Today we made chestnut creatures, as is our tradition. Adrian provided the chestnuts.

Intense concentration.

When we were poking around among the chestnuts in the bowl and commenting on the lack of choice, Adrian went off and came back with his school backpack, which contained at least another kilogram of chestnuts. Small, large, flattish or round – now we have lots of all sorts. They filled not just another bowl, but an entire large dish.

I was glad when Ingrid joined us. She’s been less interested in family activities recently. Teenagers, you know.

The naturalistic ones: camel, rabbit, hedgehog, pigeon, caterpillar.

The more fantastical ones: a sheep that can walk on water; a man with a triple jetpack.

And two space aliens.

There are so. Many. Rocks.

I’m still working on getting those bushes planted. It’s taking time. I’ve replaced several of my lunchtime workouts with lunchtime digging sessions. But there are just so many rocks and roots that digging those holes really takes time. Each hole takes around an hour and a half to finish.

Each hole tends to yield around a bucketful of small rocks, plus a number of larger ones.

Having nothing better to think about as I dig, I think of rocks, and their sizes.

I realize now that I think of them in no particular language. Now that I am writing it down, I don’t know what to call them. Both Swedish and Estonian have a single word for “rock” and “stone”, but English has two. When does a stone become a rock?

The very smallest ones I don’t notice because they don’t matter. They get shoveled around together with the soil. These I think of as “small stones”, when I think of them at all.

Rocks start mattering when they are large enough to turn or stop the spade. That’s also roughly when they become individually noticeable – when my hand can fit “three rocks” rather than a handful. And it’s also the point when they start standing out visually in a pile of earth. They no longer blend in, and they may even roll off the pile completely. These I think of of as “rocks” and I pick them out when I notice them.

The next size up is when the rock doesn’t fit in the palm of my hand any more. Those go in a pile, not the bucket. If I threw them in the bucket, it would fill up very fast. And probably break, too, because I have a flimsy bucket. These are “one-hand rocks”.

The size after that is “two-hand rocks” because I need two hands to hold one of them. These generally need to be carried instead of thrown, and dropping them might damage things.

After those come “lift” rocks. These are rocks that I lift with care, because careless handling might damage not just my toes but also my back. I haven’t found any in this part of the garden, but there were enough of them when I was digging the trenches for the hedges.

Even larger than those are “roll” rocks, so large that lifting them is impractical or impossible, but I can still lever them out of the ground and roll them from one place to another. Those have been rare, luckily.

Anything larger than that stays in the ground. (Although there was a rock once that we got out of the ground with the help of the car.)

The day before yesterday, a roe deer walked through our garden with its fawn. Deer walking in the garden is no news, it happens often enough. But this was the first time I saw one with a newborn fawn this close.

After the two crossed most of the garden, I saw another fawn come out of the lilac hedge! Very cute.

Then they went off across the road and that was that, I thought.

Today, as I was finishing my lunch out on the deck, I suddenly noticed that one of the fawns had been lying in the tall grass under our cherry tree during my entire lunch, only 5 metres away from me. It was so quiet and immobile that I hadn’t noticed it at all until I happened to look at that exact spot.

Mama deer came by a few times in the afternoon, and I saw them in a few different places in the evening.

I mostly tried to stay out of the garden today. If I was too visible, I was afraid mama deer might not dare come back to feed the baby. And I wouldn’t want to have a fawn starve because of me.

They left in the evening, probably to move to some other garden in the neighbourhood.

Deer look cute but they are marauders when it comes to plants. No tulips would survive in this garden, and deer have repeatedly eaten my pansies in the past.

This time mama deer took big bites from my strawberry plants, right under my eyes. I normally cover the strawberries with netting but hadn’t had time to put up nets for this summer yet. I’d forgotten that the nets protect against deer as well, I was mostly thinking of them as protecting the berries from birds.

I quickly threw on the nets today, on the strawberry boxes as well as the one where we planted peas. And just in time – the pea sprouts are just becoming visible. If pea shoots are a delicacy for us humans, how much more delicious might deer find them? They would probably leave nothing behind.

I have mixed feelings about deer. I like wildlife of all kinds, and I like seeing animals in the garden. Squirrels and hares and deer, and birds of course. I wish there were hedgehogs around here.

I don’t like them eating the things I care about.

On balance, though, I’d rather have a garden without tulips than a garden without deer.

Another day with wonderful weather. Adrian and I went out to do some gardening. We bought three bushes to fill some gaps in the planting. I dug holes. Adrian watered things, climbed on things, and took wheelbarrow rides.

Then he found my measuring stick from when I dug the hedge and started making balancing experiments. He balanced the stick on top of the street sign, and experimented with rocks on top of the stick. How far from the middle can he move the rock before the stick is out of balance? That, of course, led to see-saw catapults.

