Stuck in Neutral

Good morning, my friends. There as a change of plans yesterday. Shortly after my morning blog posted, Matthew called to say he'd barely slept the night before. And I'm sympathetic to that. We decided to do our walk on Monday. No worries. I could switch gears. Only...I seemed to be stuck in neutral because I made almost no forward progress during the day. 

There was a little progress to show on the Love Sampler. After stitching these two sections, I moved my hoop to the right. I'll pick it up there this morning, and then continue toward the bottom.

Our weather has been pretty gloomy this week, but there’s been no rain since last weekend. It seemed adviseable to give the flower pots some water. I noticed the volunteer snapdragons are coming back with a vengence.

It’s amazing how things can grow when the squirrels aren’t eating them down to little green nubs.

We’re seeing more and more cherry tomatoes too. No clue why they were so slow getting started. The plant is huge.

The Gracie Memorial Catnip Garden is doing a good job re-establishing itself. Smitty likes a little nibble now and then.

Okay, now here’s something interesting. This is the poppy barrel I’m trying to get re-established. See how the foliage on the left and right sides of the image are different?

I believe the foliage on the right will become a purple poppy. Back in 2020, I was able to get some to bloom, but none since. These seeds were some Mae saved from her own poppies. She and I have puzzled over this because they seem only to bloom as purple poppies once.

After that, they’ll change to the same color as their red neighbors on the left side of the image above. It occurs to me that the purple ones might be annuals? Maybe they don’t seed themselves? But that doesn’t really make sense because Mae and I are growing them from seeds. These botanical things are above my pay grade.

The Checkers dahlia is such an overachiever this year. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it produce so many flowers…and it’s early for dahlias too.

To it’s right, the Fuzzy Wuzzy dahlia has more work to do if it’s going to keep up.

This is the one I’m watching now. Bumble Rumble. We should be seeing some flowers from it by next week. There’s still one more dahlia…the Firefighter dahlia. It has some work to do to catch up with the others.

HEAR YE! HEAR YE! THE FIRST ZUCCHINIS HAVE MADE AN APPEARANCE! That is all. Please resume your regular activites.

Also, I noticed a flower forming on one of the sunflowers. There might be others, but it was hard to be sure.

In the bee garden, I noticed a new flower. My phone tells me this is Moricandia arvensis or “purple mistress” to you.

Here, I was able to get a better picture of the Checker Mallow. I posted a blurry photo last week. 

The garden is looking good. The corn is visible in photos now, and the green beans are doing great after the crow battles at their beginning. There are way more beans than I usually plant, but that’s okay. After having all the plants bitten off in our last garden, and after fighting tooth and beak and nail for these, I’ll take all the beans I can get. I believe I’ve earned them.

Also…what’s that thing about corn needing to be “knee high by the Fourth of July”? Well…we’re underachievers there. In our area, we can’t plant until the latter part of May, and most things had better be ready for harvest by mid-September. It’s a short growing season. This is an early ripening sweet corn. Hopefully, we’ll start seeing some more growth soon. And some sunshine would help.

Okay, by late afternoon I planted my butt in my sewing chair determined to do some quilting. I’d switched out my thread and was checking tension when I ran out of bobbin thread. Of course, I did.

So I fiddled with that for a while, cleaned and oiled the machine, checked the bobbin tension on my Towa gauge, reloaded the bobbin, checked the top tensionvagain, and then took the first stitches on this new daisy motif. After approximately 4 stitches, the top thread broke. Oy. By that time I’d pretty well scraped the bottom of the motivation barrel. Nevertheless, I quilted from the left side to the right. The motif is doable, and I think it’ll work for this part of the quilt.

Here’s a peek at the back.

The motif is to stitch two daisy petals, then a little loop for the flower center, then stitch more petals around that loop. Then off to the next one. The sashings of this quilt vary in size because the pieced blocks vary in size, and so I’m filling in some of the spaces with more flowers or more loops to cover the space.

When I’d stitched from left to right one time, I called it quits and left it needle down for the next horizontal sashing. 

My goal today will be to finish all the interior sashings. I’ll save the border for tomorrow.

There was no more progress made on the Stair Steps. I’ll keep plugging away at it until I’ve finished the final two blocks…maybe today…maybe not. My sanity is important to me. 

Also, today is the day we’ve chosen to harvest our cherry crop. I’m honestly not sure how much is out there. We have two trees: a Black Tartarian and a Bing. The Black Tartarian is always more productive, but there are some cherries on the Bing too. My plan is to can some of them in simple syrup. I use those to make my mother’s cherry cobbler…possibly my favorite dessert for my whole live-long life. Also, I’ll make some sweet cherry pie filling. Up until a couple of years ago, I always thought pie filling had to be made from tart cherries. Then I found a recipe for sweet cherry pie filling. I actually think I like it better. 

So all of that to say that I’m looking at a weekend of canning. Sewing might have to take a back seat for a few days as I deal with the cherries.