Knitting a Homespun Woolly Jumper

Since I have a mountain of coloured wool that was given to me, I thought it was about time I started knitting more than socks with it.  My self-taught spinning has reached a point where I'm a lot more satisfied with the evenness of my thread, although it's still not to a stage where I'd enter it in the A&P show.

I decided that Hubby needed a nice warm jersey.  He gets a bit snobby about handknit jerseys and would never consider one for "nice going out" wear, they're for home use only, but I can live with that.  There's no way he'd wear one in white or the silvery grey that I've got, so it had to be the dark brown.  I was quite curious to see how the colour would come out once it had been spun and knitted.  There is a mix of greys in with the brown and the gold coloured ends were intriguing.

The fleece before carding and spinning.

We had several discussions about how thick and heavy he wanted it.  I made the choice to make a 3-ply yarn for it.  Now when I say 3-ply, I'm not talking about anything close to commercial 3-ply.  A single of my spinning is probably similar in size to that.  I mean three of my singles plied together.  It's come out something similar to a commercial triple-knit or 12+ply.

A ball of my triple ply homespun.

The next issue I run into is seams.  I hate sewing seams on my knitting.  I have a fear that regardless of how well I pin it or mark it (unless there are stripes to match), I'll end up with puckers and stretching and uneven seams.  I also have a thing about measuring each side right.  Because just smoothing out a piece can change it's measurements, I'm rather paranoid that my sides won't truly match without a creatively uneven seam.

So this time, I chose to knit an entire jumper circular.  This took out any chance of uneven pieces and messy seams.  The only seams are at the top of the shoulders because there was no avoiding that no matter how hard I tried to come up with a solution.  I even knitted the sleeves circular.  I picked up stitches along the armholes and reduced down the length of the sleeve finishing with the wristband, rather than the other way around as is usually done.

At times, especially as I reduced down to the wristband, the sleeves were extremely challenging.  Having a long circular needle meant I had to get creative with where I pulled the excess and still be able to knit effectively.  Towards the end, I was needing to adjust it every 5 or 6 stitches, but it worked and worked well.

A sleeve almost at the wristband.

I used threads of different colours to mark the start point and halfway (or the other side).  Those threads continued down the sleeves to mark where I was reducing.

One of my markers.

Knitting an entire men's jersey this way certainly raised some interesting challenges, but I'd do it again, overall I found it far easier to do and work with.

I didn't work to a pattern as such.  I measured up his favourite but battered sweatshirt and worked to it's measurements.  I had to redo the sleeves as they ended up far too baggy and too long as this seems to be wider at the shoulder than his sweatshirt although both seem to have the same straight drop shoulder cut.

More Milk and Cheese!

Last week we finally separated Handsome the bull calf from Brownie my house cow.

We'd left him with her to keep him friendly and tame enough until he was castrated, but with one thing and another, we hadn't castrated him yet.  He was 'feeling his oats' and starting to challenge us at every opportunity.  Putting him into a pen at night (so that we could have milk in the morning) had become a dangerous two-person job.

The wonderful neighbour came down to put a ring on him when he was much younger.  At that time, we thought he was friendly enough that he could safely be pinned against the side of the pen by two people while the third did the job.  Unfortunately, while he was friendly for me, he was less familiar with hubby and didn't respond at all well to the neighbour climbing into his pen and managed to make a hole in the fence and ran around our garden.  We discussed running them down into the yards at the neighbours so that he could use the head crusher and do it safely.  But between him working and going away on holiday and us working and having other commitments, we never quite got it done.

Now he's 9 1/2 months old, far too old for a rubber ring and he's a stroppy little gobshite.  So the vet is coming this week to 'cut' him.  That was quite challenging working out when the vet was available, we were available and the neighbour was available to work his challenging crusher.  Meanwhile, I've had enough and we put him into the next paddock over from Brownie.  They spend a lot of time at the gate together.

For the past week we've been serenaded by him, first it was angry calls, then it was sad sounding.  Over the weekend, there were fewer but it just seems like "don't forget I'm here" bellows.

