Cutting azaleas, picking tomatoes & spinning yarn

Fall is the time to make cuttings of azaleas and root them. Several years ago I put a cutting of one of the pink azaleas in a clay pot, put it on the north side of the house and literally forgot about it. It took root and I transplanted it to the back yard beside the deck. It has grown so much over the years that now it gets pruned in the summer after the blooms are finished.

Don built the rooting box in that same spot on the north side (shady) and this year constructed  the potter's bench beside the rooting box. It is a great shady spot for working on projects for the garden.

To root the azaleas, I cut a section so that there are either leaf nodes or branches that will be below ground. Remove the leaves or cut the branching stems short, then apply powered Rootone to that part and put it in the soil conditioner that fills the rooting box. Then I watered gently and thoroughly and replaced the windows covering the rooting box. The box is now filled with pink and lilac azalea cuttings. Next year they will be added to the garden.

The garden also yielded the last crop of tomatoes. These were from one of the 'volunteer' plants that appeared in the compost dirt that was added to the new part of the garden. 

They were just perfect for a salad!

Six pots of violas are handing from the deck, lots of pretty blooms for winter!

Spent time spinning on the front porch, now that the bobbin is full, 

the double ply yarn will be wound onto a nitty noddy.

My nitty noddy measures 1 and 1/2 yards each time you wind the yarn around. I wound around this nitty noddy 204 times, so I have 306 yards in this skein of yarn. 

Now with the bobbin empty, I can begin to ply two single strands of yarn together again. Only a little more roving to go and I will have spun this entire fleece. Then I can decide what to make with it.

When you are spinning, everyone always asks, "What are you making?" 

The answer is always the same, yarn. 

Sometimes I don't know what the yarn will become,

 a sweater, blanket, shawl, 

but it will always start as yarn!