  I stepped out to have a look.  Both Nanny and Pop-Pop were on the porch.  She was holding a butcher knife in one hand, and wiping her brow with a paper towel with the other.  Pop-Pop was staring at something on the floor.  I called to them, "Is everything OK up there?"

Nanny hollered back, "SNAKE!"

"Do you want me to bring a hoe?"

"No, I've done killed it three times," Nanny said, wiping her brow again. 

I went up to have a look. 

Snake, indeed.  It was hard to tell what kind it was, or how long it was, as Nanny had chopped it into so many pieces that it looked like Benjamin Franklin's "JOIN OR DIE" cartoon, but its individual pieces had impressive girth.  By this time, Nanny had raked all the pieces onto some newspaper.  She was insisting that it was a copperhead or a water moccasin; Pop-Pop said it was probably a chicken snake.  As I stood there listening to Nanny tell the sequence of events, I couldn't help but be amazed at her plucky courage.  Having seen the snake lying along the floor near the back wall, she'd grabbed a hoe that she'd left propped against the porch rail.  Her first blow had shortened the snake's back-end by about 1/3.  The remainder of the snake had crawled into a crack between a support post and the wall.  She'd grabbed its oozing stub and had tried to pull it out of the crack ("You did what?!").  She'd managed to drag it out a little - enough to cut another few inches off its tail - but it had somehow expanded the remaining section of its body so that she could not pull it free.  She'd run in the house to get a butcher knife, and had jabbed behind the support post until the snake surrendered, at which point she'd finished it off.  The banging I'd heard was the combat finale, as Nanny sectioned it a few more times for good measure.

As she and Pop-Pop stood there, fussing about who was going to dispose of the snake pieces, and where, I quietly sneaked back to the shed.  I do not do snakes, live or dead.  Some time later, The Husband came riding up on the lawnmower, and they made him do the dirty work.

The little black tiller was especially contrary about cranking, and so I was already tired and the day was growing hot by the time I got to the garden.  I'd purposefully not worked around the tomato plants very much, thinking that the less I disturbed the soil, the less blight fungus I'd stir up.  Thus, the grass was fairly tall, and firmly rooted, and it took a lot of digging to uproot it.  Three hours later, I gave out and headed for the shade of the back porch and a tall glass of water, without having even finished the tomato rows.  The grass I'd intended to rake up and dispose of (so that it wouldn't take hold again) still lay in the dirt, and the rest of the garden was still un-touched.  But the last of the purple-hull peas needed to be picked, the okra and eggplants needed to be cut, and I had a ton of other things to do besides gardening.  After cooling off a bit, I went back to the garden with a sack and a knife to get the okra and eggplants.  The Husband came out to pick the peas.  The rest of the tilling and raking would have to wait.  I put the tiller back in the shed, came home for a shower and a change of clothes, and climbed into my Jeep to drive into town.

Nanny had given me a short list of things she needed from the grocery store.  I shopped for her and for myself and started home.  The Jeep's top was down, and the wind felt wonderful after the heat of the garden, but about 2 miles from the house, a few big drops of rain plopped onto my windshield.  I kept driving, thinking I'd make it home before the downpour started.  Wrong.  By the time I reached my driveway, I was drenched.  The Husband came out to help with the groceries and the Jeep top, then we went to deliver Nanny's things.

She and Mama Jewell were sitting on the back porch, shelling peas.  "Good heavens, you're sopping wet!" Nanny exclaimed.  I took the groceries in, then came back out to sit with them.

"This rain came out of nowhere!" I said, explaining that I'd been caught in the rain with the top down.

"A piece of that snake must have landed belly-up,"* Nanny surmised.

* * * * * *

* There's an old wive's tale that, to bring rain, one should lay a snake belly-up on a fence.