After weeks and weeks of scorching heat and almost no rain, this is what 90% of the ground in our garden looks like… There are some partially green patches in the shade of the house on the north side, and the raised beds in the kitchen garden are also green due to daily watering. But most of the grass is totally dead.

On Midsummer’s Eve we finally moved into the upstairs rooms.

Downstairs has a kitchen, a living room, a large bedroom, a bathroom, a weird room behind the bathroom, and two hallways. Upstairs has two smaller rooms and a toilet. Until now we’ve really only lived downstairs. One of the upstairs rooms has served as a library, with bookshelves along all walls, and also housed many of the plants that we brought with us from London. The other room has basically been a transit warehouse for unpacking and sorting books, but it’s occasionally doubled as a guest bedroom. (We tend to refer to it as “the room with the boxes”.)

We know we will have to vacate the downstairs bedroom for the refurbishment some time later this year. It’s not imminent (we haven’t even got planning permission yet) but it is certain to happen some time within the next half a year. We also think that Ingrid might get more and better sleep if she doesn’t have to share a bedroom with a (possibly rather noisy) baby.

Circumstances led to it all happening on Midsummer’s Eve. We were recently given a child bed that Ingrid’s cousins have outgrown; we recently found time to sort through the last few boxes of books; we had guests coming for a Midsummer barbecue whom we could ask for help carrying the beds upstairs.

Unfortunately carrying our king-size bed upstairs turned out to be impossible: it just won’t fit up the staircase. Eric and I ended up sleeping on our guest mattresses instead. It all felt like a makeshift camp: us sleeping on mattresses on the floor, Ingrid sleeping next to piles of boxes and a bunch of plants that we haven’t gotten around to moving yet.

And, after bravely promising she’d sleep on her own in her own room, Ingrid tottered into ours at about 2 o’clock. Then she proceeded to toss and turn and climb around for what felt like an eternity. I guess everything felt strange and out of place. After a while Eric gave up and moved out to Ingrid’s room; after about an hour Ingrid finally settled in, too. All in all, it was the worst night’s sleep we’ve had in many months.

Tomorrow we’re going emergency bed shopping. (IKEA was closed today because of Midsummer’s Day.) Then we’ll do some cleaning up in Ingrid’s new bedroom, to make it feel less like a warehouse. But the new master bedroom is going to feel like a camp for the next half a year, or however long the refurbishment will take. After all, we will have to squeeze in all the important parts of a bedroom in addition to all the bookshelves that are there now.

Does anyone need/want a wooden base spring mattress (resårbotten)? IKEA Sultan something or other, 160cm, medium hard, bought in 2002, only rarely jumped on.

I love having a garden. I love our garden. Even though I don’t spend much time there every day (because our evenings tend to be busy, and because we have no evening sun in the garden), I love having it nearby and around me.

I love being surrounded by greenery rather than houses, cars or people. Looking out through the kitchen window during breakfast and seeing green grass, trees and blooming lilacs. Being met by growing things when leaving the house in the morning, and when coming home in the evening.

I love the quiet. Which is not a direct effect of having a garden, really, but a neighbourhood with gardens mean less dense housing, which in turn means more quiet.

I love the air and the smells. I like to end my day by walking out onto the balcony when brushing my teeth and just inhaling the garden. Just a few moments’ exposure makes a big difference.

We will hopefully have home-grown tomatoes this year. (That’s assuming the rest of the experiment turns out as successful as the first week.)

While there are still patches of snow here and there in the garden (and a huge heap of it on the north side, where Eric dumped the snow from the roof) the crocuses are already blooming, the scillas are well underway, and in the warmest and sunniest spot, I spotted a hyacinth blossom.

The birds are ignoring our feeding table so I took it down today. I guess there are enough insects around for them. The tits and sparrows who were hanging around all winter now rarely show themselves. Instead the wood pigeons and thrushes are back from wherever they spent the winter.

And this afternoon I even noticed the year’s first butterfly. (On the neighbours’ roof.)

The moment the snow disappeared from parts of our garden, green shoots appeared. They must have been ready already under the snow, because this was all under snow just two days ago, and I think it would take more than 2 days for the shoots to come out. I like the way they come right through the rotten leaves, due to snow holding the leaves down I guess.

The white stuff around the shoots is not snow but some kind of weird mold that appears to have thrived under the snow.

Spring is in the air. Well, it is still –10°C outside, and there is still half a metre of snow in the garden… but the sun is up well before me, and the birds are chirping and twittering much more actively.

Other creatures are, apparently, also getting that spring feeling. Here’s the sight that met us behind our house yesterday morning, where the snow had lain more or less untouched the previous night:

Hare tracks everywhere! Must be that March madness coming on.

