Surprises in the Garden

After the rain we’ve gotten, the yard and garden needed some attention. I mowed on Wednesday and trimmed with the weed whacker yesterday morning. I found a few surprises while I worked. A couple of my grapevines have produced grapes!

Those grapevines are driving me nuts. The upper vines all looked dead well past the time they should have been leafing out. I cut everything back to the new growth at the ground, intending to train up new central trunks. I lost track of what the vines were doing—they are obscured by the jungle of tomatoes—and in the interim, they have decided to take over the world. Ironically, these bunches of grapes are on the vines that have always been the least productive. Go figure.

The UPS driver complimented me yesterday on how good the grapes looked. He drives by the big garden on his way to the neighbor’s house and we compare notes on our crops every summer. He also has grapevines and said that his were very slow in leafing out this year.

That whole section of berries is getting a major overhaul next year. I have to move the elderberry bush and I’d like to put in more blueberry bushes.

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I did a wonderful interview on Wednesday with a young man in Canada who has a sewing YouTube channel. If I get the file edited today, that will be next week’s podcast. Toward the end of the interview, he asked if he could ask me a few questions, and that turned out to be a lot of fun. He wanted to know how drafting knitting patterns compared to drafting sewing patterns. The two processes are alike in some ways but very different in others. Because knitting is a numbers-based process, most of my knitting pattern grading was done using spreadsheets. Most sewing pattern grading is done flat or with some kind of CAD program.

I am going to work on a two community projects this morning, one of which is compiling the list of volunteer tasks for next month’s homestead foundation pie social. I said that I would chair the upcoming pie social and create a handbook for it, but after this one, someone else needs to take over chairing it. I am chairman of the plant sale (and the fundraising committee) but I refuse to be chairman of all three of the foundation’s major fundraising events. (We host a spring and fall pie social.) Other people in this community need to step up and start taking some responsibility. Everyone wants the fun but no one wants the work. I’m getting tired of shoving my business to the side because the homestead foundation needs so much help. It could be a full-time job if I let it.

The other project is working on the craft co-op website, but the bones of that are in place and that project shouldn’t take too much time.

After that, the rest of today and tomorrow will be devoted to sewing. I can’t have a podcast about sewing if I never get to sew. I might make a few more zipper pouches but I really want to make that Haralson bag. The edgestitch foot I ordered for my Bernina came in and I’d like to try that out, too.

I had a hair appointment yesterday afternoon in town, so I stopped at the quilt store on my way. Two of my students were there with their new 990s. The 990 is quite the machine. Both of them were setting up their embroidery units and they told me that now that I have an 880 with an embroidery module, I need to come and take embroidery classes with them. I probably will. Sometimes it’s fun to be the student instead of the teacher.

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The National Weather Service confirmed four tornadoes touched down in northeast Ohio on Tuesday, including the one near my mother’s house. As of last night, over 5000 residents in Avon, where I grew up, still didn’t have electricity because the power companies can’t restore the lines until they cut up and remove all the downed trees. It’s a mess, and now they are getting rain from Debby.