Some Success in My Vege Garden

 My garden is still very up and down and the weather has been the same. We alternate between 30+ degrees Celsius and freezing rain and wind. I even had the fire going about a week ago. 

I've just been spending some time in the sun, listening to the bellbirds singing in the oak tree, trying to make a dent in the weeds that have taken off and reflecting on what a lovely and peaceful place it is even so.

I wasn't able to provide fresh peas for Christmas lunch, but I was able to pick four pods yesterday. I did provide some new potatoes. They were carefully exposed and picked without disturbing the rest of the growing potatoes or plants very much.

Unfortunately, all the rain has created a problem with the old water trough I planted carrots and radishes in. I had hoped that the stones I'd filled the bottom with would be sufficient drainage, but they weren't enough for the amount of rain we've had. 

Many of my carrots and radishes have rotted just beneath the surface. I did look at the bung that these troughs have at the bottom. But I don't think this has moved at all since the trough was made however many decades ago and it isn't moving now.

We've discussed drilling it out and drilling holes in the trough itself but no one is prepared to commit to retiring it from possible future use as an actual water trough. 

My tomatoes are doing very well. I've been sticking the laterals I pick off into the ground. They seem to sulk and wilt for a day or so, but the majority look like young, freshly planted tomato plants now. I'm hopeful for a good crop.

Both my cucumber plants (third Lebanese and second apple) are thriving. I have a small maybe 4 inch long Lebanese cucumber on the plant and I can honestly say it's the biggest cucumber I've ever managed to grow. 

I had to take the nets off as the beans were starting to grow through the netting instead of the support strings I've provided. 

I've decided to leave the wild part of my garden alone for now. I'm not keeping up with the weeds in the planted parts of the garden as it is and I don't currently have anything to plant in it. 

December in My Vege Garden

 It's been a while since I shared any of the goings on in my garden, I was asked about it recently by a friend who has been following the story.

There hasn't been a lot to tell really. 

I tightened up the nets since the blackbirds were still finding ways in. I planted more beans and sunflowers. Some of them have even started growing. 

Both my cucumber plants suddenly died. I've been told not to plant another cucumber in the same spot as there may be fungus in the soil that attacks cucumbers. I don't know if this is true, but it's easy enough to plant new ones somewhere else. 

The chilli seeds I planted have shown no signs of coming up. So I visited my Happy Place, as I've started calling Woodend Nursery, a local garden centre. The only chilli varieties they had were Jaiwas, a green chilli I'd never heard of before. I bought two and while I was there, I bought two new cucumber plants, one Lebanese and one Apple. I also picked up some red capsicum plants. 

I've since bought some habanero plants and wildfire chillies. 

Something was still eating my plants. It looked like slug damage, so I spread around some slug and snail bait. 

What a difference that made! In a week my beans doubled in size and grew new tendrils. 

Potatoes are still growing beautifully. I've been struggling with finding material to go into the tyres. We ran out of old branches to mulch and my pile of aged, rotted manure has all gone. I could use some of the fresher stuff from the paddocks but there is a fairly high chance of lots of problem seed growing in it too. Grass clippings and leaf mulch have been in use with some mulch from freshly cut branches. 

I haven't done much more clearing of the wild untouched parts. Partly because of the lack of mulch, partly because I don't have much yet to plant in it and partly because the weather has been hideous for the past few weeks. Any fine days are spent weeding and caring for existing plants. 

I have set up a mini greenhouse for raising seedlings. I had plenty started in it when a nasty storm with a lot of wind threw my little greenhouse and all its contents across my deck. I scooped up all the soil and unsprouted seeds into a large tray. We'll see if anything comes up in that. I rescued the sprouting sunflowers and Kumara. 

My plan was to start a few more brassicas every few weeks in successive plantings. They don't really freeze well so fresh is better. 

I haven't spoken about the drive behind this garden. I didn't want to open myself up to judgement if I failed. 

I've given up smoking. Gardening has been my distraction and my reward. Garden art has also played a fairly big part. I'm painting rocks to put around my garden. I've made a 'Welcome to My Garden' sign, although that hasn't made it into the garden yet.

