Faye's Quilt

A good friend is getting married today and so now I can share the quilt I made for her and her husband. I finished the quilt in early August, but decided they should see it before I shared it with you.

The quilt is a lap quilt, dimensions are 53 inches by 78 inches. The pattern is called Coins or Roman Stripes. The coins are 7 inches wide and the contrasting fabric is 5 inches wide. It has a solid backing that is the same as the binding. I tied it using a cotton yarn.

Here is a detail of the different fabrics used.

Squash

Today's harvest focused on the squash and dill. The winter squash were dying back and they weren't getting any bigger so we decided to have them for dinner. Each plant only produced one. Both are rather small because I crowded the squash and because my soil could have used more improvement this past spring. Here is the delicata off the vine.
And here it is sliced open. The buttercup squash, And the beautiful orange interior. We also cut a few tiny Zucchini (For some reason my plant is only putting out female blossoms right now). I also harvested some of the dill seeds today.
This small section was picked green a few days ago, and the rest should look that way soon.

Tomato Ripening: Part 1

A time line of a tomato ripening this week. Thanks to Matron at Down on the Allotment for the idea. I'll continue the series next week until it is ripe.

Sunday

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
View Part 2

Today's Harvest

More tomatoes today!

Also, I'm saving seeds from my marigolds. The seeds are so easy to pick and dry that there is no use buying more next year. I picked about 8 dried heads off the plants and there are plenty of seeds here. They are such an interesting shape. I'll be harvesting dill seeds soon, hopefully this weekend.

Tomato Harvest

Today's harvest.
Tomorrow night the large ones will become scalloped tomatoes from The Joy of Cooking. I can't wait.

Dragonfly

Today was the first day of school and though I only have seven students, I sure am tired. I had just enough energy to take a few photos this evening. I'm working on a post for later this week with a photo of a tomato every day to see how it changes. While I was out in the garden. I noticed this visitor perched on my tomatoes. I was amazed at how transparent its wings are.

The only other news for now is that these three tomatoes are looking great. I'll be picking them soon to eat.

Tomatoes & Chard

My slicing tomatoes are ripening well at last. Hopefully we'll be able to pick them by the middle to end of this week. We've been able to harvest more of the paste tomatoes, but not more than three or so at a time. They've gone into salsa with store bought tomatoes, in with patty pan squash, or into sauce but there aren't enough ripe at one time to make anything with by themselves.
The heirloom has a tiny bit of color. We'll see how it ripens this week.

We've been using a lot of swiss chard lately, but I always forget to photograph it before it is chopped up and in the pan. Last night we made an amazing Risotto with Swiss Chard. The week before we made Chard stuffed with Risotto and Mozzarella. I highly recommend both recipes. Here is the chard in the garden. You can see I've cut a lot recently yet it is still producing well.

Peony Socks

I bought this beautiful skein of Peony vegan sock yarn from SockPixie with some of my birthday money back in June. I wound it into a ball and waited. I had to finish my Francie socks before I could cast on and start another pair. I choose a simple Harris Tweed pattern because I knew intricate patterning wouldn't show up well with the beautiful variegated yarn.

Here's just the beginning of the sock. Hopefully this pair will come faster than the last.

Francie Socks Finished!

Inspired by a friend, I decided to finish my Francie socks before school starts. So here they are!
I'm very pleased with them. I had to end the pattern early to fit my short foot and ended up with some errors as I finished the toes. If I make the pattern again, I'll choose a solid color yarn so that the patterning is more visible. But overall, they came out well. The part I like the best is the bottom of the foot and it is unfortunate that it's the part few people will see.
Started: April 7, 2008
Completed: August 20, 2008

Garden Progress

My zucchini plant finally bloomed again today. It had shut down production because of the baseball bat sized fruit that grew while we were away on vacation. But now almost three weeks after we returned more female and male blossomed opened. I didn't get to hand pollinate this morning so I hope the bees did the job.
Here are two of my Brussels sprouts plants. The one was planted back in late May. The other is a seedling transplanted in July. The five plants from May have sprouts developing that look lovely. I can't wait until they are ready and it almost makes me anticipate that first frost.

Last night and today made me realize that first frost is close at hand. We had lows in the 40s last night and today was a crisp blue-sky day with a high of 70. Our average frost date is in late September, but our weather has been unseasonably cool this August. I hope I still have enough time for the tomatoes to ripen. Finally today I saw some signs of red on my unknown tomato plant. They are round slicing tomatoes like a Beefsteak, but not that size. Shoulders have darkened on my large heirloom, but I don't see any other signs of color.
My dill is starting to develop seeds. Maybe I'll collect the seeds for my spice collection.
The Swiss chard is doing very well. We need to eat more of it because it's falling over and shading my carrot sprouts. Some of it went into a Spinach, Potato, Leek Soup tonight (except we substituted kale and chard for the spinach). I'm not sure where I got the recipe so I don't want to post it here.
Lastly, you can see that the mystery plant also now known as wild cucumber is developing the spiny cucumbers. In fact, the vine is covering large sections of the hedge. All the white flowers in the second picture are the male flowers.

Fall Seedlings

lettuce	purple bush bean
carrots	radish
kale	lettuce

Above are the seedlings for fall. Progress has been a bit slow because of the rain. Also some seedlings are shaded by other larger surrounding plants. Hopefully as I harvest those they will make more growth.

School starts next Wednesday and while work officially starts this Thursday I've been in the classroom a lot working on the set up. My posts will probably be less frequent as school work picks up.

Beets

I harvested my beets on Friday. Though they were all planted at the same time I got 4 large ones and 3 small ones. No matter, they were destined to be shredded for a Beet Rosti from Mark Bittman. I didn't have quite enough beets for the recipe, so I peeled some carrots from the CSA as well. I thought the beets looked liked rubies once they were peeled.
The shredding on the Kitchen Aid mixer attachment was beautiful too. Neither of these pictures quite captures the sunset-like spectrum of colors. The first picture is muted by the flash, and in the second the red bowl makes everything a little more red.
Here are the shredded beets and carrots in the pan. I wish my kitchen had better lighting.None of the finished pictures were worthy of posting. However it sure was yummy. Nice and crispy on the outside, soft and sweet and warm on the inside. I highly recommend it.