Very domestic tonight -- gardening and knitting

Yet another two-fer, to make up for the fact that I won't be able to post something later this week. Or more accurately, I won't feel like posting anything later this week while I am on the road.

Since we still haven't planted any vegetable crops yet and the slave labor is still a few days away from being home, there's not much intentional stuff going on in the yard. The fruit trees are still doing nicely, as are the weeds. In looking around today, however, I did notice that the agave is starting to bloom:

This little gem was the real surprise, however:

That appears to be a mushroom. In the sand in my back yard. In the desert. Go figure.

The other day I realized that by this time last year, our vegetables had been in the ground for about 3 or 4 weeks already. So this year, we are getting a later start. Which brings me to the idea of raised gardening beds.

Sports Nut and I talked about putting in raised beds over the winter, but never got around to building them. Finally we scratched the idea since we hadn't done it already. Then I picked up a copy of the new edition of Square Foot Gardening and decided that maybe we should do the raised beds after all. (I am nothing if not fickle.)

Shortly after the slave labor gets home, and probably before they do their laundry, I have going to have them build me some gardening boxes and mix up some soil. Only after that will I put some vegetables into the ground. Fortunately, there's a long growing season here in Dodge.

And now for today's second topic -- Thursday's Knitting Update.

I am still working on the fourth (of six) piece of Sports Nut's blanket, but I have made progress. So much progress, in fact, that I have almost finished the yarn on the first skein of yarn for this piece. I couldn't find any more of the matching yarn, so I had to go stash diving. (The yarn, as should surprise no one, was hiding at the bottom of the bottom bin in the back pile of yarn bins.)

The yarn I found, however, didn't seem to match the yarn I was actually knitting with:

 

The new yarn seems much brighter and to have more orange in it. I checked dye lots, however, and they all purport to be the same dye lot. So I'm going to take it on faith that this is the right yarn and it's just wound so that a different part of the colorway is showing up. We'll see how it works up very soon -- I only have a bit of the current skein left.