I've also made personalised similar signs as Christmas presents for family, but you don't get to see them until after their new owners do.

War in My Vege Garden

 I'm in a war with vermin. 

Every time I walk into my garden, several blackbirds fly out. They are getting into the netting through small holes and having a field day.

I have had to replant many of my pea plants and three or four tomatoes. I found the husks of my sunflower seeds and no signs of plants. I have had to buy more plants and seeds to replace the damaged and missing ones. 

Over the weekend, my replacement cucumber suddenly died. It had been growing beautifully for two weeks, then overnight went greyish and fell over.

I questioned everything I had done. I thought the previous one had suffered wind damage so this one was well protected from the wind. It got plenty of sun and I was careful to water the soil and not the leaves. I put slug and snail bait around it. Maybe there was something wrong with the soil? But surely that would have shown up straightaway. 

The next day it was gone completely and there was a small hole where it had been. A tomato plant that had been nearly a foot tall and starting to flower was also missing. I picked up the next tomato plant from the path and replanted it in its spot. 

My peas have had their growing tips trimmed off. Where I'd had a 100% hit rate from my seed, I suddenly found gaps. 

I made windchimes and a rough scarecrow and noisemakers. I fixed up the bigger holes in the netting. I tried leaving a patch of soft turned over soil for them to play in. 

Yesterday, I saw a small rabbit running out of my garden as I went in. 

Today I found devastation in my brassica patch. I also found the hole the rabbit had gotten in through and blocked it up.

It's getting hard to stick to the concept I wanted in this garden. I feel like it's going to turn into a fortress rather than a fun peaceful garden. 

Growing Potatoes

 I've always heard lots of stories about growing potatoes. I'm told my grandfather grew them in 44 gallon drums and had to either chip them out carefully or cut the drum because he was so successful. 

But there are so many stories and different ways of doing it. They need a lot of water, but water sparingly or they'll rot in the ground. Plant potatoes to prepare a plot for future gardens, but not anywhere where you're going to want anything else because they will keep coming back forever. Cover them completely when you mound them up but leave some leaf tips above ground. 

A few years ago I tried growing them in tyres. As it grows, you fill up the tyre and then add another. When you're ready to harvest, tip your tyre pile over and pick up the potatoes. It worked beautifully. 

Dad and Hubby weren't convinced, so the year of the super garden we had both tyres and traditional rows that got mounded up. There were more potatoes in the mounds but they were mostly very small, think golf ball sized. In the tyres, they grew to easily fist-sized and bigger, but there were fewer of them. We still got an excellent crop and didn't need to buy potatoes for most of the year. We also kept Mum and Dad in potatoes. 

I'm doing tyres again this year. Mostly, I'm finding where potatoes are popping up from previous years crops and putting a tyre on top. Some are taking off and some are slower. 

I'm filling the tyres with layers of grass clippings, manure, leaf litter and wood mulch. 

I am curious to see how high I can get some of them before they start flowering. 

California Thistle in My Vege Garden

 When I wrote this morning about clearing the last patch of my garden and how long and slow it would be, I neglected to mention all the California Thistle in there.

Right now, as I'm spending I don't know how long picking thistles out of the soft parts of my hands, that is feeling like quite a big omission. 

On the surface, California Thistle is easy to get rid of. All its spreadability lies in the root system. What looks like hundreds and thousands of plants spread over a patch is actually only one plant. Cut off everything at ground level and it will die. Seeds are not viable, they're a distraction. 

However, in a patch like this, growing in and around the flowering quince that I'm leaving to cut tomorrow, taking it out at ground level is a lot more difficult. 

I've found that a gentle tug on the stem pulls out that stem plus some rootlets, so I've been doing it that way. I'm having to go into it by feel and there's a whole lot of last year's dead and dried stems lying around ready to stab unsuspecting fingers. 

I would normally be wearing gloves for this, but I rather foolishly (and for the first time) left my gloves in the garden last night and it rained. 

I will get there but I'm swearing a lot about it right now. 

My Netted Vege Garden

 After realising that blackbirds were responsible for damage in my garden, I was rather upset. It wasn't helped by the plants they have just pulled out and broken. I've had to replant several peas, tomatoes and marigolds. 