Now that we're not sharing Brownie's milk with him, we're getting twice the volume.  It may have been more but I've decided to stick with once a day milking.  We were getting more than we needed before, so doubling that has meant that I was keeping a bucket in the fridge for the excess once I'd filled the jugs for our use.  We have plenty in the freezer for when we dry her off - although we have to get her in calf again first for that - so there's no need for more to freeze.

I spent the weekend cheese making.  I've made cheese in greater quantities than previously and different varieties that I hadn't tried before.  Instead of my usual 4 litres of milk to make two blocks of feta, I used 8 litres and made four blocks.  Two have been given away to people who like my feta and two are currently in the fridge.

I was also given a lot of frozen cream.  Miss Nineteen's boyfriend works in a petrol station and brings home the cream that doesn't sell, which goes into my friend's freezer (Miss Nineteen boards with one of my friends).  She gave me a bag with about 8 litres of frozen cream in the usual 300ml and 600ml bottles.  I thawed some of the cream out and tried my hand at making cream cheese.

I don't know if it was because it had been frozen but the cream and milk mixture was a little grainy even before I added culture and rennet and the resulting cream cheese is a little grainy and not the smooth spread that you buy from the supermarket.  However it tastes great.  Next up, I'll be trying some of the flavoured cream cheeses that you can buy for cheese boards.

My grainy but tasty cream cheese.

I also made a real cheddar for the first time yesterday.  I've previously made a farmhouse cheddar which didn't involve the proper cheddaring procedures, so I wasn't really prepared for how labour intensive cheddar is and how long it takes to make.  I'd thought it would be like most cheeses, a couple of hours and it's in the press.  This required an hour of turning the cheese every ten minutes to condense it into a brick-like mass before cutting it into fingers.

I liked the thought of a port cheddar, but lacking port, I used the elderberry wine that I had in the barrel waiting for me to bottle.  It's sweet and smoky and has distinct port-like qualities so I've used that.

Elderberry wine cheddar.

One of the issues we've been running into is making Edam cheeses the way I usually do, I end up with a 1.2kg block and now there's only three of us at home, it takes forever to get through it all. Making it in smaller quantities meant that it didn't press as well and I was running out of blocks for my cheese press.  So instead I decided to make it in the same usual quantities, but just before the brining and drying part of the process, I would cut my cheese into smaller pieces.  Let them brine and dry that way and wax them separately.  I'm going to do this with the cheddar.

The added bonus to doing it that way is that a smaller wedge could make a nice gift too.

Changeable Spring Weather

About six weeks ago I was excited.  For the first time in a year, we'd gotten enough rainfall to actually have mud in the paddocks.  Not a lot of mud, but enough that in the places where my cattle congregate, they were squelching around and leaving their footprints behind.  I have never in my life been so excited about mud as I was then.  I never thought I'd ever be excited to have mud.

We still had puddles on the surface, but they were fewer and the ground around them was softening.

The paddocks have greened up and the grass has more than doubled in a week.

Then the gale force Nor'Westers started up.  For those unfamiliar with the Canterbury Nor'Wester - it's a foehn wind.  A hot dry wind that doesn't just dry up the land, it also causes all sorts of problems for people in it's path.  From migraines to increased suicide rates.

It got very hot very quickly.  What was supposed to be Spring gardening, became trying to find a shady spot that we could work in and still be following our plan.  Any work done out in the sun was in short bursts punctuated frequently by cold drink breaks and excuses to get in the shade.

Thanks to El Nino, we're forecast for another hot dry summer.  Local farmers are already getting nervous about paddock growth and making silage and hay as fast as they can.  Hay is becoming like gold.

For several weeks, we were seeing forecasts of a cold front and wet weather coming just a couple of days away.  Like last year though, that always seems to be a few days away and we just don't quite get it.

We had several days of 30 degrees Celsius.  All my gardening plans went out the window.  I shifted two wheelbarrow loads of stones and that was my limit.  I found myself almost making excuses to hide out inside.

The weather seemed to settle down and become consistently warmer with only the odd oppressively hot day.  I started to plant out the corn I'd started inside from seeds, I planted out my beans and I've planted out my potatoes.

Then I was excited about the rain this week.  We needed it and it was very welcome.

I wasn't half as excited about the snow that covered the mountain or the - 3 (Celsius) frost we got this morning.  So far my corn seems to be okay, but the beans are looking a bit sad.

