Dec. 21, 2024

A week of progress has transpired as I finished planting the hedges. It took a total of 4 days, 3 hours per day to complete. I definitely felt a peaceful sense of accomplishment when it was all done on Monday. So I took a bit of a break from the field this week while I ordered the next batch of items, including garlic, onions, a few rose hedge plants, and the main order of fruit trees. They should be arriving early next week, so back at it then. Meanwhile, I’ve now got a good pair of wellies to work with so my hiking boots no longer need to get destroyed.

I watched some videos on growing rootstock, and it’s as simple as throwing a bunch of apple seeds on top of the soil, some people throw it in with apple pulp which is discard from pressing apples into juice. The seed pulp works well as a composting kickstarter for the seed. So I was thinking I should get started with some seed now so that it’s ready for grafting in a year’s time. Although… I currently don’t have my own apple seeds, which I know would come from semi-dwarf rootstock. I’ll be working on sourcing that once the fruit trees are in. 

This week I revisited spinning, which was a nice change. I had 80g of cotton left over, so decided to spin that up to finish it off. I did my classic 3 ply yarn and split it over 4 days, doing one single each day, and then the ply on the fourth day. It turned out really nice, one of my most consistent cotton spins. I’ve found cotton quite difficult to spin because it has such a short staple length, meaning the fibres are very short. It is difficult to draft the fibre without it breaking. The trick is to split the roving down lengthways until it’s already so thin that you barely need to draft while spinning. Anyway, that’s probably jargon to most people… Happy with the end result. I now just have a bag full of sheep wool from our sheep in Belgium that I still need to spin or use some way.

I’ve also been working on a digital app side project and just finished the MVP for it. I won’t reveal it yet as it’s now going through its first round of beta testing, but it looks promising. It’s a tool that I’ve made for personal use, so tailored it to my needs, but I’ll publish it soon for other people to try out if they find it useful - I hopefully will! 

Finally… continued progress on my knitting, and almost finished the body. I’m probably making slower progress than usual, been having headaches in the evenings so haven’t knit as much. But progress is progress. 

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