I did the bare minimum in my garden for about a week. What was the point? The gobshite blackbirds were just going to trash it anyway. 

But in the back of my mind, I was thinking of solutions and working through the pros and cons for each. 

I could make a scarecrow, but for how long would that be effective? Would windchimes make a difference? What about a sparkly wind spinner thing?

I've made windchimes out of some old wheel braces and car jack parts, but finding somewhere high enough and strong enough to hang it is waiting on Hubby. It's currently hanging in a nearby tree, but doesn't get enough wind there to ring often. 

It occurred to me on the weekend that I used to net my gardens to keep chickens out. I have lettuces and brassicas netted to stop the brassica moths and any other caterpillars causing pests from doing their thing. Why don't I just net my young plants? Once they're big enough with a more established root system, I should be able to take the netting back off again. 

I also bought more plants and seed over the weekend. 

I was planting more sunflower seeds in the ravaged spot under the net this time, when I found a young sunflower close to breaking through the soil. It still had its seed husk capping the tips of the first leaves. That made me happy, but I also realised that I was finding plenty more but they'd all been broken off just below those leaves. 

I had a poke around the pot where I had planted zucchini seeds, just to see if anything was happening and found one about to break through the soil. So I'm much happier about the garden and more excited to get back into it this week. 

The last bit to clear is dragging out. Or maybe I'm dragging it out. There's a lot of flowering quince to remove and that's slow and frustrating work. 

Flowering quince is all through this garden. We have tried digging it out, but it is very deep rooting and the tiniest piece left behind turns into more. Several different pigs have dug over this patch turning it into a wasteland for a time and they didn't get it all. It throws up lots of suckers and gets quite dense at the base. So I hit Google. Several fora and websites said the only way was to cut and paint the fresh cut with undiluted concentrated glyphosate. 

I went to Farmlands and had a chat with someone there. I came home with a picloram gel product that has the brush top. 

When I clear around the base of a patch, I  leave it until morning after watering as you need to be sure there's no rain forecast for 12 hours after application. I cut and gel. I pick up every last piece I've cut and put it in the incinerator. I'm burning this stuff, I won't risk having it come back again. 

Then I have to leave the blue painted tips undisturbed for the day. I don't want to risk accidentally poisoning anything else. So I have to find a different spot to work in. 

The last part will be slow but I'm feeling motivated again. 

Heartbreak in My Vege Garden

 Peas and radishes are growing beautifully, potatoes are taking off and delicate carrot fronds are definitely a thing. So where are the beans and sunflowers that I planted?

Where I thought I had bean sprouts, I found they were more potatoes. There might be some baby spinach plants in among the puha that's coming up. It's too early to be sure. 

So I did some digging. When I found a bean seed, it had a hole in the side and the rest was either hollow or rotten. Something has been eating my seeds. I went all along the rows and it was the same everywhere I'd planted them. 

There was an entire packet of Kentucky Pole beans gone.

I have a container of bean seeds that I'd harvested quite a few years ago. It was a mix of the pole beans and two colours of dwarf beans. 

I also had a paper bag of runner beans and purple beans from about 20 years ago. I've been meaning to give them to the chickens. I'm not particularly fond of runner beans unless I pick them when they are really small and tender. 

I decided to float them to see if they were still viable, with a very few exceptions, they all seemed good. 

I've planted them out in much heavier concentration than before. If anything is going to eat them, hopefully they won't get to all of them and the odd ones will grow first.

I still have some left in case it doesn't work. 

While I was planting them out, I noticed sunflower seed husks scattered around where I planted the sunflowers. The seeds are gone and the husks have been broken up and spread around. Even the ones coated in fungicide. That was three packets of seeds.

I'm blaming the blackbirds for that.

I think I might have to start seeds in pots and transplant them out. I didn't want to do that because I don't usually manage to harden the plants off very well and forget to transplant them in time. 

I'm a little gutted.

Sycamore Maples Everywhere

 We have three large Sycamore Maple (acer pseudoplatanus) trees. They've been there since before we moved to this block. They are lovely big old trees. 

Every year, there are heaps of small seedlings popping up. Almost none of them usually make it taller than about 20cm. 

