And I was married for almost 20 years before I finally confirmed the exact date for our anniversary. That’s OK, Husband didn’t know for sure either. We’d just try to go out for dinner sometime during the estimated date.

I don’t know why.

This calls for a glass of wine! Join me?

It didn’t save some of the tomato plants I’d bought. I didn’t start my own seeds indoors this year. RIP goodly tomatoes!

But today it’s over 70 and I pulled the last of the carrots. They’ve been in the ground way too long.

I am not happy with this year’s crop of carrots. They were too small in winter and now that they reached size they have started to grow a hard core. So much for Nantes Coreless carrots packed in the Ferry Morse Planting Strips. They are rather disappointing. I’ll go back to hand planting my old way and not try to winter over the crop.

I have more tomato plants and some green and hot peppers to put in but will have to wait until the soil dries out more.

I planted Diva cucumber seeds today and dug and transplanted the Zeyphr squash plant seedlings that I started in April. The peas and sugar snap peas seemed to have survived well but I don’t know how the garlic will react to this soggy land. Most of the lettuce seed washed away and will have to be replanted.

I took a couple of hours this morning to dig trenches to drain the water. When I laid the rows out this way we were in a drought cycle and I was focused on holding rain in the rows by leaving the grass in between the rows. Now I have had to drain off the lake that each row became.

What a mess! As I worked the trench filled up immediately and water rushed to the back of the garden. Here the rush of water is down by half of what it was. And even now, hours later there is still water running through the trench.

Gaely GoLightly, The Hunting Dog, got into the action by deciding that little particles swirling down the trenches were something that she must capture. She dove right in to her job and worked along beside me. Westies are pack animals and we do everything together

Westies are bred to “go to ground” after varmints and love digging in the dirt. No lie. This Westie loves water, too. Bath time!

She didn’t want one and she really hates being photographed. Clean Grumpy Dog

And The Dog don’t pose neither.

She’s so helpful! If I could just teach her to run the vacuum.

Sunday evening Husband and I took the Dog for a walk at the local woodland lake park. It was around 6pm and the woods were damp from a light drizzle and beginning to get dark.

Then, something came into view that shattered that dusky softness.

(Please indulge me: I didn’t have my camera with me so I returned the next morning to get documentation to share this story. The light was that of the impending dark so you will have to imagine that night is falling.)

The woods were lush as we walked along the trail

when we were startled to see a Mourning Dove in an odd position and motionless on a low tree branch

By its position I thought the Dove seemed in serious distress and I didn’t want to cause it further angst by getting too close

My eyes couldn’t make out why there was a red spot on its neck so I got this close and stood completely still. A healthy dove doesn’t have red spots on its neck. I could only think that it was wounded by gunshot or had a parasite or had suffered a viral attack of some kind. Bird virus? Oh NO!

Husband and the Dog went to get the car and see if they could find a Park Attendant to help and I stood, silent and keeping my distance, waiting to see if the bird changed positions. Nothing happened for 20 minutes or so but finally my team members returned without finding anyone in authority that might have a way to handle a diseased or injured animal.

We got a bit closer from the opposite side

and finally our eyes were able to pick out the hanger eyelet on the top

Yup, it was a decoy! I had been carefully guarding a DECOY. What I had thought was possibly part of an injury was simply some leaf litter that had fallen onto the red spot

We’re not hunters; we hardly expected a plastic bird clipped to a tree branch

We laughed and laughed, so relieved that we were not watching a Mourning Dove die in the woods.

You can imagine that I was very glad Husband had not found a park employee to drag back to see my humiliation!

So, jumping in to make an analysis of the proper fit or hang or suitability of a garment is something I would really, really hesitate to do. It’s been definitely proved to me that my eyes can’t be trusted to discern an ultimate reality. I certainly wouldn’t want something I said, rightly or wrongly, to adversely affect the future work of any anyone.

I’d love to hear what you all have to say!

Did you know that you can follow a person’s Flikr pictures? Sure you can!

Just click on the person or group’s “photostream” and copy and paste that URL into your news and blog aggregator .

