Prose Works

This is my "neighbor" to the north across the road from the driveway.

In the foreground, soybeans, then dwarf fruit trees (apples, if I remember correctly), and in the background, a woodlot.

Oops, I seem not to have taken the west and south pictures off the camera's memory card.

Early this morning my husband left for his third two-week annual training session of the summer. He's been in the National Guard since 1983. His unit is being reconfigured, or whatever the official term is, from an armor unit into some kind of reconnaissance unit, so this will be the last time they are together as Company A.

Last night he said, "I've packed up the camera to take it with me, since this is our last AT together, so that's where it will be when you go looking for it."

I said, "Two weeks with no pictures?!?"

We do have a scanner, but this new one is not as good at scanning anything thick. And I find the scanner software irritating to use: full of ads for the manufacturer's other products, plus it makes assumptions about dpi and the save directory that can't be permanently changed. Every time I use it, I have to go in and change them to the size and directory I want.

So. Two weeks with no pictures!

I am nearly done with the purple socks I started back in June. The summer has been going fast. I'll have to hurry if I want to finish them in July. I only have a few more rows of the cuff to knit, and then I'll do the Kitchener or tubular or grafted bind-off (whatever it's called) and they'll be done.

Yesterday I went out in the evening, when it was only 82 degrees F. (and 66% humidity) and picked some more blackberries. After the blackberry "drought" of last year, so far I have a dozen pints and four quarts canned, and lots more berries ripening. I am going to keep canning by littles until I'm tired of it. Then I think I'll bake a pie.

One of the things that is fascinating to me (many things are fascinating to me) as a horticulturist is the variety in the blackberry plants. I see some that are usually three-leaved. Some are usually five-leaved. Some are fairly weak-stemmed creeping or trailing plants, with flowers in the leaf axils all along the cane. Some of them only bloom towards the center of the plant.

Some are strong, thick (thorny!) canes that stand up straight and don't even droop at the tip. (Last night I picked berries off some of these, and some of the berries were up over my head!) I even have some that are thornless, which you might think would be desirable: but those plants also blossom very scantily, and what is the good of a thornless blackberry less the berries?

Being a person who likes to know what she is looking at, I opened my Peterson Wildflower Guide and read:

Brambles (Blackberries, etc.) Rubus

Most of the plants of the genus Rubus are woody, prickly, or bristly shrubs, outside the scope of this book; most are problems for the specialist. Gray recognizes 205 species in our area. See A Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs for a small selection.

"Gray" is Gray's Manual of Botany. "Our area" is "northeastern/north central North America".

Although I have a whole shelf of various field guides, I don't have the Peterson tree & shrub guide, just the Audubon and the Golden tree guides. From what I understand of the blackberry species, they are just as happy to cross with each other as the various squash species. So I probably have all kinds of happy hybrids growing out there.

Today is Saturday, so I can look forward to the fifth pattern from the Sampler M KnitAlong group (see button in sidebar). And I better hurry and finish knitting pattern 4!