Until we took out the macrocarpa hedge. Now there are hundreds of seedlings, varying in size from barely emerged to a metre and half tall. They are everywhere. 

We have moved a lot and planted them out in shelter belts. They're excellent for the east-west belts as they are deciduous, fast growing and have a good canopy. 

They are drought-hardy, don't mind a frost, all round useful trees.

So it seemed a shame to be just pulling out the excess. We contacted a couple of big tree companies but they weren't interested. We spoke to a chap at our favourite nursery, he told us that it's now listed as a noxious weed and they're not allowed to sell it. 

They do spread quickly and easily, and in more tropical climates, like the North Island, they can smother anything else. He said there's no real need for their pest status down here, and he thinks they are an awesome tree.

But we have to either find new homes for them here, give them away or just discard them. Which makes me sad.

My Sprouting Vege Garden

 I have sprouts!!

Some of the seeds I have sown are turning into plants. The peas I planted first have an almost 100% strike rate. I'm not sure if the gaps are because a seed hasn't germinated or because I missed a spot.

Immediately following the peas, radishes have been popping up with their distinctive heart shaped first leaves.

I spread radishes (as I always do) through the carrots and it thins the carrots without sacrificing anything. The radish seed was at least 20 years out of date, so proof that sometimes it's worth ignoring the best before dates. I think I can see early carrot fronds poking up too, but so far they're too small to be sure.

I'm not keeping up very well with the potatoes. There are so many and they are growing very quickly. I've stopped rescuing the potatoes I dig up, unless they are at least palm sized. I'm not going to need to buy any seed potatoes this year.

I also think I have a couple of beans up. I'm watching to see if more happens. 

I'm maybe halfway through clearing the patch. I think the difference this year is I'm planting as I'm clearing. Normally, we'd clear the whole area before doing anything else and nothing would happen for at least a month. 

It's a battle to not plan everything in advance. I start to worry that I'm going to run out of ideas or repeat myself, but then I get to the next part and I'm inspired again. 

Hubby is laughing that I'm taking anything that's not nailed down. The water trough, the cracked wheelbarrow with a broken wheel, a few pots and there's an old concrete laundry tub sitting in a paddock waiting for me to move it into my garden. I think I'm cleaning up loose bits in useful ways. 

My Puntastic Vege Garden

 As I'm planting lots and lots of seeds, it quickly became clear that some signs were needed, so I could be sure what I'd planted where.

Who wants ordinary signs though? Let's have some fun with them. 

I set a challenge for the spawn to come up with simple and fun vegetable puns for our signs. Normally, my son would be all over anything to do with puns, autistic kids are very talented at them, but this time it was the oldest who contributed the most. 

I also went searching online to see if there was anything we could do with broccoli and cauliflower that wasn't beyond my artistic capabilities (Barack-oli) or needed explanation which misses the point (Broc n Caul - Rock n Roll). But not even punpedia (yes it's a real website, look it up) was much help there.

Three days of gale force winds, torrential rain and snow on the mountain gave me time to start making signs. 

Some are music inspired: 

And some are just wholesome, heartfelt messages for anyone wandering through my garden:

There are still more to come. Watch this space.

My Barren Vege Garden

 Gosh, that sounds a bit dramatic doesn't it.

My garden isn't actually barren, it just looks that way right now. 

I've cleared probably four times as much ground area as I had done last week. I've layered beds with lawn clippings, mulch and manure. I've made lovely paths, also with mulch. I've shifted pots, driven posts and with Hubby's help, shifted a large concrete water trough. 

I have boxes and boxes of seeds. Some were left behind by the people we bought this place from, some were ours. Every year I think I get this idea that I'm going to start some veges from seed, some years I even do it, but who can seriously resist the 3 6-cell vege plant punnets for $12 that you find in hardware stores at this time of year. 

I decided this year, I would use this seed. If it grows, great, if not, I haven't really lost anything. To be clear, one of the packets of seed I emptied this week was "good for growing season 2000". Most are more recent than that, if not always by much. 

The down side is, since I've planted out so much seed, there's nothing to see yet. There's nothing to cluck and fuss over, nothing to tidy or check. 

