little things

[thanate]

I have finally achieved purple podded peas; there are not as many of them as there might have been if I'd put up some kind of stakes to give them somewhere to grow once they ran out of waist high front fence, but they've got several shades of red/purple flowers, and dark purple pods, and are quite pretty. Some day I will be reunited with the camera card reader, and then perhaps will share.

I find I may fail at lace charting, though: I'm working on laminaria, and upon reaching the end of the set-up bits, I had (as I was supposed to) 37 stitches. One of these is a center stitch that carries all the way down the shawl, and the outermost three on each side are edging and not part of the pattern. That's seven stitches, leaving 30 when I went to start the first chart; fifteen on each side of the center. The chart begins with 7 stitches and increases to 23, so I knit the extra stitch in the middle of each two repeats, and the extra stitches in the middles of the six repeats per side of the chart the next time around... and according to the pictures of the project on ravelry nobody else did this, but darned if I can figure out how they made the numbers come out right. Even had I combined the first & last chart stitches (which would make for even/repeatable numbers between rows) this doesn't help the odd number to start. Anybody know what I'm missing?... Right. That bit about actually, ignore the size of the chart & just repeat the middle bit in the red outline (that's not mentioned in the key like everything else) until you get to an end? That would have been helpful to work out before I'd put in upwards of ten hours doing far too much increasing. Bother. At least the real way won't take nearly as long.

The pond life continues to multiply; I spotted a new sort of diving bug this morning, and an aquatic snail, which I have no idea how it could possibly have gotten there, but there it is. The plants are taking off, and we had one of the of the Cope's Gray Treefrogs calling from right about that corner of the house, so perhaps it will leave us tadpoles. Oh, and I've seen my second damselfly dropping by, which is also encouraging.

Comments

[queenoftheskies.livejournal.com]

I've never heard of purple podded peas. I'm intrigued and off to Google.

We live in an area near a neighborhood of homes in a preserved environment area that has a lot of plants and wildlife you don't normally see in southern California. At night, when I drive through to pick two of my kids up at night classes, I stop and listen to all the frogs sing. It sounds like there are hundreds of them around the creek. And as they mature, their song deepens. It's awesome.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Apparently there are a bunch of sweet pea varieties in purple; the ones I have are the sugar snaps from Peace Seeds in Corvalis, OR (whose website is absolutely *terrible* or at least it was last year, but contrary to appearances they are actually legit)-- I suspect that if you wanted, you could probably grow those in your climate over the winter. I've also got some purple bean varieties that I got off a seed rack from one of the larger garden centers, though they claim to turn green when you cook them, which seems kind of a pity.

Your frogs sound very cool-- it's so nice to know that there are still a few natural areas out there.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I love purple beans, so the purple peas sound lovely!