Houseplant day. I bought a couple of plants at IKEA and more at Plantagen. Re-potted all of those, as well as one I had from before. Checked the roots of the Anthurium that looks unwell, in case the roots were rotting, but the ones I could see were all healthy, so I just moved it to a sunnier spot. Also moved and pruned my small jade tree, which I was actually considering throwing out because it looks so thin and spindly, but today is a day of new beginnings for houseplants here, so it gets another chance. And finally divided and re-potted an old Clivia, which was a real tentacle monster inside its pot. It is now four separate plants, all of which lost some roots in the process. It remains to be seen how many survive. I almost hope it isn’t all of them, because I don’t want four Clivias.

I find that re-potting is annoying to do for just one plant, because of the mess it makes, and because of all the stuff that’s needed. So it’s actually perfect to do it like this, in bulk. I set up a whole workstation on the deck. For the first time ever, this process felt efficient – time spent on setting up and cleaning up was less than time spent actually planting.

In the morning I spent several hours catching up with the scout club accounts, and some miscellaneous other tasks, but the afternoon was filled with an IKEA trip, and the evening with assembling the bed. After almost two years, I finally have a proper-sized bed.

Some of IKEA’s naming conventions are cute, some are funny, but for the beds, they were purely annoying There were three varieties of spring mattresses, and their names all started with an R. There were about seven different mattress toppers, all starting with an N. One of the mattress toppers was called Norrsele, while its closest neighbour was called Nordberget. It was as if someone had gone in for maximum confusion. “Which one did you prefer? The one with North something? No, the other one with North something.” So you really had to memorize the whole word to be able to distinguish between them. And you needed to know that there was another one starting with Nor…, because otherwise you’d start typing its name into the computer and pick the one that looked familiar, without even realizing that you have been misled.

For the fabrics, the choice was depressingly limited. Dark blue, grey, or another grey. Grey it is, then. I wonder if polyester can be dyed.

The mattress is supposed to rest for 72 hours before first use. The bedroom is now an utter mess, with two beds taking up nearly all the space and everything else crammed into a corner. But! New almost-bed.

Bought and installed a few more smart plugs to combat autumn’s dark evenings.

I like having cosy lighting in the living areas. Actually, in all parts of the house. There are three independent light sources in my bedroom, five in the sun room, six in the other living room, five in the kitchen. Many of the smaller lamps get switched on automatically, on a timer, with Tapo smart plugs. I don’t mind the manual effort of walking a round and turning them on – but I do mind the darkness before I notice that I need to do it. So now even more of them turn on automatically. Instead of me looking up and discovering just how dark the house has gotten, I now look up as the lights click on, and it feels so much nicer.

Finally I can use up all the soil that has been sitting around since last summer. I thought it might be enough (and maybe more) than I’d need, but with the amount of rocks I’ve removed from here, there was a lot of space to fill up. The bag is all empty, but the soil level is lower than it was before I started removing the sod. Looks like I’ll be needing to buy more.

All the rocks I’ve found thus far – and they have been most numerous – I’ve been able to remove. Many of them were clustered around and under the cherry tree roots. Or rather, I guess, the roots were snaking their way between and over the rocks. No wonder there are so many superficial roots here – their way downwards has been blocked. The more tangled the roots, the more rocks I can expect.

There have been several large ones, a few that I’ve barely been able to lift, but even those moved in the end. This one, though, is going to have to stay. It’s loose, it moves when I push at it, but there’s just no way to roll it out of there. If there was nothing around it, I’m reasonably sure I could roll it out of there. Build a bit of a ramp, maybe. But here… stuff is in the way. There are so many roots in front of it, and the house leaves me no room to manoeuvre behind it. Even the smaller roots here are as thick as my thumb, and in the foreground, barely visible, there’s an even thicker one that I definitely don’t want to damage.

A new digging project. Yay?

This spot has very different soil than what I’ve come to expect from this garden. No clay, just normal, slightly sandy soil. And roots and rocks, and then more roots and more rocks. In fact, what I’m doing here can only barely be called digging. I’m more just poking through the soil with a hooked stick, between the cherry roots, and picking out rocks.

Picked at least half the back yard clean of fallen cherries.

Some had dried in the sun; others were almost like jam, wet and warm and sticky. It was a pretty messy job.

Out of curiosity, I weighed the result. Just over 9 kg, including the bucket, so around 8.5 kg net. Also out of curiosity, I weighed and counted a double handful of cherries. 150 grams and 80 cherries. (The dried ones really don’t weigh much at all.) That would mean that I picked around four and a half thousand of these things. No wonder it took me hours.

There’s no end to the cherry fall. The ground under the cherry trees is unwalkable. There isn’t enough room to set down your foot anywhere without stepping on a whole bunch of them. You definitely don’t want to go there barefoot, and even with shoes, it’s kind of unpleasantly squishy and sticky. I want/need to pick them at least at the back of the house but I just don’t have the time.

Borrowed a power washer and cleaned the deck, for the first time in several years. Grimy work – there’s splatter all the way up to my knees, and when I was done cleaning the deck I had to clean the walls and windows around it. The deck looks really good now, and the contrast between the clean and the not-yet-clean parts was shocking to see. I knew it was dirty, but without something to compare to, I hadn’t realized just how dirty.

The cherry harvest is behind us, and whatever is left on the tree now is not fit for human consumption. Most of it will fall down sooner or later. A great deal of it has done so already. I picked a giant builder’s bucket full of cherries out of the grass under the tree today. Took me hours of crouching.

The waste collection company in Stockholm provides an optional service of garden waste collection, for an extra fee. It’s been well worth it for me. Without it, I don’t even how I would get rid of a bucketful of rotting fruit. Now I have a giant bin that gets emptied every other week from April to October, where I can throw weeds, branches, leaves, fallen fruit, and other such garden waste. Including cherries.

There’s a weight limit, and a specific weight limit of 10 kg for fruit in particular. I guess if there’s too much fruit then it messes up the composting process. Too wet, or too sugary, or something. The bucket of cherries weighed 12.5 kg, with the bucket surely accounting for some of it. That rounds to 10 kg in my world – it’s closer to 10 than to 15 – so into the bin it all went.