I’ve been making good progress on my Koigu socks over the last couple of days. I sort of hoped that I would get them finished today, but life got in the way and it wasn’t to be. Here is the second one – it’s only missing the toe now, so I should be done before too long.

After lunch I decided to enjoy the nice spring weather we’re having and potter gently about in the garden for an hour or so, cutting back a little, sweeping up the very last of the leaves, pulling up the first of the early weeds and admiring the tiny brave crocuses that have burst into flower this week. I then got a little carried away with my cutters.

(please note – this is most certainly NOT my apple tree)

You see I have an old apple tree. It isn’t very beautiful, but it does produce the most wonderful cooking apples. Or at least it did, up until last year, when there wasn’t a single apple. I was a little miffed about this as normally I have a good supply of my own stewed apples in the freezer to provide us with yummy crumbles and apple pies right through the winter months. But last year, nichts, nada, nothing at all.

I usually have someone come in to trim the fruit trees in the garden properly. Last year I had to get a new man in as my dear friend Suzanne the Gardener has gone off to travel the world. It would seem that the new man didn’t know what he was doing. When I read up about apple trees and their problems this morning, a picture of my tree stared out at me – entitled ‘the overpruned apple tree’. There were masses and masses of long shoots growing straight upwards. A clear case. Hmph. I paid good money for that.

Apparently this is rather a tricky situation to rectify.

So I set to. I bit off rather more than I could chew actually. I ended up first using a ladder and then climbing into the tree itself and finally had to recruit my non-gardening husband to reach the parts I couldn’t get to. It took hours. So much for a little gentle pottering….but I guess at least it’s done.

Now I’m off to a dinner party and I’m not sure anyone will believe me when I tell them that I got all the scratches climbing trees. (The ones on my face are particularly attractive 🙂 )

Tomorrow is strictly a day for running and stitching. Watch this space.

Helen

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 12th, 2011 at 4:18 pm and is filed under Gardening, Knitting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.