Gardening and knitting

 I love it when my garden begins to show signs of being ready for harvesting. I've picked several tomatoes already, which is about two weeks ahead of schedule. I've canned a few pints and will can more in the next few weeks.

I came upon a recipe online for oven-roasted tomato sauce. It sounds so delicious, and I love the way roasting vegetables brings out their sweetness (Have you ever tried roasting together potato chunks and butternut squash chunks, with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper sprinkled on them before popping them into the oven? Really, really tasty), so I'm eager to try roasting some of my own.

The tomatoes that aren't fully ripe when I pick them I put into a brown paper bag with a banana or two. The bananas will hasten the ripening of the tomatoes.

Green peppers? Love 'em. I chop them up, place on a single layer on a baking sheet, freeze them for an hour or so, then dump them into freezer bags and put them back into the freezer. This gives me chopped green peppers to use in chili, dynamites, rice pilaf, etc., all winter long.

Last fall for the first time I planted some garlic. I wasn't sure what soil conditions would work best, so I planted the cloves of one bulb in my vegetable garden and the cloves of the other bulb in my flower garden. The vegetable garden tends to be must wetter than the flower garden.

I harvested the garlic two weeks ago and can see that the vegetable garden was the preferred spot for growing garlic. The bulbs now hanging in the basement to dry before cutting off the stocks and roots. I'm a little disappointed in the size of the bulbs, but maybe I'll get a better crop next year. I love garlic. If a recipe calls for two garlic cloves, I add four. That sort of thing.

And knitting. Yes, I've been knitting, of course. This little girl's shrug is called "Entrechat." I found the pattern on Ravelry and immediately bought and downloaded it.

It was a quick, easy knit, an all-in-one, top-down design, so there were no seams to sew up once it was finished. I haven't chosen just the right button for it yet. I'm thinking something with a little bling will be just the ticket.

This is a size 3-4, but the pattern ranges from 0-3 months to 5-6 years, so I should be able to make a lot of these very feminine shrugs for various little girls, current and future!

So that's what I'm up to currently.