MouseGarden

This year some plants really stood out.  

One of my current favourites is the Oriental poppy (Papaver orientalis) which is usually red, but this one is known as Royal Wedding, and is white with a tiny tinge of pink, and the center is dark purple.  This one bloomed in June, but for some reason it has decided to throw out a bloom in September as well.  They have really large blooms that don't last long, but they are spectacular.

Very dramatic, these poppies don't like hot weather very much but they do like sun.  At some point I should photograph the seed pods.

Another I really like is the Gold Heart Bleeding Heart (Dicentra spectabilis).  Most Bleeding Hearts have green foliage but this one is kind of yellow green.  It makes pretty much anything in front of it look great.  The flowers are the usual pink.

I've been gardening.  Last year I battled slugs for my sunflower bed and mostly lost.  I still achieved flowers but my leaves looked like Swiss cheese.

The temperatures keep going up and down, which resulted in some interesting patterns on a frozen pond.


Really neat.

Lately photographing items outside is challenging now the neighbour's new cat is suddenly interested!  I have to do it when he isn't around. 

I have to admit that until I read the newspaper today I had never heard of Jason Polan.

He had a blog called Every Person in New York.

He had a big goal:  to draw everyone in New York.

I would think you could call him a People Watcher.  I often see people doing strange things as they go about their daily lives. When he saw interesting things he would draw them.  But then he got sick and then he died aged 37, so he can't finish his project.  That made me feel sad, because I love people with big dreams like that.

It reminded me of a quote from Matt Smith's Doctor in Doctor Who.


And there was Jason Polan, drawing all of them.  Or trying to.

He published a book of 30, 000 of them as a kind of first installment.  He also drew art he saw in the Metropolitan Museum of art and published his drawings of that.  He had a drawing blog in some publications like The Times. He showed a bit in galleries.

I love how he would tell people to email him if they wanted to be drawn by him in a public location, and how it would take 2 minutes of their time but  he asked for 24 hours warning "beacause I may unfortunately miss you and do not want you to have to invest more than 2 minutes of your time in case I cannot make it."

I want to feature interesting artists and things on this blog and Mr. Polan is the first.

The New York Times has an obituary with some photos here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/arts/jason-polan-dead.html

Art can make you look at the 'ordinary' a different way.  Maybe there isn't any ordinary, at all.

It's back in stock.  I like this one because it makes me think of Spring.  It takes a long time to get leaves back where I live.  The Spring feeling comes long before the leaves, flowers and warmer weather!


Rib Knit and long enough to wear in a loop.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/506891199/lime-green-hand-knit-scarf-mens-or?ga_search_query=lime&ref=shop_items_search_1&pro=1

This is my newest completed scarf.  It's a soft rib knit acrylic.


It can be bought here:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/771989465/cream-hand-knit-scarf-mens-scarf-womens?ref=shop_home_feat_3&pro=1

This week I'm having a sale!

The scarf I'm working on now is lime green.

Happy New Year!  January brought arctic temperatures for a week, which are thankfully gone now. 

I've been doing a lot of knitting and some new stuff.  These are two of my new scarves made from several different colours of yarn.




Had some brief Chinook weather, where warm winds push out the bad weather.  Now it is back to snow, but it does look kind of pretty. 

I'm making some changes to my blog, so some of the links may be a bit wiggly till I fix all the connections.   Then I shall introduce my new scarves.  Eventually I will sell some of my scarves here as well as in my Etsy shop.

Meanwhile it snowed on me.  What?  No!  Yes.

Hint:  This is not what a hanging basket of flowers is supposed to look like.



It snowed over the weekend, and it is taking its sweet time melting.

I've added some knitting patterns for sale.  I also sell patterns on Etsy if you prefer that site.

I like my patterns to be straightforward and adaptable.  I think if a pattern is only really achievable in one particular yarn it isn't very useful.  It should be something that once you learn the stitch you could use it in many ways.  It also should be something you can knit without too much frustration.

Sometimes I see a stitch and think that is awesome, but so complicated,  I am never ever doing it!  It has to be really pretty to make me slog through a 24 row repeat, or more of pattern.  That said, I have my eye on Ginkgo Stitch.  It looks like lacy Ginkgo leaves and is gorgeous, I just haven't learnt it yet.

Update on sunflowers:  they look like Swiss cheese because they've been nibbled so much.  I'll have to take a photo so you can thrill to the spectacle.  The only sunflower in bloom is oddly enough, one I never planted.  It was probably buried in the flower bed by a squirrel or dropped by a bird.

I can feel the season turning.  No!  I'm not ready! (but I will be...I'm knitting a tweed scarf)

I just finished a golden yellow scarf and I am quite pleased with how it turned out.  The knitting always seems to take longer than I remember.  I think it would be a nice color for when the season changes.




I'm expecting hot weather, so I might start winning on the slug front.  The sunflowers this year are a bit underwhelming because they haven't had enough sun.  The poppies have lots of buds but no flowers yet. (I have a short growing season so I can be seen in the garden yelling "hurry up!"  LOL)

Sunday I saw a bobcat for the first time, very briefly.  That was exciting.  I always wondered if the difference between it and a cat would be obvious or not, and yes it was obvious that it was something else.  They are quite fast and a bit stocky.  Didn't manage to get a photo.

Now I wonder if that was the cat print with the long stride that I found in the winter.  Hmm.  And not good news for the people who still let their cats roam around outside.

This July has had a lot of rain, so I am fighting with slugs that intend to eat all my sunflowers, plus my sunflowers are behind because they haven't had as much sun as last year. (the garden is pesticide free, and I don't actually like to kill slugs because everything has its place, but the damage is becoming spectacular)

I am a big fan of sunflowers.  They look great.  Bees like them.  Birds eat the seeds.  Just make sure you are growing the ones that have pollen so you get seeds. 

I experimented a bit recently with using coffee grounds from a coffee machine as a slug deterrent.  Slugs don't like it because of the caffeine, but it doesn't necessarily keep them off.  They don't look well when they touch the stuff though.  I tried tea leaves, but they don't work as well.  What does work is to put jars over the seedlings at night.

Last year the sunflowers did very well but then the plant stems froze and fell over in the fall.  I cut the flowers off with a length of stem attached, hung them up to dry indoors, and then attached them firmly to a hedge with string so birds could eat the seeds.  Chickadees picked all the seeds out and then they were just empty like this.


These were mostly black oil seed sunflowers and Lemon Queens which have brown centers.

Last year I had a huge Russian Mammoth sunflower that was just about to bloom, after growing about 10 feet tall,  and a squirrel running along the roof stole the bud and ate it.  Argh!  You can't trust squirrels. I loved the Mammoth sunflowers but they do seem to need a long growing season to actually flower.