It should look like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/XXXXXXX@XXX/ The first 7 X’s are numbers and the last 3 are a mix of alphabet and numerals.

That’s how I’ve been following Ann Rowley, the winner of the Great British Sewing Bee, for the past three years. I don’t miss a photo and can keep track of all the lush projects that she publishes for public viewing there

Each picture will be treated as a separate post.

Much easier than trying to track all the entries in a message board or writing or reading a whole blog.

Here’s the Stitchery’s Flikr URL http://www.flickr.com/photos/77314006@N00/

According to Reuters, Bangladesh is number 2 in the world in apparel exports.

Yesterday, April 24 2013, an 8 story building that housed an indoor market, a bank and 5 garment factories collapsed 20 miles outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh. The numbers vary: 250 dead, 2000 pulled from the rubble alive, 1500 injured, 1000′s unaccounted for.

The 9th floor of the building was still under construction and had been certified as safe only the day before when large cracks developed. The owner of the building has been arrested and locals are calling for him to be sentenced to death. Some of the garment factory owners are also being arrested.

My heart is breaking for these low-paid employees. Shirtmaking shouldn’t be this dangerous!

Edited April 28 The building owner has finally been detained, he was not arrested immediately because he could not be found after Tuesday. And he said the building had been inspected but the police report that they advised the building was unsafe. There are also reports that 2 of the factory owners forced their employees to go to work. Politics and avoidance of responsibility make reporting almost impossible.

OK, I’ll spare you all the major whine brewing in my soul and tell you that we have finally captured the critter that has been eating the cabbages in the garden. And she sleeps in my bed every night.

(These are pictures from last summer)

Sigh, so cute

Yes, Gaely GoLightly is the prime suspect.

How could that sweet, innocent looking dog be our cabbage ravisher? Any why???? Who knows.

Since we have prevented her access to the garden by blocking off the porch stairs,

not one cabbage has been chomped.

I sure hope May is an easier month. I could use some smooth sailing!

I wish I had known more about roses when I planned and planted the front landscape two years ago. Here, they looked so small compared to the plants we’d removed: Front Porch and here: Bedragged…

We heavily pruned back the Cinco de Mayo floribunda shrub roses and the Coral Drift roses. I have absolutely no idea how to properly prune but we got out the book and tried our best. It’s not pretty YET but here’s what we did:

Shrub roses, Cinco de Mayo, get very large and we found lots of weeds to pull after we pruned

They have vicious thorns but my rose pruning gloves performed perfectly

We painted all the cut branches with wood glue to prevent intruson into the plant by The Baddies. We raked out the dead leaves and fertilized, watering it in.

This is a heavily pruned and cut back Coral Drift rose. It’s description led me to believe that they were much smaller and more disease resistant than they proved to be. They spred and overtook the front planting, and did NOT respect the dwarf boxwoods planted around them. I may have to move them in the future. (Arghhh) They are so thick it is impossible to weed around them.

and we dug up a dead azalea and a volunteer holly tree to make room in the shade for the Mountain Laurels (Kalmia latifolia “Keepsake”) that were being burned by the sun in the front yard. I hope they are happy here in the cool shade

We moved the remaining shrub rose away from the front walk way so we wouldn’t have to prune it so heavily. It’s companion had developed rose rosette disease and had to be removed last year. That leaves the front planting unbalanced but right now I don’t have plans to plant more. Our butterfly bushes will have more room to spread now.

We more lightly pruned the Wing Ding roses. They are a miniature polyantha, very sweet but have no fragrance

The only blooming, pretty things now are the pansies

and the dogwood

There is so much more to do but I have to get some commercial sewing done today so I hope the weather allows me to weed and start to mulch tomorrow.

But my hands are nice and smooth thanks to Bag Balm and those really great gauntlet rose pruning gloves. I found the Onion pattern 1045 Anarok worked very well in the light rain, too. I hung it to dry before putting it away in the closet. Wool is a wonderful fabric

In case you haven’t heard: Bag Balm is the gardener’s friend. It saves hands from the roughing up they get when working the soil. Must have smooth hands for sewing and knitting you know!