For the most part, I look at my garden and it seems like a barren wasteland of mulch, posts and planters.

My Surprising Vege Garden

 So I posted about my vege garden, how I want it to be surprising and random and an adventure. 

It would seem that my garden (or the spirit of my garden?) heard and approved. 

An hour after posting last time, I found sprouting potatoes in the garden. 

The year that I left Hubby to it, he planted potatoes down this end. He dug trenches in the stony, sour soil, planted spuds and pretty much ignored them after that. There were minimal efforts made to mound the growing potatoes and when those efforts were made, he just used more of the same soil. The few spuds we got were small and unpleasant and we'd pretty much forgotten about it. 

So I've moved these few into tyres and started building it up with grass clippings, manure and mulch.

Not too long after my pleasant spud surprise I found onions.

I planted them a year or two ago, I really don't remember. They didn't seem to do very well and Hubby kept pulling them out with weeds, so I had assumed they had all gone.

I was wrong. Some are clearly last season's onions, most of the small bulb has rotted down but there's new growth coming from it. Others are new, at least one of last year's must have flowered and dropped seed.

Now I'm carefully inspecting every handful of weeds I pull up. 

My Vege Garden

This is my vege garden.

Every year, I tell myself I'm going to have an amazing, productive garden and some years, I even achieve that.

About 5 years ago, we decided to turn this patch into a vege garden. Everyone got excited about it. Hubby sprayed the grass and weeds and turned it over with the rotary hoe. Then he just kind of left it. 

I did get his help to put in the deer fence height warratahs to stake my tomatoes. 

But I made the beds, I planted and weeded and watered, I nipped laterals from tomato plants and tied them up, I mounded up potatoes, I picked several kg of beans each day to keep them fruiting. 

I picked, I podded, I blanched, I froze, I bottled and preserved in every way you can imagine and possibly a few you can't. 

So I was a little pissed when I heard my darling Hubby bragging about his vege garden and how well he's done with it. 

The following year, I left him to it. And it was pitiful. I managed to rescue several of the jalapenos and count that as a win.

The year after, I decided to try hugelkultur beds. I was soundly criticised by family and the beds didn't really take off. 

Last year, I was working a physical job and didn't have the energy after work to put into a garden. But I did experiment with a patch of it. I spread a thick layer of chainsaw shavings over this stretch. I topped it with a decent layer of well rotted manure and then another layer of shavings. 

It was about as wide as a footpath and ran for maybe 8m. I planted some tomatoes and a cucumber in this patch and surrounded it with a net to keep rabbits, chickens and our one remaining turkey out.

It went okay. Nothing particularly special, but better than we'd seen for a while. 

This year, I'm feeling a bit more motivated. I weeded the patch I'd built up last year. It was so easy. The roots came up with barely any force, I was pulling up entire root systems for cooch and yarrow with ease.

And the soil! It was rich and dark and full of life. It was light and healthy. 

A two finger salute to the people who tried to convince me that macrocarpa mulch is toxic and kills the soil. 

So this inspired me even more. We've got plenty of wood mulch, Hubby is chipping the too-small-for-firewood trimmings from the macrocarpa hedge we had cut down last year. 

I have started with a bed along the length of the tunnelhouse. I wanted to put tall climbing peas there. They need support. Ideas were tossed around. I decided to make my own, with the help of a few years worth of baling twine and a gun stapler.

Hubby has been looking at my work with a puzzled frown and confused judgement. But I've decided it's my garden this year and he can just stay out of it. 

Yesterday I started working out where my beans are going. I'm cleaning up the ground and making beds and paths as I go. I'm using stuff we have around the place for supports and inspiration. Yes the beans are going to be in wavy lines, and in the curves, I'm planting other stuff. 

I'm going for a wilder garden, few straight lines, no monoculture beds, random, glorious chaos. I want a vege garden that's fun, where a wander through is a bit of an adventure. Turn a corner and there's some unexpected broccoli, or sunflowers or that patch of wild fennel I chose to leave where it was. 

He keeps asking me what's my plan for this part. No plans, isn't it exciting?

