The Golden Iris

I woke up this morning to loud peeping and went outside to see this: Meet mama duck. See all those fuzzy butts crowded under mama duck's wings? Those belong to eleven fuzzy ducklings. Yes, eleven. The time had come to herd baby ducklings. Some backstory: when we moved into our apartment, which is two floors above a restaurant with a second-floor deck that opens on to the alley, both the landlord and the previous tenant told us that every year a duck made a nest on the deck and would require our assistance getting the ducklings to the river. Of course, the river is not only seven blocks away, but down a flight of stairs and across several streets. (Nobody ever said ducks were really smart). I found a nest with six eggs in it on Easter morning and had been watching and waiting ever since. The first trick was to get the babies down the flight of stairs without any of them getting hurt. This is me trying to placate mama duck with a bit of homegrown lettuce while I take her bab...

Springtime has already produced some of its bounty in big enough quantities for me to eat! Last night I harvested some lovely leaf lettuce and baby spinach with a little broccoli raab and parsley on the side. I had them with cold spaghetti and a lemony vinaigrette, and it was lovely. It felt very celebratory. So here are some photos of my containers. I have several long, narrow, built in planters, many of which contain bamboo. The open ones all have stuff growing in them now. Here is some mint on the left, and jumbled in the right are parsley, broccoli raab, and spinach. And of course a tomato. It's a Supersweet 100, not my biggest favorite, but I figured I couldn't grow anything much more substantial than a cherry tomato in a container like this. On the left there are two kinds of lettuce, and over on the right are potatoes I planted on a whim. The potatoes have sticks sticking up from them because they are interplanted with some sweet peas that I hope will soon rise ab...

Okay, I admit it: I'm turning into a foodie. As if you couldn't tell, we love food, we always have, and we love to cook. One of the things I love is Neapolitan-style pizza, and my favorite pizzeria is 2 Amy's . There is something really lovely about a real margherita pizza: hot, crisp, chewy, the bright tomatoes and basil balanced by creamy fresh mozzarella. 2 Amy's does a real bang-up job of it, and their pizza is certified D.O.C. authentic Neapolitan. If it's certified authentic, it must be good, right? I can't even begin to tell you. Because 2 Amy's is far away - it's a serious ride on the subway plus about a mile's walk - and because we like to experiment, we decided to try our own version. Without a proper wood-burning oven, our pizza is never going to come out exactly the same as a restaurant's. But we got some good tips from a pizza-making forum. There were two aspects of our past pizza-making that had to be improved: the crust ...

Spring is here in Virginia, which we've discovered means 48 hours of more or less continuous rain followed by minor flooding. Hooray! We've been keeping busy, and between work, planting my garden, cooking, and cleaning, there hasn't been a lot of knitting time left over. I still have about 8 projects left on the needles, some of which would probably take only a few hours to finish. But I'm slow, and I want to start more projects instead of finishing the ones I have. Knitting samples up is also taking time away from my own knitting, but that's okay. In any case, this is the only knitting I have to show lately: These are still the Diagonal Rib socks. By now I've turned the heel and am decreasing in the gusset, but there is no way I'll finish these for the March Sockdown deadline of April 31. Oh well! They will still be lovely socks. I am fascinated by the abundance of flowering things here. Spring seems so early, and so quickly followed by summer - ev...

First of all, has it really been a week? Argh, not posting makes me feel so incompetent. Now that I've got that off my chest, I want to share some nifty butterfly photos with you. I can't show you much knitting these days due to it being a secret again, so you'll have to bear with me for a bit. Or, you know, just ignore this post. A friend and I went to see the Butterflies and Plants: Partners in Evolution exhibition at the National Museum of Natural History last week. While ostensibly the message is encapsulated in the title, my guess is that most visitors went to see the live butterfly greenhouse and didn't bother looking at the rest of the displays. It seemed like half the kids in the greenhouse were screaming with excitement while the other half were screaming with fear. Regardless, it was fun and worth the $6 and the early-morning trek across town to be the first ones in to the exhibition. The focal point of the exhibition is an enclosed greenhouse with tro...

... very sleepy. And hungry, too! Over the past few days I've snuck in enough time to make some fun refrigerator cookies. They're very easy. Just remember when cutting them up to make sure the dough is really, really cold and your knife is really, really sharp. If these conditions aren't met, your nice round log will be smooshy and your pattern will be ragged on the cookies. This recipe isn't super-awesome, so I won't be passing it on. It's tasty enough for me, though. Then if you're crafty and remember that they don't grow much in the oven, you can fit a whole batch of cookies onto two baking sheets and get the whole shebang in and out of the oven in ten minutes or less while you're washing the dishes. Unfortunately these babies are mostly butter so you can only have one. Actually because this is the Internet, you can't have any, but I'll be putting half in the freezer for another time. Well maybe you could have one, but you'd ha...

Today is a very grey day chez Golden Iris. It's been raining or drizzly on and off for the past few days. I don't know about anyone else but weather like this makes me want to curl up under a blanket and snooze and do nothing, which isn't good for my day off! Every day off I get I make all these ambitious plans for cleaning the house, making food, shopping, knitting, gardening, you name it. Today? I've had a shower and a cup of coffee, but not much else. But the rain indicates one thing - Spring has definitely sprung. The big oak tree outside my window is leafing out (yes, the Christmas lights in the tree are still lit): And on the patio, my seeds are growing. My nasturtiums even sprouted! Sample knitting has returned to my life. I've received some lovely Pear Tree Australian Merino in one of my favorite colors, seafoam green, for another hush-hush project. This stuff is absolutely luscious! The hats I finished a little while ago have safely made it to thei...

It seems every time I try to knit something for myself these days, something goes wrong, or I'm met with disappointment. (Thankfully the sample knitting has been successful.) I run out of yarn for the bedjacket, have to substitute another yarn for the edging. One pair of socks, deliberately knit to the wrong gauge, looks awful. Rip. Three shawl projects lay stagnant due to me generally not caring enough to work on them. And then this happens. Actually this happened weeks ago, but it was too disheartening to deal with. I get this far on the edging, and there's no way in the world I'll have enough yarn to finish it. So after this photo was taken, it got ripped back far enough to where I can finish it. I'll have leftovers now, but at least the scarf will be finished. Of course with most days in the 60s, I'll have no use for it until September. Wonderful. I've been trying to participate in a group on Ravelry called "Sockdown" - basically, the ide...