Those electricity cabinets and the street sign next to them are great for climbing on, even if they are a bit of an eyesore. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t choose to put them there. But I’m pretty sure that Adrian would, if he could choose. Just like with the sewer access thing that you can more or less see in this blog post. I found it an eyesore and tried to find ways to hide it; Adrian loved climbing on it, stacking things on top of it, and so on. I’m glad it’s gone; he misses it. In a way I’m glad for his sake that I can’t get rid of the electricity cabinets.

Another old blog post reminds me of the covers I made for the cabinets. Those got vandalized soon after with graffiti and then with a knife, so they got thrown out. Someone keeps spraying graffiti on the cabinets; Eric keeps covering it up with silver-gray spray paint.

Autumn is not my favourite season, but I do love its colours. When I planned and planted the hedge, each bush’s autumn colours were a big part of my decision. There are spireas of several kinds with their interesting colour combinations (orange and purple!) and aronia bushes with brilliant red leaves and black berries. It looks colourful from afar, a bit scruffy when you get closer, and then stunning again when you get really close.

The cherry tree is apparently having one of its more colourful autumns this year. Photos can’t do it justice, but I keep trying anyway.

Actually we have three cherry trees. What “the cherry tree” refers to depends on the season. In the summer, it’s the one behind the house, with the sweet and juicy berries. (The others bear small, sour berries that we don’t pick or eat.) In the autumn, it’s the one in front of the house, with the fiery colours. The third tree is smaller and younger and less colourful. I even considered cutting it down because, honestly, how many cherry trees do you need in a garden? But I just couldn’t do it. Now I kind of think of it as a backup for the autumn tree, in case that one dies because of how many large branches and roots it lost when we had to dig up the water pipe.

Ingrid is really looking forward to beginning seventh grade. She is really looking forward to the new school year at the her new school, for all kinds of reasons. She’s looking forward to a fresh start in a new class and making new friends. She will be going to a class with a maths and science profile, which is great because she loves these subjects and has been complaining for years that maths class is just too easy and she doesn’t get any more challenging tasks even though the teachers promise in each parent-teacher conference that she will. Her previous class was kind of noisy and relatively disorderly, and she has high hopes that this class will be better because it’ll be made up of students who actually want to be there and study.

And the new school itself seems great. There is a giant library, and all the classrooms (especially the science rooms) look inspiring, and the kids get their own computers and lockers. LOCKERS! Did I mentions lockers? The rest of the school could probably look like a junkyard and Ingrid would still look forward to being there because LOCKERS. She is so happy to get her own little corner where she can have her stuff and not have to carry it around or worry about it getting lost.

She is also looking forward to Comic Con in September. She will be browsing and buying pop culture stuff for an entire weekend and has saved up money for it long in advance.

The list of Ingrid’s favourites below is a mix of questions I asked and categories she added. It hadn’t even occurred to me that one would have a favourite YouTuber for example.

• Hobbies: reading, gaming, board games, drawing. She also likes learning odd skills, such as popping bottle top liners or distance-spitting cherry pits.
• Other activities: roller coasters and water parks
• School subject: maths when it is hard; crafts
• Future job: games programmer
• Best friends: Majken and Benjamin
• Words: kummaline (meaning strange or weird) and müstiline. Especially kummaline. It’s almost becoming a joke between us; she winks at me when she calls things kummaline.
• Colours: mint green and turquoise.
• Movie: Ready player one, hands down.
• Books: Classroom of the elite, Hunger games, Ender’s game. (School-age kids doing tough stuff.)
• Manga: Gun gale online
• Anime: Kakegurui
• Series: Steven Universe
• Games: Overwatch, Slime rancher, Wipeout, and the board game Mysterium.
• Music: Hamilton the musical, “Centuries” by Fall Out Boy, “Uma Thurman” also by Fall Out Boy, “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragons.
• Youtuber: Aki Dearest
• Food: sushi
• Fruit: paraguayo peaches, watermelon, crisp green apples, blackberries, blueberries. She likes her peaches and apples much harder and less ripe than I do.
• Drink: Virgin mojito
• Ice cream flavour: mint chocolate
• Country: Japan, for its sushi, anime and manga
• Clothes: zip-up hoodies, especially her Ravenclaw hoodie
• Super power: transform into anything
• Thing: a large marshmallow-shaped super soft plushie with the face and ears of a dog, known in the house as “shmallow” or “pluffen”.
• Animal: hedgehog. Hedgehogs have become like a mascot for her, because her nickname at school used to be Iggi, and hedgehogs are called “igelkott” in Swedish, so she was “igelkotten Iggi”.
• Sport: dancing
• Place: the armchair in her room, and the corner seat in the sofa
• Shops: Firebox and Gamestop
• Means of travel: ferry, like the one that goes to Estonia
• Time: evening, when the house is quiet and it is dark outside and she can hang in her room
• Season: autumn, because it is beautiful with all the colors, and pleasantly cool so she can wear her hoodies, and because it’s when her birthday is.