I just received this pattern in the mail yesterday and had planned to sew it up this week in a wind blocking technical fabric but temperatures are going to be in the 70′s and 80′s for most of the week.

I’ll have to cut another pair of overalls instead. My new brown ones don’t show dirt very much but they will need washing soon. Here’s how they look after a day in the dirt: not too bad. You just can’t beat good quality fabric, that’s my thoughts on the matter

The overalls got a good workout yesterday. It was a wonderful day. First, Husband worked just a few hours in the early morning and when he came in we took the dog with us to the Rose Society’s Education Day at a local nursery.

The meeting was incredibly informative and just as I suspected: our area is overrun with dying roses that carry the incurable Rose Rosetta virus. Here’s some more pictures at Fine Gardening

Here’s a wild rose in our neighborhood field that has the disease but is still growing and spreading the mites that carry the virus. The diseased branch is red, while a healthy branch on the same bush is in the background

RRD Closeup

The virus was introduced originally to kill off the wild roses that can take over whole fields. That was done about 27 years ago and now it’s killing off domesticated roses in wide swathes across the country.

It is potentially devastating for the rose industry but only just now are there studies being done to see what cures might be developed. Turns out that our little local Rose Society is full of incredibly knowledgeable folks and the Society provided the seed money for the first year of such a study, YAY for them! Dr Mark Windham is conducting the investigation. I do hope a prevention or cure can be found.

I have had to remove one whole plant last year when this virus continually sent up shoots from it’s root stock that were afflicted with the disease. The plant itself looked OK but one tiny mite, blown on the winds, can carry the disease to all the other roses. Another of the same species is exhibiting this disease in just one area and I’ll keep pruning those branches and hope that it doesn’t spread to the other roses. Yesterday I learned that if I get all the roots out of the hole from where the infected rose was removed I can plant another rose in that space. That was not the thinking last year. And I learned that I could just continuously prune off the branches that show this disease and perhaps the plant will survive.

Roses are a lot of work and even the disease resistant “Knock-Out Roses” are not as resistant as they have been touted to be. And I had just redone the front landscaping in 2011 with 13 roses. Ahhhhh, what have I done?

I had hoped to prune down hard all the roses with Husband’s help but the advice from the Rose Society’s expert is to wait until the new growth is 3 to 4″ long. Mine is only just over an inch right now. So we’ll wait a week or so to prune. Pruning is not my forte but I do try to do things properly so I’ll study up on it. It’s an annual ritual: re-reading rose pruning techniques.

So now: on to the vegetable garden.

Why do I grow the garden? Simple economics: the more food I grow and put up, the less money is needed to run the house, and the more money is available to pay employee salaries over the winter time, our slow season. I’ll bet I only went to the grocery store 4 times this past winter. And so I work, hard.

In the afternoon we planted peas, spinach, and lettuce.

The peas will grow up a 4 foot wire fence and shade the spinach and lettuce behind it. They will only get direct sun in the mornings.

This row held tomatoes last year and being the closest to the creek and the wettest part of the garden grounds, proved to be a hotbed of the anthracnose fungi, Colletotrichum coccodes. WARNING: The following photos are not for the faint of heart: My homegrown Anthracnose Colletotrichum coccodes I did a really good job of letting it thrive! Duh.

Boy, that decimated the ‘maters! I had overplanted so I still got a harvest that kept me quite busy. I pulled the most infected plants and doused the ground with vinegar and water but it didn’t really seem to do much. I still had wet spots even though I didn’t allow any more filaments to form. Perhaps the wet spots were a different form of tomato malady. There are so many wilts and fungus that beset tomatoes!

This year I will plant, water only on the ground, lay down a ground cover, prune all but the growing tip and stake the tomatoes. Labor intensive but with this kind of a fungi in the ground I need to provide prophylactic measures.

I will also cover the ground where the peas, lettuce and spinach are going to grow to keep this fungi off their leaves. I’m not so sure I’ll be able to do as much canning and freezing as I did last year.

