Some more pretty spring shapes :)

Because I like to share my pictures all over the internets apparantly :)

I really liked the texture on the trunk of the cherry blossom tree in my garden.



This is another tree that's growing in my back garden. I'm not sure off the top of my head what it is, I guess we'll see later when the leaves fold out! I liked the weird shapes the growing leaves were making.









That last one is my favourite - all spiral-y and pretty colours. Nature is beautiful at this time of year!

Spring Is Here :)

We've finally had the last cold snap here, and it is now officially Spring - well, I say it is and that's what makes it official ;p

I've been wandering around my garden looking to see what has come back. We had a really cold winter, and the ground was covered in inches of snow for weeks. So I didn't hold out a lot of hope for many of my plants. But most, if not all of them, came back! Yay for hardy perennials! :D




These are the ones I was most surprised at - Asiatic Lilies. There was no way I thought these were strong enough to survive the winter, but I went out my back door the other day, and there they were! I can't wait till they grow and flower, I love lilies!



Another surprise - Dicentra or "bleeding hearts" If you'd seen the mess this was in a few weeks ago, you'd be surprised too. There was nothing, not even a green sprout, just a mess of brown sogginess. Then, all of a sudden, this appeared! :D

A couple more growing pictures:




And some water droplet macros:




And what do you do when it's warming up, and nature is blooming all around you? Why, you knit colourwork mitts of course! ;)





These are the Starstuff mitts by Amy van de Laar - a free ravelry download. I knit them out of Stylecraft Special 4 Ply, using 2.75mm DPNs for the cuffs, and 3.25mm needles for the hand. I like them :D They knit up quite fast, and the pattern was easy to follow once I got the hang of the "extra" stitch at the end of the chart. Basically, you just follow the chart and knit till the last 8st repeat is finished, then you knit stitch no 9 from the pattern, substituting in the "extra" stitch colour. That makes more sense if you're actually reading or knitting the pattern, I wouldn't bother trying to understand me if you're not :)

I'm having a real mitten craze just now, browsing ravelry like mad for colourwork patterns, and I've got 2 other pairs on the needles just now. Just the thing to knit in springtime :)

A New Interest - Gardening

Over the summer, I've discovered that if I plant things from seeds, they grow!

OK, not really news, but it comes as a bit of a suprise to me that I can actually grow stuff, and the soil doesn't become barren and un-life-sustaining at my mere touch. In the past when I've had plants, they died. Unfortunately, without exception.

My landlord is quite knowledgeable about gardening, and is very encouraging about us taking an interest in the garden ;) Last year, he gave us some Lupin plants that he had grown from seeds from his own garden, and I stuck them in the garden, sure that even this short contact with me would kill them.



It didn't ;)

Towards the end of the summer, the lovely flowers all went away, but there were a lot of seed pods. (this was the first time I'd actually noticed a seed pod on a plant, now I'm seeing them everywhere) So for a laugh, I decided to experiment and see if I put the seeds into some soil, would they grow?

One did:



All the other pots in that picture had the seeds in them too, but they hadn't come up yet, so I got fed up and chucked the soil into the garden. Maybe they'll grow out there.

But this experiment got me quite interested in the whole seed planting thing. I've now filled up all my window sill space with plant pots. Mostly containing herbs like rocket, dill, basil, thyme and mint, but I planted some wallflowers as well, from seed pods from the wallflowers in my garden. Those are coming along great!



The herbs are growing really well too. I've planted 4 pots of rocket, cos I love the taste, and I've been using that in various dishes. I've used some of my basil too, in a meatloaf I made the other day (yes, I've been cooking too. Not worthy of a blog post yet, but me! Cooking!!) I haven't used any of the mint yet, but I think I'd like to experiment with that and try making some mint tea or something.

This new interest is very strange for me. I've always been so not interested in plants. I could point out "that's a rose bush" and "that plant is red/blue/yellow" or whatever, but that was it! And I wasn't interested in knowing any more than that. Now I keep asking my bf's mum what plants are as we pass them, and I even took some seed pods off a laburnum tree that I was walking past in the street, and planted them. They're growing too!



It's really quite amazing when I think about it, that I can take a little tiny thing like a seed, stick it in some dirt, put it on the windowsill and give it some water every couple of days, and it'll grow into an actual plant!!

This experiment hasn't even cost me much either. I got a lot of plant pots from people I know, and got some other cheap ones from the shop. I use ice cream tubs as saucers for under the plant pots that don't have actual proper saucers. The compost cost less than £5, and I got most of the herb seeds from the pound shop, where it's £1 for a pack of 6 different types of seeds.

I don't think I'll be getting overly obsessed with gardening like my other hobbies, but it's interesting for the moment, and I'm learning a lot about nature, something I hadn't really paid much attention to before. I seem to be getting all domesticated in my old age!!