Wednesday 14th June - Flowers, Sewing, Knitting

 I'm so pleased to be up and doing again. Maybe doing a bit much? I can feel my eyelids drooping a little... Ah well. That's what happens...

I spent an hour and a half this morning sewing the cross stitch project. Getting properly started and making some progress - and no unpicking - is a relief. I find getting started is always the hardest part. I've done enough to think that, barring serious mistakes, it is not as complex a design as I feared.

Then I had the usual zoom chat and piano lesson with a friend where we put our worlds to rights and incidentally do a bit of piano. 

Lunchtime! And because I had taken off my step counter wristband at the beginning of the lesson, it now recorded at mere 128 steps for half a day! I do try and take it off for playing the piano, as I can gain anything up to 1000 steps (teaching Scott Joplin Rags and any kind of 'oom cha cha' LH is particularly good, or bad, for step counting).

After lunch I answered a question about my work-in-progress sock that was bugging me; did I have enough yarn to finish the pair, or would I need to start the last ball for the second sock? I did all sorts of complicated weighings of sock (2 inches to go), needles (2 stuck in the sock, one free). In the end, if I had thought about it, all I had to do was weigh the sock, weigh the yarn, and think. (Never do anything the easy way, if you can make it more complicated somehow...?)

But in one way I am glad I did, because on the piece of paper I used is this;

'Apricity' the warmth of the sun in the winter'. What a lovely word.

Later in the afternoon I wandered into the garden and started transferring some of the little plants I've been growing on since they arrived as thimble-sized plugs. Of the 72 wee little babies - too young to have left their nursery, surely! - about 56 survived. The main casualties were busy lizzies and rudebeckias, but the petunias, nicotianas, lobelias, gazzinias, bacopas, begonias and pelargoniums are mostly doing well. I just hope the snails don't find the containers I planted today.

This was a nice cool place to set up a little workstation. In the window box are individual lettuce seeds, on in each pot. On the table; right at the back the latest arrivals, some coleus plugs, a re tray with a few remaining petunias and the nicotinas, in the pale tray the geraniums.

On the ground; a mniature Christmas tree - if it survives then 2023 will be its third year, some mint, a tub with petunias, bacopa, and some snapdragons (I think) self seeded from last year, two smaller tubs with petunias and lobelia. 

Here are the three cardoons, already about twice the size they were when they went in. I was thinking of stashing the nicotina plants in the spaces around them.
 

The sweet pea has some companions now, I am pleased to see.