the real thing

Between drizzling mizzling rains today, I paddled out and got a few pictures of Pulmonaria for you. These pictures accurately show how the colors pop up through the fallen leaves of last Autumn.

The largest leaves are red oak, which gives you an idea of the size of the plants.

And in this picture, you can see deep pink buds, and several flowers in the process of turning from pink to blue. This isn't the exact stem I painted, but it could have been.

I hadn't seen this plant until a kind gardener in town gave me some from her own garden. It was long past blooming, and when it came up the following year I did not know what it was, so the flowers were a big surprise. I posted a picture here on the blog  and several readers identified it for me.

Rereading that old blog post tonight also confirmed my feeling the bloodroot is usually up first.

Speaking of which, here is the bloodroot today: all tucked in against the cold.

Plants are simply amazing, aren't they?

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bits of color

This year, the Pulmonaria began to bloom a full week before the bloodroot. It was so refreshing to suddenly see a bit of pink and blue amidst the many shades of brown in the leaf litter still covering most of the gardens.

The plants are only a few inches tall but they certainly have a lot going on in the Color Department. In addition to the multi-toned stems and prettily mottled leaves, the flowers begin to bloom in pink, then shift to a lavender blue!

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no turning back

Yesterday, a cluster of delicate bloodroot buds - which I've been admiring daily - 

opened!

The sky was overcast and rain soon began to fall, continuing all afternoon and right through the night. It was still raining when I got up this morning, and although it has now stopped, the sky is a heavy, dark grey.

But no matter.

The bloodroot is blooming.

That's it.

It's Spring!

Let's dive in.

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more than halfway there

Each Spring, after weeks of daily plodding out to the barns with my basket-o-brushes, there's always a point when I know I'm on the long, slow, downhill side of the annual cashmere harvest.

I haven't found a feasible alternative to these giant ziploc bags.
But at least I reuse them, as you see by the elegant labels.

People are often surprised to hear how long this process stretches out. I have only a small herd, but the variability in shedding is extreme. Acer always starts shedding in February; Dara has just begun and April is nearly over!

Right now, some goats are functionally "done" and will just need one or two quick clean-up combing sessions so the last of the undercoat will be off and fresh air and sun can get to their skin. Like Sambucus here:

But there are some goats who will still need more hours of careful combing despite already having been thoroughly combed at least three times. Case in point: Azalea.

It takes a lot of very gentle work with a slicker brush to remove loose cashmere without tugging on this long, thick topcoat. It took over an hour working on just her left side (above) to get to the point where a rake would run smoothly through her coat:

And as you see, it's still picking up a few wisps of cashmere.

A few days after a thorough combing, Azalea will look like the top photograph all over again, and we'll have another session. I'll be collecting less cashmere next time, but she is still carrying quite a bit.

Betula is another long-coated goat. We've worked very hard this year, Bet and I, to harvest as much of his cashmere as possible. But now he is dropping the remainder so fast that it immediately becomes a matted layer trapped in his topcoat. I'll keep working to get it off, but more for health and comfort than for useful fiber. This is all discarded fiber from one combing of Betula this week:

With the harvest drawing slowly to a close, I'm already starting to think about knitting again. The past couple of years I've had to put all WIPs aside when the combing starts, because even though my mind misses the restful quality of knitting, my hands can only take so much in one day. This year, that meant a pair of nearly-finished socks has been waiting since February for toes.

Soon, socks. Soon.

Right, Azalea?

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wordless wednesday

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