At least the gales have stopped.

For now.

Trees!

Repeatedly, we've tried to plant more trees on our property.  We spent quite a bit of money on Tagasaste seedlings and planted them in bare shelter belts.  I went for tagasaste (tree lucerne) for it's wide range of uses - not only is it fairly quick growing shelter tree that won't destroy the paddocks around it like poplars do, but it is also a good tonic and fodder tree for livestock.

Unfortunately, naughty calves got into the shelter belt and ate them down to ground level.

Hubby spent $100 on pine seedlings and spent many hours working out where was the best place for them, digging the hard clay and rock soil, planting them with little stakes and seedling protectors and walking around regularly to water them.

They all died in a nasty hot summer anyway.

We bought several native plants of various sizes from Trade Me and from a garden centre.  We carefully planted them beside the creek, above the usual flood level, carefully staked them too. They got watered daily.

Then we got about two years worth of rainfall in a week.  This actually lifted the entire plants out of the soil and washed them away - I found a couple hanging precariously (with stakes and protectors still attached) on the edge of the bank.

I was given a small mountain of weeping willow switches by some friends who'd been trimming theirs.  I planted them all around the creek.  I watched them and tended them and they were doing well.

Then the same rainfall that took out the natives washed not just them but the land around them away down the creek and the few that survived were eaten by my naughty steers (at the time) who escaped from their paddock.

I have my moments when I truly despair trying to plant anything to hold the banks of the creek together and stop the erosion or provide shelter for my animals in extreme weather.  We've spent ridiculous amounts of money buying trees and taking the time and effort to treat them right and they die anyway.

I've taken cuttings, I've transplanted small trees, I've encouraged the odd crack willow that washes down the creek and takes root - even though I know them to be a pest in the waterways.  My thought is that it could work to stabilise part of the bank and allow me to plant other (better) things around it.  Even crack willows don't stay long enough to grow past a metre tall.

We do have plenty of wild plums and elder trees around the property though.  I've gotten to the point where I'm quite tempted to try encouraging their spread.

I've been told that gorse can work as an effective nursery plant.  It will shelter, feed and protect a young tree growing in it's midst and then when the tree is big enough, it tends to kill off the gorse.  Most of the elder is growing amidst gorse which is frustrating when I'm wanting to collect berries and flowers as I can't get to them, but also in that gorse and elder is honeysuckle, which strangles and buries everything.

We're going to try planting in amidst the gorse next.  I'm sprouting cuttings at the moment.  Wish me luck!

Lovely Spring Days and Garden Busyness

Today was the first day of daylight savings this year.  For all we'd been forecast for rain or overcast weather, it dawned bright and sunny and stayed that way.

As I've just changed the days I work to give me Sunday morning off, Hubby and I had been discussing what needed doing the most and what we were going to do today and had not come up with any clear plan.  There's always plenty to do and not enough time to get it all done.  We always seem to have at least ten projects on the go and which gets worked on depends on dramas that may make them more urgent, weather, motivation or just what we feel like doing today.

While I was waiting for him to come outside, I popped into one of our vege patches and started weeding.  The recent rains had made the weeds take off, so it was needed.  He came out and joined me.

One bolted Brussels Sprout plant

I've never grown Brussels Sprouts before, so I looked at my plants unsure whether they were supposed to look like this, or if they had bolted.  Miss Nine (very nearly Ten!) had a friend come over and her Mum is a keen and knowledgeable gardener so I asked her while she was here.  No, she told me, they've bolted.  Bugger.  I left two in (one purple and one normal one) to go to seed and hopefully their babies will be more successful.  The rest I pulled up and gave to the cattle.  

Just in case we'd forgotten, the chooks reminded us why the vege patch has bird netting.

Our self-sown radishes were just starting to bolt, so I've left a few for seed and pulled up the rest.  I'm the only one who eats radishes, so I might have a go at making the rest into a pickle or chutney rather than let them go to waste.

We started on the next patch, which we got through quite quickly given how neglected it's been over the last few months.  Planted some green beans and two grafted tomato plants in there and it seems to be fairly full now, or rather it will be as soon as they all get bigger. 

