Mystery plant, moringa and oakgalll ink

This morning's wander in the early morning cool revealed another sudden mystery plant, probably another escapee from next door. 

I'm guessing some variety of squash, but if you, or your app, know better, please say. Beautiful leaves, perfect for leaf printing..

And my moringa, grown from a seed from Arizona, is doing well. I started another as a houseplant but the winter light levels were too low and it eventually gave up. 

In the much higher light levels of Arizona, they grow as trees up to 90 feet I'm told. So this is an infant.

And the thyme is flowering now, woody but persisting.

Back indoors, full disclosure, I made a few inches of Iris string

I had unwrapped the fibers, kept damp in a napkin in a plastic bag, in case they were mildewed from waiting, but they're fine, so I tried a bit and will now desist for a few more days or resting the shoulder.

Anyway there's yet another adventure to add to my plans: oak gall ink. 

I've made walnut ink, as you know, and given it to students. But I supposed oak galls were attached to trees. Not so, as I found from Sally Pointer, who has gathered them from among acorns on the ground.

Having found that out, i checked further online, in the British Library and Getty museum YouTube channels, highly recommend both.

Turns out it's not a big deal to make oak gall ink, just takes a bit of time. It's indelible, permanent, waterproof, and if you don't make it right, corrosive! It can eat through the paper or vellum. 

Which means the ink makers who provided for the Canterbury Tales and Magma Carta and Declaration of Independence knew their stuff. As well as all the other mss.

I've often wondered what happens if you make a mistake on a manuscript. You can use the knife you used to make and sharpen your quill pen to scrape it out! Phew.

And yes, in the past I've made rather rough and ready quill pens from locally found feathers, and used them to write and draw a bit.  Need you ask?

Anyway here's my fall plans, as soon as acorns fall, to make ink and maybe a quill pen or two. This hot year might have been good for galls, which result from wasp attacks. You can see the hole in the gall where the wasp departed, no danger of bringing home an irritated wasp.

Always good to have something to look forward to, as well as cooler days. You can order galls online if you don't have local oak trees.

Today I'm baking the chocolate cherry cake.

Later I'll deliver the card and enclosure so Handsome Son gets a nice surprise when he arrives home late tonight from work  

He lives a couple of minutes'drive away, I can do this. This way it will be there in time. My tiny baby is going to be 55! Unbelievable.

Happy day everyone, make plans for adventures in everything, play and work and rest and we got this.

The 72 microseasons and other discoveries

Yesterday was eventful. I discovered the Japanese concept of 72 seasons in the year, rather than four. On the grounds that four was an inadequate number to convey the reality of the year, it's a division of the year into about five day sections. 

No sooner seen than signed onto, I looked out a book I made years ago, to start my own nature journal entries. This is a sentence or two a day at most, enough to mark sightings.

Front cover

Back cover

 Colored pages

Some quick and no doubt inaccurate calculation tells me I can fit two microseasons on each side of a page, filling the whole book. So here's the start, in silver pen. My year started yesterday, why not. Season one, with five planner entries, season two in waiting.

The binding is a Japanese stab binding, seemed appropriate, and the cover is an old print on canvas with stenciling over a monotype. 

Various colored pages. And it finally has a  project. It's a nature journal made simple, my speed right now.

Then the mail brought the rest of my lovely fabric for spring and summer wear, winter sewing.  

Lovely patterns, just what I was looking for. Firecracker Fabrics sale.

Look at the drape there. I'm going to be so well dressed I'll charge $ to talk to me. How smug I look!

I checked the lengths the old fashioned way -- nose tip to outstretched finger and thumb. It's a handy way to measure when you don't have a tape measure right there. You measure the distance between your nose tip and outstretched index finger and thumb, as if holding the fabric. 

That's your personal base unit, and it's pretty close to being your inseam measurement, too, handy to know. Mine, nose tip to finger tip's 27", inseam a shade more. Then you do it moving along the fabric, then do the math to determine your total yardage. And they gave me a few extra inches on the yellow material, always a nice touch by good fabric sellers. The batik's pretty exact.

On other paths of discovery, I found out several things about our mystery plant. One is that I'm even more absent minded than I realized, and should compensate with labeling my planting. 

The other thing I found out, when I lifted out the mystery to see what it was growing from, and found I'd also broken another seedling which was  about to break ground, was that these were the sprouting  moringa  plants I'd started from seed. Blurry picture, best I could do, but you can see the seed

I'd been watching  the wrong pot to see if they were growing! And used another handy filled pot which I thought was empty of occupants, to transplant the philodendron. This happened to be the one the moringa    seeds were actually in. Doh!  Note to self: a simple label could have averted this little debacle.

Anyway the baby moringa is now in the pot I was watching, and now I know the seeds are germinating nicely. I'd only planted a couple to see if they were viable. They are, so I will plant a couple more. And label them. I will label them. I will.

Field and Fen takes a walk snd learns a thing or two

Aside from the mud from Henri and the new crop of mosquitoes today was good for walking.

I took a muddy trudge and found lovely sights.

Wildflowers on the first part, where the trees are and the ground's always moist

Jewelweed, supposedly its sap can treat poison ivy, which grows  abundantly right here

 

Pokeweed, probably good bird food

and, coming back through the streets, roses still with weeks to bloom yet

And next door after a chat with neighbor, all about gardening, I learned about the moringa, here a houseplant but in its native India, a good sized tree, also known as drumstick tree. 

Every part is edible, leaves, bark, pods, seeds source of various vitamins aside from looking nice.

She grew hers from seed, in a pot

So when I got home, I thought I'd see about seeds, looks like a thing I'd like to try and ordered a packet. I'll report further when they get here. 

Then while I was out walking this happened on the deck. 

No idea where the rest of it, or the former occupant, are.

I'm guessing it's a mourning dove egg. Right size, right pure white color. We have mourning doves nesting around and yesterday I saw an adult rushing about pecking up seed from the flowers, maybe because of new young.

I had a couple of cool ideas about the beaded figure, nothing to show yet, still musing. And I did not make dough beads, because I found I was down to the last of the doughballs, and needed it for lunch, with the last of the roasted vegetables. Last peach for dessert.

It all came out evenly. I think I may need more peaches before they're gone.