(I haven’t done any monthly posts in a long time and probably won’t be picking that habit up again.)

The garden still has two large bare patches from when the water pipe was replaced. One from replacing the water pipe, and one from removing a concrete sewer access thing that stood in the middle of the front quarter of the garden. I’d started to plant bushes around that lump of concrete to try and hide and camouflage it. The idea of removing it had never occurred to me. But when the digger was here anyway, the workmen asked if I would like to be rid of the sewer access, and my answer was an immediate yes.

At first I was just going to sow grass in its place. I don’t know what I was thinking! this prime location, where the soil has now also been thoroughly tilled so it is easy to work with, deserves better than grass. Why would I want more grass in my garden, anyway?

I planted a witch hazel bush and some ferns and Epimediums, among other things. Given some time I hope this planting will grow into one whole with the hedge next to it.

The ground cover in my front flowerbed is mostly doing pretty well. I’m a bit peeved that the Lamiums all died, while their wild cousins turn up here and there in the new hedge, full of vigour. I even see Aquilegia in there but I’ve given up hope about them blooming.

The flowerbeds I remember from my childhood summers in my grandmother’s cottage had single flowers planted at regular distances: tagetes, lilies, gladiolus, hostas. In between the plants the earth was bare. And I remember my grandmother and mother sitting and weeding those flowerbeds to keep them tidy. It must have taken up so much of their time.

I think that aesthetic is still quite in fashion in Estonia, although nowadays the general recommendation is to cover the earth with mulch of some sort to reduce the need for weeding.

The result can kind of look elegant if you can keep it totally pristine, but that bare-earth look just seems so unnatural to me. All gardens and flowerbeds are unnatural by definition, of course, but mulched or bare-earth flowerbeds are like perfectly even monoculture lawns and giant paved patios: it’s no longer bringing out the best of nature but a constant battle to completely dominate nature.

All philosophy aside, it’s also a giant waste of time.

Last summer I also planted some ground cover under one of the new hedges. I couldn’t make up my mind so I bought three different species and gave them equal shares. That turned out to be a very good thing. Out of the three, one has died out so completely that I can’t see even enough of a trace to recall what I may have planted. The second one (Waldsteinia) is growing well, and I’m planning to get more of those to fill in the empty section. The third one (Vinca) is surviving but not exactly doing a good job of covering the ground.

The front hedge I left to its own devices, because the “lawn” there has a lot of species that I thought might spread and cover the ground – Creeping Cinquefoil being the foremost among them. It is generally categorized as a weed, but I find it completely inoffensive in all ways and would happily let it take over all the ground under the hedge, and block weeds I don’t like. The cinquefoil is doing pretty well but there are places it hasn’t spread to yet, and those are now being invaded by less attractive weeds, so I think I will be buying some commercial ground cover for those spots to speed things up.

I like the Viburnum I planted a couple of years ago. Last year when I planted the hedge, I added two more (of hopefully the same variety) to keep it company.

The first one has had a few years to establish itself, and it shows. It prepares by putting out flower buds in winter already, and when spring comes, it’s all ready to go.

The second one is clearly playing catch-up and is only just budding now.

The third one seems to have died during the winter; I guess I’ll have to replace it.

This is the state of our garden right now. A giant ditch cuts right through the front of it, from the street to the house. It does not just cut through the garden – it also cuts right through the retaining wall that we only just got done, and the newly planted hedge behind it…

We were just going to renovate the kitchen this year. But the mess of water pipes and water meter in the cupboard under the sink was seriously hindering that project, so the conclusion was that we needed to move the incoming water supply connection from the kitchen to the basement. It was only in the kitchen for historical reasons – if a builder tried to put it there today, it would never get approved. Plus the incoming water supply pipe is many decades old, made of galvanized steel, and probably not in a very good shape.

So in came the builder and the diggers and the plumber, and they measured and they planned and they consulted and discussed. And they dug, until the garden looked like a giant mess. As a small consolation, at least they didn’t have to dig up the paving between the stairs, or my planting in front of the house. I do hope the cherry tree survives this – quite a number of its branches and roots had to be cut.

Did I mention that the water pipe was old? And probably not in very good shape?

In fact it was in such a bad shape that all the digging and poking around it was enough to break it. I wasn’t here to see it happen; it must have been spectacular with water everywhere. By the time I got home, the water had been shut off and a temporary replacement pipe was in place. But only authorized Stockholm Vatten personnel are allowed to touch the valves of the municipal water supply, whether for turning it off or on, so we still didn’t have any water… (There are substantial fines for breaking that rule, so our diggers and plumbers didn’t even consider doing it themselves.) We had pizza for dinner – the kids were happy about that – and I made a visit to the neighbours to fill up some plastic cans so we could wash our hands and brush our teeth at least.

Finally late at night a Stockholm Vatten van turned up and we got our water back.

It was a long day.