He thinks I'm crazy but hasn't said it out loud. I don't care. Currently it's a work in progress, I will keep you updated. 

Dyeing Wool with Blackberries

 Our relatively wet summer showed itself this year in the size and volume of wild blackberries. I only travelled a short distance through the brambles and picked several kg of large, fat, juicy berries.

The problem, as ever, is what will I do with them this year.

I tried cordial one year, a non-alcoholic one.  The first attempt was weak and unpleasant.  The second was wonderful but grew a hideous mould fairly quickly and had to be thrown out.

This year, I made some fruit leather with them, but still had heaps left over.  I wondered, could I use it for dyeing my wool?

A quick Google search showed me I could.  To my surprise, the page I found explaining the process showed a lovely blue from dyeing with blackberries.  I was determined to try it. 

The instructions said to gently heat the berries in water.  Not to let it simmer or boil. I didn't have a stick mixer at this point, so once the berries were softened, I mashed them.

I mordanted my yarn, including a scarf I'd recently woven and dyed it.  

My first batch came out a lovely purple, with a pink tone to the purple.  Quite a bit different to the colour shown on the website.

In the dye bath

The scarf drying

I dyed some more yarn using the same dye bath and it came out a different shade of purple, more blue than purple this time. A third batch through the dye bath came out in a silvery grey with faint hint of blue.  Miss Fifteen argues with me about whether there is any blue or purple hint to the grey.

I picked more blackberries to do this some more, but because I was going to be away for a week, I didn't have time to dye any of it, so I froze them until I did have time.

Successive dyeing has turned out quite a range of colours.  No two are quite the same, and sometimes two skeins in the same batch came out in different colours. The batch that accidentally simmered came out with the least amount of colour, even though it was a fresh batch of blackberry dye liquor.

I have to say I haven't been particularly scientific or consistent in this process.  Next summer when the blackberries are fruiting again, I think I will be.  I will pay attention to times and temperatures, to ratios and ripeness and possibly even test the pH levels of my water.

All my different colour results

Peaches

 Another autumn and another mass gift of peaches. Black boy peaches from previously mentioned friend and normal peaches from my inlaws. 

Another year of "what shall I do with this lot?"

We're not eating bottled peaches any more than we have previously. I think we've eaten one bottle in the past year. We're still well overstocked with jams and jellies. Even after a summer of renovations and making scones with jam and cream for lunches.

We are out of crumbles in the freezer. So I decided on peach crumbles using this previous recipe. We are also out of fruit leather, so I will use the black boy peaches for that. 

I still had plenty of peaches left over after making several peach crumbles so I decided to try drying them.

They were washed, stones removed and cut into fairly thin slices before being laid out on dehydrator trays.  They dried fairly quickly and taste great. I managed quite a good yield from them.

I've kept enough for us and the rest will go for snacks for the grandchildren.

Waste From Weaving

As anyone who knows me or has read this blog will know, I hate waste.  There is always something you can do with leftover pieces of whatever project you are working on.  Food scraps go to animals or compost.

But the short bits called thrums that are left on your loom when you have finished weaving and cut your project out, what can be done with them?

They're not short enough for me to be comfortable with just discarding, even into the compost bin.  But they're not really long enough to do much with.  I had been keeping them in a bag and using the odd strand as a marker in my knitting or to tie up the tomatoes but the volume was distracting and I needed to find a better use for them.

I was reading one of the books I got with my loom.  It had a section on the thrums in it where they recommended re carding and re spinning your thrums.  What a wonderful idea!

It's not exactly easy to pull apart the ply and card these threads.  It is a very long and slow process and one best suited to several days with nothing better to do. The resulting thread is uneven but very pretty. Hopefully it will make for a lovely rustic project at some stage.

I did kind of like the way the carded thrums looked on the combs though (this process did not work in the drum carder by any stretch of the imagination).  So I decided to try out how it would come out felted. Previously I had tried just laying down some loose thrum threads on some carded wool for felting.+

Both of these have become cat beds, just as pieces of felted wool. While they reduce the amount of time my cat spends dominating whatever project I'm working on, he still needs to sit or sleep on every woollen thing we have.

