Well, another week has been and gone.
I was supposed to be
back at work last week but have now been notified that furlough has been
extended again, so I am now not due back until August. There is a chance I will
be back in mid-July though, but maybe on a part time basis. I am still waiting
to hear officially. Week ten has been quite frustrating – I want to be back at
work, I miss work. I love my job and that’s no secret or surprise! We have
missed a whole growing season and at least two sites will have waist-high grass
that needs tackling before the volunteers can come back. I cannot switch off
and I cannot stop thinking about work or what I will do when I am allowed back.
I already have plans and a process in mind, but it is on hold until August. I miss my
volunteers. I miss the friendship, the comradery, the laughs. I am very much
looking forward to being back at work and to see people again even if it is
from afar.
This week has been productive but also achey. I have spent a lot of time hunched over the living room floor, sewing. So, onto this weeks roundup:
Homelife
I have finished my granny square blanket! 182 squares all sewn
together row by row, and then the rows were sewn together. I then edged the
blanket with two rows of stitching. It is big enough to cover the bed which is
what I wanted. I am very happy with it, very happy that it is done, and happy
to announce that I shan’t make another!! I definitely need to learn the join as
you go method, but because these squares were different colourways I wanted to
attach them in an organised random way. If I make a blanket with all the
squares the same colourway, I will join as I go to make it a lot easier and a
faster process.
Now that this blanket is done I am refocussing my efforts on
the monocolour square blanket that I started at the beginning of furlough. I started
making these bigger squares to give my hands somethings to do to keep them busy
through periods of anxiety. There have been many periods of anxiety. I have
decided to make this blanket to gift to someone. I need 42 squares, I currently
have 20. I am trying to make each square a different colour from the Stylecraft
Special DK selection, so I may have to raid Momma P’s yarn stash soon to get
more colours, and then buy the others. I do have a lot of yarn to work through
though – I should have enough for about 28 squares before I raid yarn from
elsewhere. I have nicknamed this blanket the Elmer Blanket, after the patchwork
elephant.
We have now been in the house for just over three months and we love it! It’s starting to feel more like home now, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop being excited when David gets home from work. We ordered pizza to celebrate three months but I accidentally ordered it for delivery to a neighbours house. Luckily the neighbours are very understanding and didn’t eat any before it came to us!
Garden
The garden is very much an extension to the house and quite
often I have both the back doors flung wide open. I love just sitting and watching
nothing in particular. I am missing the birds and so wish we could have a bird
feeding station again but it is too soon after the ratty incident. The neighbour
has now ripped out a hedge that was housing the rats, which is a shame as it
was also perfect nesting habitat for small birds. I realised this week that our
garden is the only one in our block of five terraced houses that actually has
flowers in it.
In the last three months I have seen five species of bumblebee
and three species of solitary bee, five types of hoverfly, seven types of
butterfly, two types of ant, and a bee-fly.
This week I have done some garden clearance to remove some
of the invasive decorative grass type plants that were already here. I am
trying to stop them spreading so just pulled up baby plants. I have also
planted a sea holly that I bought in Poundland – the bees love this plant and
it will come back year after year. I have three on my allotment too. I have
also planted a large rooted cutting of a winter jasmine from Mommas garden, and
I am already planning which bulbs to buy to plant in October and November. I
fancy lots of snowdrops to edge the paving slabs…
The gladioli corms that I planted in the new raised beds are
coming up already and I have seen a spear poking up at home too. I am excited
for these! The flower seeds are also coming up in and around the veg beds, and
the first peas are showing in the new bed with the tepee I built the other
week.
I have the first female flower coming on one of the loofah
plants – I know it is female because it already has the immature fruit behind
the flower. It is unusual as most squashes (pumpkins and courgettes) have male
flowers first. I also have a case of the black fly but there are nasturtium
seedlings coming up so hopefully they’ll migrate across to them when the plants are big enough.
David has done my other four paving slabs in front of the
shed so that I now have a double row of slabs! It looks SO GOOD. I am so happy
with them. This area gets very boggy in the winter but eventually I want to
pave this whole patch and have a picnic bench. I’ve also decided I want a raised
bed along the side of the compost bin so that I can attach netting to the bin
and have climbing plants up it. Oh, to have dreams.
Before...
I have been harvesting salad crops regularly from both mine
and Momma P’s plots. She has the salad leaves and I have the radishes.
It will soon be time to harvest the garlics as the leaves
are starting to yellow. Nearly every one of them has produced a flower spike
but I pinched these off and used them in the kitchen. I am not sure how successful
the garlic has been, but they have definitely been more successful than the
onion sets, some of which have hardly grown at all. I think I might leave the
smaller onions in the ground and just leave them to grow again for another
year. I cannot remember which garlic varieties I planted – I bought them from
the Garlic Farm on the Isle of Wight when we were on holiday there last year
and I had labels for each row, but the birds kept pulling them out so I lost
track of what was where. I do know which one is the elephant garlic, and I so
hope that it has grown.
I am looking at possibly another seven weeks off work. If I go back at the start of August I will have had 17 weeks off. The mountain of e-learning to do when I return is building up, but it can wait. It’s the last thing on my mind. It is going to be strange going back to work but not going back to practical sessions straight away as there will be so much to do, to sort, to tidy and to clean before vols can come back.
So the next week will be filled with crochet, allotmenting,
gardening, and playing computer games. Much like the last ten weeks and
probably the same for the next seven.