We also pulled all the collards and I cooked up a big pot this morning, some of which will go into the freezer.

using this recipe from Men’s Health. It was different than the way I usually do them but quite good. I used a packet of country ham, I just couldn’t go without the ham flavoring.

when I went out to the garden to get the shot of the now dirty overalls I found this:

Who ate one of the cabbages last night? Some animal with very sharp, tiny teeth and a big wide bite. I’ll just bet that opossum who checks in on us got hungry for a sweet cabbage dinner! I can’t blame the poor critter. And raccoons eat cabbage, too. So now, I’ve got to figure out how to protect the cabbages from hungry omnivores. One article suggests planting a critter garden. Oh no! That’s more than I can even think about. Don’t know exactly what I’ll do about this. Any suggestions?

With all this garden work I’m facing I would like to applaud this little pot that needed nothing from me all winter: The Italian flat leafed and the triple curly parsley managed to thrive all on their own

When the dog and I went out to the field to get the wild rose shots we crossed over to Cane Creek and Gaely investigated an animal trail down by the water

and did her usual trick of getting a drink of water while wading

The field was full of field pansies AKA Johnny Jump-Ups. From the leaves I’d say they are Viola Bi-Color

I do miss living up on the mountain where wild diversity was so much richer than here in this settled, cultivated valley. But I take pleasure in the wilds where ever I can.

This pattern has cutting lines for 32 different sizes for each pattern piece. That’s a lot of lines! This time I laid a sheet of tracing paper on top of the fabric, laid the pattern piece on top of the tracing paper and used a solid tracing wheel to mark the lines directly onto the wrong side of the fabric. My measurements fell between the largest “regular” size and the plus sized. I cut the regular size and can wear regular pants, leggings, and a sweater under them anyway.

There are some problems with this pattern or maybe with the pattern cuter but the cut fabric matched up with each pattern piece. So here’s what to watch out for:

Straps are not the correct angle to lie flat in the back when worn. Even the instruction drawing shows them crossing over each other. I didn’t discover the problem until I had done all the double top stitching and was not going to pick all those stitches to make the correction.

I took a tuck and then put a rivet in each corner. I also had to narrow the straps (yes I did unpick two rows of top stitching for that) and cut off 8 inches of length.

Pocket piece is not wide enough to allow proper installation of button band. This is a crucial 5/8″ of fabric but I managed to squeeze through the construction by triple step stitching the edges and turning just once.

Add at least 5/8″ to the outer edge of the pocket and pocket facing. It will save a bunch of time in construction.

The next time saver is a big one and so simple and logical I can’t believe I didn’t find this in any of the two How-To-Use Jean Rivets tutorials published by Fehrtrade or TaylorTailor Oddly enough both of these tutorials were published on the same day May 15, 2011. I found that interesting. Wonder what was going on there?

But here’s the deal:

Rivets nails should be trimmed down after inserting into hole

if the thickness of the fabric doesn’t require the full length of the nail. Sooooo simple. It allows you to see how much you need to trim and since the nail hasn’t been crimped and it sharp point removed it slips right through the pre-made hole.

See that ragged edge?

It catches on on the fabric threads and takes forever to get pushed through

Even with the pointed head left in tack threads can be split and cause a few troubles

but the point takes much less time to insert. I got my rivets years ago from the nice man at Castbullet. I see that TaylorTailor also sells them and in more colors

As I was working with this fabric I’ve had for years and had always planned to use for overalls, I was wondering why I’d put this gorgeous twill aside for work pants. The answer came as I was applying the rivets to the side tool pocket

and found this

It is clearly abraded and marked and must have been there when I received the fabric. I zigzagged over the edges and applied a patch.

Another odd thing about this pattern is that there are no reinforcement suggested for the location of the buttons or buttonholes. I put them in without adding anything since I wasn’t going to do the ripping needed to add in a backing material.

The pattern has you “tack” over all the stress points but I only used them on the faux fly area

and used the rivets where there would be real stress.

I am glad this pair is done. I compared the pattern pieces with the other two patterns I have in the stash and they are similar in shape. I hope the instructions are better. We’ll see.

Gratuitous Dog Bomb