nearly wordless wednesday

Experiment:

can drinking catnip tea every day

beginning in early Spring

make the human body

inherently repellent to mosquitoes?

To the best of my knowledge, this is unprecedented research.

I shall report my results.

~~~~~

first cut

I've probably mentioned the incomprehensible barrier that immobilizes me
every time I think about trying linocut printmaking.

Yes, that thing that almost everyone I know had a chance to try in grammar school. "Linocut? Oh yes," they say when I ask. "We did that in art class when I was 12!" I don't know if it was the limited arts program in my school or what, but it was never an option. And for at least 30 years I've wanted to try it, because I love woodcuts and wood engravings, and linocut seems like the easiest way to experiment. I mean, kids do it in art class, for goodness sake! How hard can it be?

Over several years I've acquired bits of gear: an ink roller from the cat shelter tag sale, a few pieces of lino added to my semi-annual watercolor order (amazingly, ordering watercolors has become a routine!), a starter set of printing inks, and the same Speedball carving tool with multiple blades that I imagine schoolkids use for their carefree adventures in linocut. Everything but a bench hook - to hold the lino steady on a table while cutting - which could be easily built with scrap wood.

This past month, which is "#PrintOctober" on twitter, I decided to either do it or stop thinking about doing it. The adventure began quite merrily on the 1st. I sat down to sketch a design and...immediately got bogged down. What to draw? What to DRAW? Settling that question took a couple of days and even a little poll amongst the twitter art folk, who kindly gave me a nudge. Okay, onward!

Next, I watched some videos about how printmakers transfer a design to the lino. I had to wait til I could go to the library on the next Saturday to print my drawing at the correct scale for my 4x6 inch block. But when I got to the library, their computer was inexplicably Not Working. It would be three days before I could get to another library.

It went on like that all month - every little step forward turned into a delay. Meanwhile, of course, I kept doing the Daily Markmaking, and this might have made it easy to forget about the printmaking altogether.

Well on October 30th I looked at the calendar and thought, "Wholly guacamole, the month is almost over!" I did what I could have done a month ago or a year ago or ten years ago: I drew the design directly on the block, consciously eliminated all expectations, and began to get a feel for using the cutting tool. I still had no bench hook, but it didn't matter because my spine has been so troubled for the past few weeks I couldn't have sat at a table to work anyway. Nope. I got in my "zero gravity" position, wedged the block between my knees and my worktable, and making very very sure my left hand was never within a 180 degree arc of the blade, I began to cut.

Dear Readers, I can report that there is a lot more work to do,
and a lot to learn along the way,
but my first linocut, an ellipse framing Japanese anemones,
is now a Work In Progress.

Onward!

~~~~~

not quite planting time

It's been too cold to plant. I mean, it's been really cold.

Giant kettle of soup cold.

Stodgy-meal cold.

I've even turned the heat on for the past few nights so Piper won't think Winter is back. Heat on in May! Good gracious.

Despite the weather, watching the spring wildflowers appearing and the trees blooming and beginning to leaf out is endlessly exciting.

Unfortunately, the cold nights and overcast days have meant a struggle for some, like these Solomon's Seal plants you saw earlier:

These greening and fast-moving days make me feel I'm late getting the vegetable garden started, but in fact it is still too cold for the things I intend to plant. That said, between the rainy spells there's plenty of prep work to be done in the gardens before anything is planted. A couple of weeks ago I marked out the six upper rows in the terrace vegetable garden, and my helper rough-dug the rows and reinstalled a section of garden fence we had taken down in the autumn.

This is what the rows look like after the soil is just turned over...I think you can see a few rocks there?

So I have to go over each row, foot by foot, sifting the soil through my fingers and tossing the rocks into a bucket. I got one row done last week, on a day when the rain held off til evening. This row is ready to plant as soon as the weather warms up:

Only five more rows to go!

Then there's a new little experimental raised bed in the works, for a hill of either squash or cukes - something that will grow on a trellis. It doesn't look like much yet:

This little bed is on a stony bit of slope and I am trying to support the downhill edge of the bed with rocks sifted from the planting rows. A first layer of organic material has been piled up around a 5-gallon bucket, and there will be some soil added to the top. The bucket has holes drilled in it near the bottom, and my plan is to use it as a waterer, to help roots find deeper moisture in the summer.

I don't plan to buy much seed this year - maybe just summer squash and pole beans. I've saved seed from some of last year's success stories: the candy roaster squash, suyo long cucumbers, and popcorn. I also have Egyptian "walking onions" and field peas ordered last Autumn. All of the above came from Sow True Seed - the Appalachian seed company I learned about from Tipper at the Blind Pig and the Acorn blog. You may recall that Tipper kindly allowed this Yankee to participate several times in her annual seed-testing project, which has been great fun.

This year, Tipper has become a Sow True Seed affiliate: here is Tipper's brand-new affiliate link to the Sow True Seed online catalog, in case you'd care to visit. I really appreciate what these folks are doing to preserve and distribute heirloom varieties.

~~~

How about you? How are your gardens - or garden plans - or next year's garden plans, for those readers living in the southern hemisphere - coming along?

~~~~~