I’ve never actually seen the hares visit our garden – just their tracks and some droppings underneath the bird feeder. (I guess they won’t say no to some seeds when they’re desperate.) Eric’s spotted them lurking in the lilac hedge at times.

The bird feeder has also attracted the interest of a couple of roe deer. (Look at how deep that snow is around the doe’s leg! I expect we’ll be reminiscing about the Great Winter of ’09 for many years to come.)

As with the hares, they’ll take peanuts and sunflower seeds when that’s the only thing on offer. We have very deliberately not put out any more suitable feed for them: we don’t want them to think that this neighbourhood is a good place for them to hang out. They should really stay in the nature reserves well away from here. Here they risk getting run over, and of course they are rather unpopular with most homeowners since they tend to eat parts of the garden that people would rather keep. Tulips, I’m told, are a favourite food in spring.

We haven’t planted any tulips, but I am hoping to see a lot of snowdrops, crocuses, scillas and daffodils.

Well we got snow all right. Here’s what our stairs looked like when Eric had shoveled the top one, this morning at 8.30:

And here’s the state of affairs less than 9 hours later, at 5pm:

And (as warned) there were disruptions to civic services. Train delays, of course – no surprise. Rather more surprisingly there was something weird going on with our electricity supply. At some point during the afternoon we lost power to a quarter of the house. It was early enough that I had no lights on, and I didn’t notice that my Mac had switched to battery power. After a while I thought it was getting unusually cold here, got up to check the temperature (thinking that perhaps I was just coming down with a cold) and indeed it was barely over 15°C. All the heaters in the room were off, and I quickly realized that we had no power in the room.

A fuse, I thought, and spent almost an hour hunting the culprit. The wiring in this house is a mishmash, installed at different times through its history. As proof, consider the situation I had: living room all without power; some outlets in the kitchen OK, some not; ceiling lamps in the kitchen without power; ceiling lamp in hallway without power; wall outlet in hallway OK.

We have three fuse boxes, one up in the house and two side by side in the basement. The ones in the basement are at least labelled; the one up here was a total mystery – I wasn’t even sure if it was still in use. Anyway all the fuses in all boxes looked perfectly OK to me. Nevertheless I took three trips to the basement, replacing various fuses which I thought might be relevant, based on the scanty labelling. No luck.

During this time the temperature had gone from 15.3 to 14.7 and I realized that it will soon be seriously unpleasantly cold in here. I took a break from my investigations and focused on damage control instead. The good thing about electrical heaters is that you can plug them into any outlet you want, as long as you have enough extension cord. So I spread a network of extension cables from the kitchen to the living room, and got two of the three heaters hooked up, as well as some lamps.

Back to investigating. Now I went through all those unlabelled fuses up here (I think there were nine in total). Still no luck. Surely the juice in the living room couldn’t be affected by fuses labelled “heater (basement)” or “wall outlets and lighting, bathroom”! I couldn’t face more running back and forth between the house and the basement. It really was a task for two people and phones: one to fiddle with the fuses and one to check what happens in the house. But Eric and Ingrid were out at Junibacken. At this point I gave up, spent a little more time installing more extension cords to let me have a desk lamp in the kitchen, and started cooking dinner.

Eric and Ingrid got home, and Eric spent some more time investigating. Still no success. Then, just as dinner was almost done, the house went all black for a moment. The next moment the power came back – including in the previously dark part of the house. And we’re both thinking – wait a moment, what just happened here? Are we supplied by two separate power lines? But we only have one meter… Or is the old half of the house somehow more sensitive to small voltage fluctuations? No idea. Whatever it is, I don’t like it. I don’t like mysteries in my electricity supply.

Eric and I both like books, so we own quite a lot of them. Many of them have lived in storage boxes for years now – a sizeable portion of our library stayed behind when we moved to London, and we were only reunited when we moved to this house a year and a half ago. Now, during those winter weekends when there’s nothing to be done in the garden and the weather doesn’t particularly encourage cycling or other activities, we’ve been slowly unpacking and sorting through them all. We’re finally almost through.

There will still be a few boxes for special cases, but most of the books have ended up in one of two places: the shelves, or the charity shop. This weekend we drove to the charity shop with 5 boxes full of books.

Store: Children’s literature that Ingrid’s too young for. Books in French that I read while living in Belgium (that I think I will someday re-read, even though I cannot envisage when or why I would do it). Books that we want to keep for nostalgic reasons. Books that we really don’t open often but like too much to give away.

Shelve: Books we haven’t read yet. Books that we would love to re-read if we had time. Books that are fun to browse. Books that bring back fond memories. Books with a historical meaning (remember dictionaries?).

Ditch: Many books about business and economics from our university days. Lots of mediocre fiction. Various lexicons and reference books: we use the internet instead.

Partway through this work a thought struck me: the entire decision process is founded on the premise that the world will go on functioning as it does today. In particular, we’re assuming that the Internet will go on existing, and that I can use it to look up anything I want.

