Some days it feels like real spring is just around the corner. Then it recedes as the weather turns cold and windy again. I hunt for every tiniest sign of it.

Optimal bedroom temperature: somewhere between 14 and 16°C. Our house is old and not very well insulated, so this is roughly the temperature we get in the rooms on the 2nd floor if we don’t turn on the heating, as long as the temperature outdoors stays above freezing.

For me, this kind of temperature is great at night, when I’m under a nice thick duvet, but during the day it’s too cold. My feet get cold and my fingers stiff. But Ingrid likes it cold in her room even when she’s awake and playing Minecraft etc, so she manages without any heating at all.

Staghorn sumac.

I planted it 2012 and three years on, it had barely grown at all. So this summer I dug it up, added lots of mulch and fertilizer and replanted it. Since then it has actually grown and even sent out root suckers – and while root suckers are generally annoying, these ones made me happy because I think the tree is finally thriving! I’m undecided between removing all the suckers, or keeping two of them so I get a nice three-stemmed tree/bush group.

This year our cherry tree gave us a properly dramatic display of autumn colours (unlike last year’s disappointing performance).

This year’s big planting project is 90% done! I’m continuing my long term mission of replacing lawn with better things, such as bushes and perennials. Lawn is a pain to care for and boring to look at.

I was kind of planning to focus on section 4 this year, but it didn’t turn out that way. It was easier to continue in section 1 because I have a rough plan all ready in my head for it, whereas all I have for section 4 is a vague vision.

It’s taken almost all summer. The planting bed covers about 15-20 square meters. Preparing it involved cutting away about three tons of turf – literally. Then spreading about 1 cubic metre of mulch and manure on top, and mixing that with the clay soil to make it more plant-friendly. And finally another cubic metre of prime planting soil on top of that.

At first I was just going to replace the lawn under and between the dogwood bushes with better ground cover that would look more interesting and not need mowing. But when I was halfway through the digging, I realized that if I am going to put in all this work then I might as well get something more grand for it!

Today I took a trip to the garden centre at Ulriksdal and came back with the car packed full of plants. It was like a jungle in there. It was a good thing no kids came with me because on the way back there would have been no space for them in the car. And now they are in the ground! Now I just need to add some more ground cover plants between them and then I’ll be done with this bed for this season.

This bed is in deep shade. It’s situated along the west side of the house, and our cherry tree and the neighbours’ tall trees shade it in the afternoon and evening as well. Possibly the bottom end may get a tiny bit of sun now and again. I like shade plants: Hosta and Brunnera and Polygonatum and Bergenia and the hardier Geraniums. But I wanted some taller blooming plants as well, so I also put some Astilbe and even a few Aquilegias there. It remains to be seen whether they will survive or flower.

Frankly I’ll be happy with anything as long as it is not lawn and not obviously a weed. So if a few of the plants get pushed out by others, I don’t mind. And if the bushes smother some perennials, I won’t cry either.

Here’s what I have:

• Aquilegia “William Guinness”
• Astilbe, Japonica group “Ellie”
• Astilbe “Purpurkerze”
• Alchemilla mollis
• Bergenia “Silberlicht”
• Brunnera macrophylla “Jack Frost”
• Carex morrowii “Ice Dance”
• Geranium phaeum “Samobor”
• Hosta “Albomarginata”
• Hosta “Big daddy”
• Hosta “Halcyon”
• Lamprocapnos spectabilis “Alba”
• Polygonatum

We’ve had a lot of rain today and it’s washing away the soil I just spread here! Well, I guess it’s good to discover this kind of bug early in the project’s life – before this area is full of newly planted plants. The rain barrel definitely needs upgrading to something bigger (and less ugly) and we need a drip irrigation hose to lead the water to the plants rather than to the street. And the soil needs to be covered with mulch of some sort to help keep it in place.

The builders did their part renovating the roof. Now Eric’s painting the new siding boards they put up around the roof.

We’re renovating the roof. Or rather, we’re having it renovated. So there are two guys clomping around on our roof, noisily tearing it up.

The original metal roof, probably from 1973, is well past retirement age. It is uneven so water gathers in puddles. It has leaked at some point, and been patched at some point, and now we basically don’t trust it to keep us dry.

Today was cherry picking day!

Our cherry tree is unpredictable. I think we last had a great harvest three years ago. We got almost no cherries last year, or the year before. This year’s harvest was pretty OK.

Ingrid and Adrian quickly divided up our two step ladders and got started. In fact I believe that for them, climbing on ladders is the best part of the whole cherry picking thing.

My job was to help stabilize the stepladders (especially the taller one is a bit wobbly) and to ooh and aah over all the cherries the kids got. Adrian especially loved showing off how much he had picked.

Once we started picking we noticed that the quantity may be OK this year but the quality was not so good at all. We always have to throw some out because the birds have been at them. But this year, many cherries had a different kind of damage: they had split because of the rain we’ve been having all throughout June and July. I can’t recall having seen that before.

Today I learned that commercial growers actually use helicopters to blow-dry their cherries to keep them from cracking. Luckily for us, we don’t need our cherries to look perfect or to store well, so we kept many of the cracked berries for making jam and syrup.

Here’s the cherry sorting station, where Eric sorts them into three groups: undamaged, damaged but OK, and inedible.

Cherry jam is awesome. But we still have a fair amount of jam left from three years ago, so we don’t need any more.

Cherry pie is probably the next best thing you can make out of cherries, so that’s what I did.

It rained today. We went to IKEA to look for wardrobes for our bedroom. By the time we got home again, the rain had stopped, and it looked like all the slugs and snails in the garden had come out to enjoy the moisture. They were everywhere. Ingrid and I went out slug picking. We kept count: she because I pay her per picked slug, and I because I was curious. Our combined total was a mind-boggling 281 slugs.

I don’t want to honour those marauding bastards with any photos so here is a shot of its less annoying cousin, the grove snail (parksnäcka, Cepaea nemoralis). Although some people on the internet say that these snails also eat live plants and not just dead plant material, so who knows, maybe I should be picking these as well. They are also very numerous.

Because of the slugs and snails, we are not getting a single carrot or broccoli this year and probably no peas either. The carrot and broccoli seedlings grew to a few centimetres’ height and then vanished overnight, one by one. At that stage they were far too small for deer to bother eating them so it’s got to be the work of the molluscs. If I had lots of time, I’d protect the seedlings, but I don’t. Maybe another year. This year I guess I’ll just enjoy my tomatoes.