We will hopefully be getting tomatoes this summer.

All these lovely bushes, and the cherry trees!

They would have more of an impact if they weren’t half-buried in grass, wouldn’t they… But there are so, so many more interesting things to do in the garden than mowing the lawn! Especially since mowing is a solitary activity, whereas almost every other task – digging, planting, weeding, watering – I can do together with Adrian, who loves being out in the garden with me.

I should get the mowing done on a weekday so we can do more fun stuff outside in the weekend.

After a few years of focused effort, the front of the garden is starting to look pretty good, even though there is plenty more lawn there, waiting to be replaced with better things.

Ingrid has been complaining a bit about how bare and boring some parts of the back garden are, especially those that we see every day from the living room and the wooden deck. I agree. So this season I’ll be switching focus to spend more time on that area. (Part 4 in this sketch that I made in 2012.)

I’ve simply been procrastinating until now because I don’t know how to approach it. It feels complicated.

Firstly, it’s very shady since it’s surrounded by large trees on most sides. And instead of grass, the ground is covered by moss. You can see all the brown patches in the photo. The moss doesn’t bother me, but it makes me suspect that it might be more difficult to get other things to thrive there.

On top of that, a good chunk of this area has a very thin layer of soil. Adrian and I poked around today with a digging bar to see what we have to work with. The arrangement of sticks in the ground in the photo above is actually our markers of places where the soil is at least 30–40 cm deep, so there’s room to plant a normal potted bush. There’s quite a large area to the right of the sticks where I kept hitting rock after just 15 cm or so. I think there’s a single large, contiguous chunk of rock down there.

This whole area needs bushes for fullness and volume, not just pretty little things on the ground. It’s too open right now. My current vague idea is that I could cut section 4 in two parts, right along the imaginary line between the cypress on the left, and the bird cherry and mahonia on the right. Plant some bushes next to the cypress on the left, plant some more next to the bird cherry on the right, and leave a passage in between. Like this:

The right-hand side wall of the passage would continue in a curve, with some tallish bushes that look good from a distance, from where we sit on the deck. In front of and around the cypress and its future companions, some pretty, colourful things to look at. Peonies, maybe.

The new section 4b, beyond the passage, will then be less important since it will be less visible. There’s an apple tree there right now. Maybe I can somehow squeeze in a plum tree there somewhere? Blackcurrant bushes, maybe?

The sun is shining, the sky is blue, the grass is green, the air is warm, and the cherries are blossoming. Can life be better than this? I love May.

There’s a new young cat in the neighbourhood. Looks like it might have been let out of the house for the first time: it’s exploring, discovering, cautiously but curiously poking its nose in all sorts of places. I had to shoo it out of the basement twice, and keep the doors closed to keep it out of the house.

We’ve seen its like before. One spring, a young cat out for the first time when its family had gone away from the day, came into our house looking completely lost and abandoned. So much so that we thought it might have run away and took it to a nearby vet to scan its chip and find out who it belonged to. He turned out to be called Sid, and lived just two houses away from us.

Sid and his family have moved away, but there are several other cats whom I recognize by sight. They are all older and feel more at home in the neighbourhood. They walk in a very different manner – more confidently and purposefully.

One thing the young and old cats apparently all have in common is a love of birds. Not our kind of love, but the kind that expresses itself in hunting and eating the birds. This kitty quickly discovered the bird nest box up in our cherry tree and decided to go fish for baby birds. Climbed up and poked its paw inside the box and tried to catch things.

When I had chased it down from the tree with a broom twice over, I had enough and decided to saw off the branch that seemed to offer it best access to the nest box. (It was mostly dead anyway.) I’m hoping that this will make bird-fishing less comfortable for the cat, so the cat will find some other fun activity and leave the box alone.

Pink is not my favourite colour in interior decorating or in clothing. I don’t think there is a single pink thing in the house. I remember buying one skirt with pink flowers and giving it to charity because I barely wore it. But in the garden, I like pink. It contrasts well against all the green. I like all other colours in the garden as well, to be honest.

I finished filling the new planting boxes with fresh soil today. Well, soil, at least, but maybe not so fresh… I’ve had three-quarters of a cubic metre bag of soil sitting next to the driveway for at least two years. But it’s not full of weed roots, so that counts as fresh in a way. Now I’m kind of stuck, though, because I need fertilizer and strawberry seedlings, and that requires a shopping trip, and I’m not doing that while I have a sore throat.

Speaking of weeds, the Japanese sedge in the slope is spreading almost like a weed. But it’s not doing that in front of the house, so it must really love conditions on the slope. It spreads vigorously in all directions and tends to smother other plants. I had hoped that some taller things like alliums would be able to grow through the sedge, but they don’t, really. I guess they get too little sun in their early days and die before they get tall. Or maybe they just don’t like the slope as much as the sedge does.

Martagon lilies and bleeding hearts do like this spot, though, which makes me happy. And luckily the sedge has superficial roots and is easy to yank out around them.

The old planting boxes are rotten through after ten years of sun and rain. I’m putting in place new ones, with fresh new soil and new strawberry plants.

Some kind of horrible weed had invaded several of the boxes with strawberries. It has thread-thin stalks and roots that break as soon as you try to remove it, so it’s impossible to get rid of. Replacing the soil will give the boxes a fresh start; maybe we’ll get a few years without that thing.

Adrian helped me assemble the boxes. Then Ingrid came out as well and they “helped” each other. There was so much monkeying around that there was almost no progress on the boxes… when they gave up and went in, it was almost a relief, and I could finally get the last boxes done on my own.

It’s Monday and I should be working but the midday sun pulled me out into the garden so I spent an hour shovelling earth and pruning old raspberry stalks instead. Which I should have done last autumn but didn’t. The raspberries got almost no love last year and barely grew. I thought it was nearly impossible to not succeed with raspberries, they’re supposed to grow like weeds, but not these ones. More water and more fertilizer this year, I guess.

One of this year’s garden projects is to replace the planting boxes with strawberries. The boxes themselves are ten years old and nearly rotten through. The soil in them is also full of a particularly unpleasant weed, with thread-thin stalks that break as soon as you try to pull them out, that spreads like crazy. I hope I can get rid of it by replacing all the soil, and lining the new boxes with a higher-quality weed fabric.

I’ve shoveled out all the soil now so the next step is to buy new boxes and new fabric. And then start shoveling again.

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.

This is the best of seasons. Every day, the world gets noticeably greener. Every day, more things are growing and flowering in the garden. It’s a joy to step outside the door. The rose currants here, the white anemones there, and the daffodils in the background… I wish I could take a photo to do it all justice.