The lawn needs mowing, but the primroses are still flowering, so it’s a precision exercise to mow around and between the primrose clusters.

Nysse is keeping a close eye on the crane delivering 1 m³ of soil for the new planting area.

As pretty this year as they have been every year.

It looks like spring, but doesn’t feel like it. There green things everywhere and cherry trees blossoming, but the temperatures rarely reach even +10°C, so it’s hats and gloves and warm coats all the way still.

It’s ant season. Every spring, for about a week or ten days, tiny ants invade the house. I’ve read that they do this in the beginning of their season, when they’re awake but not yet finding enough food out in nature.

For that brief period, there’s no way to completely keep them away, no matter how much of an effort I make. I keep the counters clinically clean. I wipe up the smallest spills. I scrub the floor around the packaging recycling. I leave no tuna out for Nysse. I empty the kitchen compost bin twice a day and run the dishwasher daily. And still they find some minute trace of something somewhere.

Years ago we used to try and fight them with poisons and whatnot. Now that I know how temporary it is, I don’t feel the need to be quite as aggressive about it. Which doesn’t mean that I don’t kill them – I do, but I just squish the ones who are in the house, and wash away the pheromone trail they’ve created while I’ve looked the other way. (They can get a lot done overnight.) But I don’t feel any need to poison the rest of them.

Today some of them have decided that they really want to get into the top kitchen cabinet above the dishwasher. There is nothing there for them! There’s no food in that cabinet, just dishes and kitchen tools. There hasn’t ever been any food there. And still they congregate there.

When I’ve noticed trails of ants, the camera has been the last thing on my mind, which I now regret. I think the invasion is winding down. There may be ten ants on the wall, which feels like a lot when it’s in my kitchen, but there’s enough distance between the individual ants that I can only fit one at a time in a photo.

Viburnum in all its pink glory. And the season’s first bee, gathering nectar.

April is doing its usual thing, swinging back and forth between +10°C sunshine and barely-above-freezing days.

The first daffodil is blossoming.

Deer are frequent visitors in our garden, and are totally unbothered by my presence.

I proudly present to you these holes I drilled all by myself! I’m rather pleased with my drilling precision, given that this is my first time with metalwork.

The drilling was rather less straightforward than the sawing and filing. My first attempt with a standard metal drill bit failed. After a long struggle, I had nothing more than a tiny divot to show. (This is a trial hole in one of the sawed-off pieces, hence why it looks so sloppy.)

The weekend after I went off to Bauhaus and bought drill bits made for high-density stainless steel. This weekend I put them to use, and the difference was immediate. With them, it was no struggle at all to drill through the steel pipe.

Spring!