It's Summer on the Farm

I can finally post about the throw I made and gave to Ian and Michelle as a wedding gift.  I started spinning alpaca fiber for it way back in August, thinking I had lots of time to make this as they had yet to set a wedding date.  I think they called me the next week and told me they had set a date of June 4th.  No pressure.  Not only did I have to spin at least 2000 yards of alpaca yarn, but I had to dye it in no less than 10 colors.  Then I had to weave it.    I finished it in time to enter it into the Arts Council's April show, where it took second place to a basket (to be fair it was a nice basket, but the judge was given a score sheet calling this a woven throw....no other info or any clue as to how much work and how many hours really went into this).  I am so happy with the result and Michelle seemed to love it despite the fact I gave it to her in 90 degree temps.  The photo was taken prior to me trimming the fringes.  
 
We are settling into summer farm work.  The mowing and weeding is so hard to keep up with at this time of year.  The garden is growing.  This is just  shot of the area where we have peppers planted.  There are tomatoes on both sides of this area and the large plant in the foreground is one of the sunflowers.  We have a whole separate area where we have corn and squash and beets and chard and onions and lettuce and cucmbers.  I had yet to weed it when I took this photo, so I will post it next time.  I got a lot of weeding done last night and then we had lots of rain, so I will be weeding everything again I am sure.

I checked into the bee hives the Saturday after we got back from Portland and I will do so again this Saturday.  

 The Swarm Hive will likely need another box to grow into.  It seems to be a very active hive for as small a colony as it was when we caught it.  You can see that they are doing housekeeping and removing dead bees from the hive.  That is what is on the rug there in front of the hive.  

I hope to be able to harvest some frames of honey from the other 2 hives this weekend.  I had thought maybe I would be able to 2 weeks ago, but the bees were still busy filling and capping cells.  I decided to give them more time.

 My buckwheat and sorghum are coming up nicely.  These photos are from several days ago, and we have had rain since then, so I am sure everything has grown.  Buckwheat is below left.

  








And here is the sorghum:

The cicada noise has been dwindling as the days go by.  They are still around, but have mostly gone off into the trees at this point.  I posted about part of their life cycle as they were emerging from their 17 years of life underground and finding themselves in the daylight and becoming creatures of the air by shedding their shells and drying their wings.  The next step is to mate and lay eggs and start the cycle all over again with the next generation.  The females, once mated, choose the tender tip of a branch and cut slits in it and lay their eggs into the branch

 Here you can see the slit cut into this branch.  This is why many people cover new plantings or just simply wait until the cicadas are gone to plant young trees.  This really does not hurt large trees, but can kill new young trees.

I think the cicadas somehow chew most of the way through the branches, which causes them to die and fall to the ground:

Here are some branches that are hanging from the tree:




And a view of the entire small tree with damaged branches still attached:

Once these branches fall to the ground, the eggs will hatch and the little cicada larvae will burrow into the ground and spend the next 17 years there.  I imagine the adult cicadas dye shortly after their work of guaranteeing the next generation of cicadas is done.  I hope the short period of the freedom to fly and mate is worth the previous 17 years...I'm not sure it would be, but I'm not a cicada.

Quite a fascinating life cycle actually.  Now to wait 17 years to see it all again.  I will be in my 70's.  Wow. 

In addition to endless mowing, Sam has been pulling some fallen trees out of the woods to cut up on the sawmill.  I think some of this wood is destined to become     2 X 4s for my weaving studio.  He also acquired laminate flooring for it at an auction last week.  This may actually become a reality.

I have my small loom at home warped for some towels:

This warp will make 6 towels.  I am in the process of warping my big loom for a couple of baby blankets.  One is to be a gift for the woman who cuts my hair who is due in early August and the other will just be a back-up.  It's just as easy to warp for 2 baby blankets as 1, so why not?



I also finished a pair of socks for myself.  I started these back in February when we were doing maple syrup and got one sock done at that time.  Then I took the other along on our trip out west and managed to get a good bit of it done mostly on the flight home, and then finished it last week.

Oh and Grover and I ran in a trial last weekend.  We had no qualifying runs, but our 2 jumpers with weaves runs were pretty good despite no Qs.  Here is a link to a video of our Sunday run:

 Jumpers Run Sunday June 19th