At that point, we stopped for lunch and tried to decide what we were going to do for the afternoon.  My body was struggling with anything heavy so I suggested we go and work on the paths and whatnot that we're putting in front of the tyre wall garden.

Hubby has been getting stones from a workmate who has been doing some work at his place that involved getting rid of several tonnes of stones.  So far the estimate for what we've taken is at four tonnes and they've been sitting in the driveway waiting for us to get their final home sorted.  Yesterday while out shopping for other things, we bought several rolls of weedmat just for this, so I thought it would be a good idea to lay the weedmat and start shifting stones. 

I did the lighter work of laying the weedmat and tucking it around the tyres, while Hubby shovelled stones into the wheelbarrow and followed me along tipping it onto the weedmat.  Initially it was just enough to hold the weedmat in place, then it was dump and spread.

Once we got to that stage, I started weeding the tyres too.  We'd filled in underneath them with weeds and garden trimmings, so there's plenty of weeds growing up through them.  Less than half of the tyres are filled with any kind of soil or compost so far.  Those I have filled in the past, much of it has settled and sunk and needs topping up.  Although the strawberries I planted in a few of the tyres a couple of years ago are still going strong and even giving us babies on runners.

We've moved about a quarter of the stones now before deciding that was enough for today.  I'm proud of what we've managed to achieve in just one motivated Spring day.

Garlic

I've always grown garlic.  I love garlic and eat quite a bit of it.  I also love having garlic tied in plaits hanging somewhere in my kitchen.

My results in the past have been inconsistent though and it was only in the past year that I learned why.

I usually plant a few cloves of garlic around my roses.  It helps keep some of the bugs off them.  While they've always grown, looking back, there was a large proportion that didn't grow very big or were single bulbs.  Those single bulbs were a good size for a clove of garlic, but they hadn't separated into more usable garlic as we usually know it.

I grew some in it's own bed and they tended to stay small.  That was in town and our soil was mostly sand though.  I also put it down to having used garlic from the supermarket as my seed.

Last year, I was leafing through a gardening magazine at a friend's place and there was an article about growing better garlic.  It said there was a lot of urban 'wisdom' about garlic that was just incorrect and that people wanting to grow garlic more successfully should discard it and start treating garlic with more respect.

Firstly, garlic prefers to have it's own bed and be fairly well spaced - at least 30cm (12 inches) apart.  That was a new one for me, having always been told to plant it closer than that and around my roses.  Perhaps that idea was more for the roses' benefit than for the garlic?

Secondly, that garlic likes a heavily manured and very rich soil.  I had been told garlic would grow anywhere, in any conditions, and thrived like most herbs, in poor soil.

The last thing I remember from this article was that your garlic beds needed to be kept well-weeded.  Garlic in it's own bed doesn't like competition and a weed-free bed will grow better garlic.

Looking back at all of this, it does seem rather obvious from a gardening point of view.  Most plants I grow do better without competition from weeds and good soil always makes a difference.  I don't usually do a single crop in a bed or garden because companion planting has produced better results for me, but maybe, as I said earlier, garlic being a companion for something else is not an equal exchange where the garlic is concerned.

When we lived in town, we built some large planter boxes to grow veges in.  It was rather a necessity as any good soil that was added to the sand we had would lose all nutrients rather quickly and sink into the sandy soil and become sour within a season.  A built up and lined bed, filled with good quality bio-blend soil from a garden centre was a necessity for growing any veges (other than beans - they seemed to love the crappy soil and grew like triffids).

We took the boxes with us when we moved.  We never quite knew what we were going to do with them and they were moved several times before they found their current spot.  I think we've had too many choices and between everything else that has needed doing and water issues, they just sat there.

About a year ago, I laid a thick layer of pine needles in each of them to keep weeds down and covered that with flattened cardboard boxes.   Then the planter boxes became a default compost heap or more correctly, a dumping ground for organic stuff that we didn't really know where to put. They became filled with straw, sawdust and chook poo from cleaning out the chookhouses.  They got ash from the fireplace.  They got lawn clippings and some smaller tree branches.

I used some of the badly composted results last year when I was filling up the tyres that I grew potatoes in.  Otherwise, they just sat there like an accusation of laziness and grand ideas that hadn't been followed through.

