Spring time is always insane busy for me. See, I’m a gardener. A pretty ravenous one. And I actually run a seed bank, and this time of year, whew boy, does that take up a lot of my time. Not only are there the seeds and all that entails to go through and plant, there’s the yardwork.
Oh, the yardwork.
At the end of the summer I’m getting pretty tired of mowing the lawn and weed whacking and trimming, but after the snow melts and the ground thaws in the spring, you can’t keep me indoors. Every weekend I’m sore and exhausted after building up those muscles that have atrophied over our pretty harsh winters (wherein I stay indoors and hide, attempting to avoid the snow and -20C temperatures at any cost).
The picture above is of my seed starting endeavours – every late winter/early spring I start planting, usually around 40 types of tomatoes, which I then mix in with squash, corn, and a few other things that strike my fancy that year. Within the next few weeks I’ll be planting out the spinach, lettuce, beets, and some other leafy greens.
Then there’s the keeping track of it all. I keep pretty meticulous records, especially of the tomatoes, for my seed bank records. How long everything took to germinate, various stages of growth, when the plant flowers, when it sets fruit, when it’s harvested… then I keep photographic records of everything as well. I’m not going to lie, it’s a pretty good amount of work. And I love it.
But what about the knitting?
The knitting is surely chugging along. It’s still too chilly to be outside with the plants all the time, so that still leaves plenty of time to knitting. I’m still working on the two patterns mentioned in this post, with one of them almost ready for testing, and the other still in the swatching phase. I have a really good foundation for the second one, but I need a little something extra for it, and I just haven’t found that special thing I want yet.
On top of that I have a few more ideas that are sketched out, and a few more that are still but seeds in my brain. If only my fingers could knit faster and then I’d be able to make the ideas tangible objects so much faster!
But I’m going to sit down, refocus, and get the vague notions sketched out, then finish up the two I’m working on. This seems to be a running theme with me and coming up with designs – too many ideas, I scatter my efforts on too many at a time, then they all take much longer than they should.