A New Project

I was working in a pretty toxic environment.  I would go to bed thinking about work, very angry about it and be unable to sleep.  Then I would wake up very early in the morning, still angrily thinking about work and unable to go back to sleep. When I woke up in this state at about 5am one Sunday morning, I found myself offended that it was invading my weekend and I was allowing it to happen. So I started casting about for other problems to solve, things I could think about that weren't work related.

I found myself thinking about the poncho I was making for my sister.  It was part of her lockdown list of requests and one I had tried doing about four different ways already and hating it more each time. It was going to be clunky and I would most likely not have enough of my homespun green wool to finish the project if I continued in any way like I had been doing.

I thought about fleshing it out with other colours or different shades of green, but as I was knitting it at that stage, the different strand thickness would create a host of other issues with it. Then it struck me, why not weave it?

I woke up inspired and went searching through the mega stash for shades of green. I found a bag of some partially pulled apart knitting.

I think I should pause here and explain the mega stash, in case I haven't done so previously.  I am the person other crafty hoarders destash to.  I can and do find a way to use any small odds and ends.  I have made them into stripes in socks, hearts and flowers on jerseys for my granddaughters and the obligatory granny square blankets. There is almost nothing I cannot find a use for and I hate waste.

As a result, any time any of my friends is having a clean out, I am given their cleanings.  A good friend's brother went to a garage sale quite a few years back and couldn't resist the stash he picked up there.  Someone's Grandmother's abandoned stash.  After my friend picked out what she wanted, I was given about four or five banana boxes worth.  Some were half finished projects, complete with needles, but never with the pattern.  Some almost completed projects that didn't take much know-how to finish.  A few that someone was in the process of unravelling.  You can tell by the crimp in the balled yarn.

As the only yarn crafter in the family, I got my Grandma's stash.  When my friend's mother passed away, I got what she didn't want out of that stash.  Needless to say, I haven't bought any yarn in years and have promised myself that I won't until I have made an impressive dent in all of this.

As a result, I have a room that is almost entirely dedicated to what I lovingly call my mega stash.  This also includes my own wool.  I have sacks of wool that I have washed but not yet spun and boxes of balls that have been spun but not yet used or set aside for a particular project.  At the moment, in the height of my "frantically washing the last shearing's fleeces season", you can barely fit in the door.

So I found this pillowcase (yes I got it that way) filled with a partially unravelled project in a dark bottle green that I thought would go beautifully with the emerald green of my homespun. I found a few other random balls of other shades of green that I thought would go nicely as a contrast.

I set up my loom and began weaving in a pattern.

There is a point in every project where I doubt everything about it.  These colours or pattern are terrible, what was I thinking? I haven't done this wide or long enough.  I've overcommitted and I'm going to run out and it will be an obvious flaw.

All of this went through my head, although the main one was "Omg, this looks like that upholstery on dining room chairs that was fashionable in the 80s". But the sister I was making it for loved it, so I persevered.

It wasn't wide enough, so I did two side panels to be added on afterwards.

I left a slot for a neck hole that I crochetted a collar onto.

When it was all finished, I threw it into the washing machine for a hot wash, to shrink and felt it somewhat. We all thought the finished project was stunning.

My other sister came for a visit before I'd been able to present the finished project and she loved it.  She also fell in love with some wool I was dyeing for another project.  I promised to make her a poncho too, but didn't think I'd have enough of the blue she loved for her poncho and we discussed a few other colours that I did have plenty of.  We were potentially looking at a red and white striped poncho.

It turned out that I did have a fair bit of the blue left over. Not quite enough for a poncho for her, but it could work with all the other little bits of blue in the mega stash. I ran low on blues so some pale violet and pinks popped up here and there.  And as an experiment, I used some of those fancy "feathers" yarns and loopy yarns that seem to be fairly popular but are hideous to knit or crochet with.

I kept everything about this project secret because I wanted to surprise her with her 'not red and white like she was expecting' poncho.  She didn't want a collar, so I cut and blanket stitched a neckhole.  I think that makes it a far more flexible poncho.  It can be worn as horizontal, vertical or diagonal stripes.  It is completely reversible.

I will be offering more for sale as part of another new project that these ponchos have inspired.