After reading a fiction book that had a stables as part of the setting, there was a scene where one of the characters had to go and dig over what they called "shite mountain".  The manure from the stable was heaped into a big pile, covered with feed sacks and once a week, someone had to turn it over, poke a few holes in it, water it thoroughly and cover it up again.  The process was explained - the watering and covering killed off any grass seeds that may be in it, as well as created a humid environment that broke it all down.

This caught my imagination as I looked out over the paddock where my cow has been staying.  I'd been constantly raking up the old hay and her manure to try and keep her paddock fairly clean.  I'd had a few ideas about what I was going to do with it all, but nothing that had stood out.  While I wasn't planning to build a Shite mountain, I thought a planter box could work.

I filled one planter box with hay and cow poo.  As I went, I soaked it and covered it with feedsacks held down by tyres.  By the time I was about halfway, Hubby noticed and joined in.  We turned it over probably once a month and celebrated the big worms that were starting to appear.  The last time we turned it over, Hubby suggested adding chook poo and sawdust to lighten it up.

By this time, we'd filled the second planter box with old hay and manure.  We've left this one open.  No sacks on top.  Partly this was a case of we hadn't gotten around to it, partly running low on feed sacks and partly to see if the difference was noticeable.

This is the box that was left uncovered.

We couldn't decide whether to dig the chookhouse sweepings through, or leave it as a mulch layer on top.  The mulch layer has worked extremely well another vege garden.  So in the spirit of experimentation, we divided the box in half lengthways.  Half was dug through and half was left on top.  Widthways, half was covered again and half was left exposed.

The mulch side is at the bottom, dug through at the top.

This morning I planted garlic in this bed.  The mulch side had fewer weeds and was easier to plant in.  The other side seemed richer and more composted.

Left end was uncovered for the last few months and right covered.  Mulch bottom and dug through top.

I guess the proof will be in the garlic harvest.

Perseverance and Spinning Madly

I think I mentioned it elsewhere, I have been given a lot of unwashed fleeces from both sheep and alpacas.  When I started working on the alpaca fleece, I didn't realise it hadn't been washed until I'd carded the lot and then started spinning.  It was when my fingers turned black from working with it that I realised.

I still haven't gotten very far through the alpaca fleece. And I've only washed two or maybe three of the sheep fleeces I was given before the weather and drying conditions turned against me.  Meanwhile, I have a small mountain of washed fleece waiting to be spun, so I've been trying to get through it.

Washed sheep's fleeces waiting for carding and spinning.

One of the alpaca fleeces though caused a rather rare (for me) ragequit.  I actually took the bobbin off the spinning wheel and threw it.  The wool is short and soft, rather like persian cat hair.  It doesn't spin up nicely at all, regardless of how short my draft is and the thread breaks constantly.

Bloody awful alpaca fleece

This is how it spun up.

It sat in time out in my spare room while I rather resentfully pretended to ignore it and treated it as a betrayal of my trust, while I hoped it learned it's lesson.

I hate waste though.  I hate giving up on something.  I hate finding out I can't do something.  So it sat in the back of my mind while I tried to figure out how to win this battle.

Then it occurred to me to blend it with the much longer and sturdier texel fleece.  Slap forehead, D'oh.

It's terribly obvious as a solution really, but I hadn't been thinking like that. 

It also meant that Hubby could get his socks that aren't creamy white and stop being so obnoxious about the colour of his socks.  It's not like he wears shorts often enough that woolen socks would be visible anyway.

Blending it is fairly simple, I start with some of the texel fleece on my carding comb and add a rough layer of the alpaca fleece and card back and forth until there are no big obvious blobs of brown.  Once it's spun, the colour is uneven, but I think this is a funky feature and we all like it.

Texel fleece on carding comb.

Add some alpaca fleece.

Start carding back and forth to mix up the colours and fleeces.

Sufficiently blended for me.

A rolag ready to spin.

This is how it spins up - this is still a single and not plyed.

So far I've made three pairs of socks with this.  The alpaca fleece makes them warmer and snugglier.  I've had to start adding special stripes so we know whose is whose.

Same yarn knitted into a sock.

Two stripes is Miss Nine's sock.