One of my plans for this vacation (of which I have nearly two weeks left) is to bring some order to the basement.

The basement is a mess. There are corners I have never looked into so I don’t even know what all is there. The things I do know should be there somewhere are hard to find and/or hard to reach. There’s plenty of junk that should be thrown out.

Yesterday was a basement day, and today is another one. I’ve found that it’s easier for me to make progress, and to feel that I have made progress, when I spend a large chunk of time focusing on a single “theme”. If I do a bunch of unrelated small tasks and cross them off my list, then I don’t get the same satisfying feeling. So instead of doing a dash of basement-clearing, a pinch of gardening and a smidgen of sewing, I am focusing on the basement only.

I’m clearing out so much stuff. Old inflatable swimming pools. (Plural.) Boxes of pool chemicals. A dusty foam mattress. A saggy foldable bed. Swathes of geotextile that I will never use. Buckets and buckets of old paint from when we renovated the house in 2011. Decades-old snorkelling equipment. A sleeping bag from the 1970s.

Things that I still have entirely excessive amounts of:

1. Terracotta plant pot saucers – several dozen. I don’t even like the terracotta pot + saucer combo.

2. Screws. Boxes and boxes of them. Deck screws, drywall screws, wood screws, floor screws, cabinet screws, roof nails, general-purpose nails – you name it, I’ve got it. Some of them literally in the hundreds. I am most unlikely to need this amount of screws in the next few decades.

3. Jam. I counted, I have 95 jars of jam/marmalade/chutney. These might literally last me until I retire (unless they go bad first.) I don’t eat much jam. Neither does Ingrid, and when she does, she prefers low-sugar versions, which these are definitely not. Adrian only likes raspberry jam and blueberry jam, whereas this is mostly funky stuff – cherry jam is the only “normal” kind here, and the rest is more odd things like gooseberry, rhubarb with ginger, redcurrant, spicy plum chutney, etc. Still, I won’t be getting rid of any of these. They’ve been made with love, and I will do my best to eat my way through them.

It was hot in Estonia, but I think it’s even hotter here. On the shade side of the house, it’s 28°C outside and 30 inside. Of course it doesn’t help that the house has been closed tight most of the time, with no air flow to cool anything down. And I didn’t think to close the curtains on the sunny side of the house.

The houseplants have easily survived ten days without watering before, but that in combination with 30-degree heat was too much for the Spathifyllum. It’s not quite dead but not looking very lively either. The rest are all in better shape.

The soil is all in place for the new planting area.

Even the way this area is now, with bare earth, it’s nicer than the lawn that used to be there. Not having to mow around and underneath the elder is a relief. This won’t last, of course, weeds are sure to invade any moment, so I’ll have to get on with the planting soon.

I’ve postponed all of that until after our Estonia trip, because you never know with July weather. I don’t want a sudden heat wave to kill everything. Once I’m back and can water regularly, there will be bushes!

There’s an unexpectedly large amount of soil left over – maybe a third of the bag. I expected there to be a little bit, but I didn’t take into account all the soil I would reclaim from the old planting boxes. I guess I’ll use the rest to fill up some uneven, bumpy parts of the lawn.

We’ve had very unsettled weather for the past few weeks. Sunny one day, gray and windy the next day, back and forth. Yesterday evening we had storm-strength winds, with trees falling on cars and people in central Stockholm. I didn’t notice them much, and nothing was damaged here.

Today the weather has already switched back and forth several times. Gray in the morning; beautiful in time for my morning meeting; gray again; sun again for lunch. I carelessly left the chair cushions out after lunch, as well as my cardigan and the newspaper, and then didn’t pay close attention to the weather afterwards, so I ended up running out to rescue them from the rain an hour later.

The Friday newspaper usually has the best crosswords, so now the newspaper is spread out to dry together with the cushions.

I was going to just mow the lawn behind the house, under the cherry tree. Some cherry branches kept hitting my head in a very annoying manner, so I lopped them off. And while I had the loppers out, I might as well prune away some of the dead branches on the tree. And if I’m doing that anyway, then why not also tidy up the damson bush a bit. (I was really supposed to be shovelling soil, but procrastinating one gardening task in favour of another is OK.)

All this work resulted in decent-sized heap of dead and mostly-dead branches. Both cherry and damson are brittle; if you break them, they snap, without any fibres keeping the two pieces attached to each other. I broke all the branches into little pieces and they didn’t even fill up the garden waste bin. Almost disappointing: I want the pile of waste to reflect the time and effort I spent!

I really appreciate the garden waste collection service. It’s so nice to not have to worry about a compost heap, or having to bag it all up to take it to a recycling centre.

A mama deer with her two babies was in the neighbourhood. I first saw them in the garden next to ours. Mama deer jumped over the fence and didn’t quite seem to understand that the babies wouldn’t be able to do that. One of the babies found the opening under the fence that the cats use; the other one stayed on the other side. Mama deer just went on with the one baby and didn’t seem too concerned about the other one. Hopefully they’ll catch up later.

I planted a peony in 2021. It’s been failing to thrive since then. Every season I’ve been mildly surprised to see it come up again. I bought a backup peony last year because I’d mostly given up hope of the first one ever properly taking off.

This year it gave me a flower! Maybe it was doing better under the surface than I thought.

Now that the old planting boxes are gone, and the flat section of the garden is presentable enough to host Ingrid’s graduation party, I’m back working on the planting towards the street. The steel edging has been waiting for me since November. Today I got it in place.

I’ve got a cubic metre of new soil waiting for me, to replace the grass sod I cut away.

Nysse was obsessed with trying to get in under the pallet that the bag of soil was delivered on. Some small creature must be hiding under it.

Got the last pieces of the planting boxes removed. Found another layer of geotextile under one of them. All grown through with roots, difficult to detach, but the material has not degraded at all.

When I first set up the planters, I lined them with geotextile in an attempt to keep weeds out. “Weeds” in our garden includes not just common couch but also lilacs and cherry trees, both of which spread their roots everywhere.

I tried a non-woven kind of textile in some boxes and a thicker, woven kind in another. I don’t think they made any difference against the roots whatsoever. All they did was make it harder to pull out the weeds that got through. (Or that elected to grow in the space between the box and the fabric.)

There were weeds in the boxes that sent their roots out through the fabric which made it harder to get rid of them. There were weeds that came in through the fabric from underneath. And, in a final insult to the fabric, there were weeds that nonchalantly sent their roots in and out and in through the fabric again, totally unbothered by it “blocking” the way.

Now that I’m trying to remove the fabric, I sometimes have to cut the roots first so that I can even get the fabric away from the ground.