I tried to photograph the bees and bumblebees in my summer flowers but they were uncooperative and wouldn’t stay still.

In parts of our garden, digging around in the soil is guaranteed lead to bits of old bricks, roofing tiles, crockery and glass. In fact in some parts that kind of junk wasn’t even hidden in the soil but lying right on the surface, but I cleared those areas as soon as possible to make the garden safe for bare feet. For years we made sure to always wear shoes on the slope of weeds. But there’s a lot of ground I haven’t touched, so there’s plenty more junk still buried here.

Out of curiosity, I saved some of the more interesting-looking pieces of junk I unearthed while I was planting bushes behind the house this summer. They’ve been lying in a bucket, waiting for my attention, which they got today.

I’m surprised at the sheer number of different designs I find. It’s not like someone has thrown out a single plate or a cup in their compost heap – there are pieces of dozens of different items.

Most are hard to date. I wish I knew an expert in vintage and antique ceramics!

The brown little bottle was easy to identify because it has a logo. Rulles is a maker of liquer essences, still exists, and their website has a small photo archive.

I found pieces of one or more plates with blue and white decorations in a Chinese style…

… as well as pieces of other blue and white crockery.

A lovely plate with a green design of flowering branches…

… and a strikingly ugly design that is apparently suppose to invoke an impression of China again.

Plenty of chunks of plain white plates – more than one because of differences in thickness and curvature.

An item in unglazed earthenware, perhaps a flowerpot.

Also the head and torso of a small plastic doll, a little bit larger than a matchbox, slightly creepy.

I’m playing with buckets and IKEA boxes again, to plan and design the new flowerbed. I first did this for the bushes and shrubs behind the house and this approach worked better than anything I’ve tried before. It gives a much better idea of the size of things.

I only have a limited number and variety of such design aids, though, so one bucket will have to stand in for a whole group of plants in some places, and the same kind of flower pot saucers means different things in different places.

That’s why phase two of the process is to take a photo of the design and annotate it with specific plant names. That made the groupings more obvious and I went back several times to move some boxes around and take a new photo.

Phase three was shopping, but buying fewer plants than I thought I needed based on the design, and then placing the flowerpots in their intended spots. And indeed as usual I had overestimated the number of plants that I had room for. A bucket looks large but three day lilies still take up more space.

The steel edging for the new flowerbed arrived today. I got it installed with a bit of shovelling – which was easy now that the soil is all soft and prepared. Ready for planting!

I have generally thought of this corner of the garden as sunny, but the time I’ve spent here digging has shown otherwise. It gets shade from the house almost all morning. And in the afternoon the cherry tree gives shade. The elder will also start shading the flowerbed more and more as it grows. So the most sun-loving plants will probably not work here.

A peony, I think, and daylilies, for some colour.

The bushes that I planted behind the house are coming along very nicely. They mostly don’t look very impressive, but all seem to be growing, which is all I can ask for in the first season.

The hydrangeas, which I’ve seen described in various places as “extremely thirsty” and prone to dying because of lack of water, have behaved like any ordinary newly planted bush and not been particularly thirsty at all. One of the spireas has been much fussier and shown signs of wilting several times. Maybe all the talk about thirsty hydrangeas comes from people growing them indoors.

Both hydrangeas are currently flowering with blue flowers. I wonder if that’s because the soil here is slightly acidic after all, or if it’s due to the soil they came with. I guess next summer will show.

I keep digging. And I keep rediscovering techniques for getting through this clay. (I’ve done this before, after all, for the planting along the front of the house.) Shaving slivers off the untouched wall of soil works well, because then the chunk that I cut loose is thin enough to break up easily. The downside is that this risks killing a lot of earthworms. Cutting off larger chunks of earth is more work but spares the worms. When I break up the chunks, they tend to split along natural cracks, and the earthworms just sort of fall out, unharmed.

Earthworms apparently spend sunny days resting, about 20 cm below the surface, curled up into what looks like a knot.

In a few spots I ran across soil that was packed so hard that even my body weight wasn’t enough to get the spade into the ground. It was clay mixed with gravel, and probably compacted by some kind of machinery. The weight of the soil above it, or the weight of a human, would not be enough to pack it so hard. It felt like trying to hack through concrete. Hacking at it with various tools and from various angles finally got me through it.

You know what’s harder to dig through than clay? Large, rusted nails. Unrusted nails would probably be almost as bad, but I haven’t found any so I can’t compare. They might be slightly less work because they wouldn’t be so camouflaged. Unlike rocks, rusty nails don’t make a sound, and you can’t make out their shape and size with the tip of the spade. Unlike roots, you can’t hack through them. The spade just stops.

People who throw building hardware into the soil in a garden deserve their own special circle in hell, where they have to dig through a patch of earth and pick out all the nails, and a demon walks behind them and makes new nails materialize in the soil that they’ve already dug through. Forever and ever.

There has been a distinct lack of progress in the garden since I finished planting the bushes behind the house. (I see I have posted no photos of the end result – I have to do something about that soon.)

The last time I mowed the lawn, I decided that my next gardening project was going to be around the bushes in the front. Mowing around them is getting very frustrating. Yes, I was going to focus on planting a plum tree, but that can wait until later in the season. The lawn/grass needs to go NOW, so I can plant something else underneath and around those bushes. Something that doesn’t need mowing.


I’ve been digging here for some days already. Today I mostly finished cutting away the sod. I started out with a more curved shape for the planting, but then I started thinking about maintenance, and keeping the grass away from this new planting. I like the steel edging I’ve used before – but it’s quite stiff and I don’t think it can be bent into those shapes. So today I evened out those curves.

Digging under bushes is not a lot easier than mowing there… the branches of those Chaenomeles bushes lie close to the ground and are a bit of a tangle. I tried getting them out of the way by binding them up with string, but in the end the best solution I found was to just push a bunch of branches to the side and stab a garden fork in the ground in front of them to keep them there. That’s why it looks in the photos like I’m wielding two spades at the same time.

Eric and Adrian were out catching Pokemons while I was digging, and came back just when I had set up my camera on a tripod. Adrian took charge of the camera instead and took some action photos.

Then he tried digging, and discovered just how stiff the clay soil is here. His body weight is simply not enough to push the spade into the ground. Mine is – sometimes barely.

The deer are feeling right at home in the garden, walking through, nibbling on this and that. I went out and shouted at it when I saw it eating one of the new dogwood bushes. It glared at me and walked a few steps further away, but didn’t really seem very bothered.

Some years there are lots of killer slugs in the garden. 2014 was the first year I noticed them in large amounts. 2015 was also a slug year. In the summers since then, we haven’t had very many.

This year is apparently a slug year again. The bounty is on, and Ingrid is hunting them.

We’ve given up on trying to collect and freeze them. Too much hassle – they tried to crawl out of the freezer bag all the time. Now we simply cut them in half and throw them somewhere where we won’t step on them. I have a special pair of slug scissors in my garden basket.

We also saw unusually many leopard slugs today. I’ve never seen more than two or three on the same day. Today I think we saw almost ten. Maybe they’re here to eat the Spanish slugs!

A mama deer with its kid passed through the garden again this evening. They nibbled at various things (cherry branches, the round thujas, hydrangea flowers). Interestingly they ignored the clover patch.

The kid has lost its spots by now and simply looks like a smaller version of the adult one, though it lifts its back “feet” extra high when walking through grass.

I wonder if this is the same mama deer who was here with its two kids earlier, and she’s lost one. Or maybe it’s a different pair; there’s probably more than one deer family roaming around Spånga.