But if one day we should have an apocalypse that wipes out our communications infrastructure – meteorite, collapse of civilization or whatever – we would probably really miss those reference works and rue our decision to not buy an encyclopedia. The people hoarding all their old books would be the heroes.

Is it worth keeping an encyclopedia packed away in the basement, as a sort of insurance policy? What is the probability of an apocalyptic event happening within my lifetime? A general collapse of civilization could probably be foreseen some way off, but the meteorite scenario is trickier.

Of course if anything like this did actually happen, we’d have bigger problems than lack of information and history. We should instead make sure to equip ourselves with books about basic medicine, growing your own food, and carpentry and metalworking and construction and so on.

See what kinds of thoughts books can lead one to!

Our first winter with a garden (meaning last winter) we put up a bird feeder for suet balls. We had quite a lot of visitors during late autumn, to the point where we started thinking that we’d need to ration the balls because of cost. Then winter came, and suddenly there were hardly any birds at our feeder. Our theory is that they found better food elsewhere.

This year we upgraded to a seed feeder. We kept the suet ball feeder, too, but now we also have a little hut on a stick, filled with seeds. This way we can vary the food. It also allowed us to move the bird food further away from the house. The suet ball feeder hangs off the kitchen window, which meant that the twitchier birds would fly away as soon as anyone moved in the kitchen.

The new location seems perfect. We’ve got a good view of it from our dinner table. It’s far enough to for the birds to consider it mostly safe. It’s got various trees, bushes, eaves etc. within a few metres, in several directions, which allows the birds to scout out the area before coming in for a feed.

First we bought some sort of seed mix consisting mainly of oats and sunflower seeds. The sunflower seeds got eaten, but the birds totally rejected the oats. These ended up on the ground below the hut in such amounts that I couldn’t even see the ground underneath. They even started sprouting, so in November we had a thick mat of oat shoots underneath the bird feeder.

Then I checked which kinds of birds were supposed to like what kind of seeds, and mixed my own seed mix: peanuts, sunflower and hemp, since we mostly had small birds such as sparrows and tits. Turns out all the birds visiting us adore peanuts, and the sunflower seeds generally get eaten too, but no one touches the hemp. We’re forced to scrape out the hemp seeds now and again, or the hut will just fill up with them.

This season we have seen:

• Sparrows, en masse, especially before the snow came. They preferred eating on the ground, and would eat the seeds that other birds had kicked to the ground, or kick down their own. They often travelled in gangs; sometimes there would be up to thirty sparrows underneath the feeder. Now during winter they are far fewer.
  I assumed at first that they were common House Sparrows (Passer domesticus, koduvarblane, gråsparv) but closer observation showed that most, or possibly all, were really (Eurasian) Tree Sparrows (Passer montanus, põldvarblane, pilfink).
• Tits. We have two kinds, Great Tits (Parus major, rasvatihane, talgoxe) and (Eurasian) Blue Tits (Parus caeruleus, sinitihane, blåmes). For some reason the Blue Tits all look really scruffy, while the Great Tits look well-fed and sleek.
  The tits like to scratch away the less interesting seeds, then take a peanut and fly away with it to a tree, where they hold the nut with one foot while eating it. They often hang around the feeder together with the sparrows – neither seems bothered or scared by the other.
• Nuthatches (Sitta europaea, puukoristaja, nötväcka). Beautiful sleek birds with a very distinctive behaviour – they often turn around to face downwards, both on the feeder and in the tree. They seem to like sunflower seeds best. They also often share the feeder with tits.
• Jays (Garrulus glandarius, pasknäär, nötskrika). Even more beautiful than the nuthatches. Cautious birds who often abort their landings at the feeder, fly another scouting round, and then come back to feed. They’re also big, so the feeder wobbles whenever they land, and it’s hard for them to get into a good feeding position. But they manage. I get the impression that they travel in pairs – often when I see one, there’s another one somewhere nearby.
• Magpies (Pica pica, harakas, skata). Brash and confident, often they scare away the other birds. Sloppy eaters: when they first arrived at the feeder, they would scratch around so much that much of the seed ended up on the ground. Eric had to modify the feeder (put up bars along the sides, so instead of one large opening on each side there are two or three small ones) so that the magpies don’t spoil all the food.
• Blackbirds (Turdus merula, koltrast, musträstas). At first they would mostly land in our whitebeam tree and eat the berries, but now they’re also feeding off the seeds on the ground beneath the feeder. I think there might only be a single couple visiting us: I’ve seen a single male and a single female.
• Green Finch (Carduelis chloris, grönfink, rohevint). It’s a rare visitor here; I’ve only seen it a couple of times.

Sparrows

Nuthatch

Blue tits

Jay