Ran into a giant hunk of concrete or something like it in my digging around the elderberry bush. I ran into it from three different angles and thought it was three separate rocks but then it turned out to be one giant one. I can wiggle it a bit, but it is too heavy for a human to lift, and too heavy and awkward to even lever or roll it out of where it is. So I’m going to end up burying it again. Damn it.

People who bury construction waste in a garden deserve to rot in a special kind of gardening hell. May they get mould in their lawns and may deer eat all their bushes.

Someone, probably deer, have already been chewing on the baby plum tree I planted this summer. It’s not even winter so they’re not doing it out of hunger. I guess plum tree bark just tastes good. This happened to the last tree as well, and I’m not letting it go any further. The tree is getting caged in. (Using material from the cage that housed Nysse a year ago.)

I’m past the dead zone! It feels like I made more progress today, measured in volume of soil dug through, than in the past three weekends all together. No more scraping soil one fingers-breadth at a time. Now I’m cutting off entire chunks.

The soil here is like somewhat crumbly cheese: sticky and stable. Cut it, and it sticks to your tool, and what you cut off falls into a few pieces, but it can be handled in chunks.

The horrible soil was close to a place where there used to be a concrete sewer access. I’m guessing maybe the soil got compacted by heavy machinery when it was installed?

It’s like there is almost no topsoil here. A hand’s breadth’s worth at most. And then it’s the hard-packed, concrete-hard, dead layer that no grass or bush roots penetrate, although cherry tree roots and earthworms manage.

And rocks. So many rocks. When the soil is so densely packed, even the smallest pebble stops the spade dead, because it has no wiggle room.

At this pace I can dig every weekend and still not be done before the ground freezes. Ugh.

Ingrid is away with her boyfriend, Adrian is away at scout camp, and the weather is dry but not hot. Eric and I seized the opportunity to scrub the living room floor. It’s been several years since we last did it. The floor always looks and feels so nice afterwards.

You can see quite clearly where the big rug usually is, where the floor is smoother and more yellow.

The room looks both oddly large and kind of small like this.

It looks like we’ll have a great cherry harvest this year. And they reached peak ripeness just today. Too bad I won’t be here for it – the kids and I are leaving for Estonia this evening. Eric will have to eat and pick what he can on his own.

Humans and their cars are away on vacations, so the deer can be more bold than usual. A family of them (dad, and mum with baby) have been traipsing through the garden repeatedly in the last few days.

Or it could be because of the ripe cherries that have dropped from the tree, and the newly cut grass that makes the cherries easy to reach.

This season’s big garden project: replacing lawn with a planting under and around the elder bush, and the new plum tree next to it. The soil is thick clay, hard as concrete when it’s dry and like a lump of glue when it’s wet, so it’s slow going. And the elder is not making it easier. The dogwoods on the left I can just push aside – even tie them up with a piece of string to get them out of the way. The elder branches just break when I push them even the most gently. I started cutting the sod with a normal gardening spade, but in the end I was crawling under it with a little hand-held planting spade.

The little patch of green that’s left right next to the elder should be a patch of white anemones. I know they’re roughly somewhere there, but when I looked for photo evidence, I could only find close-ups of anemone flowers and nothing documenting their location. At this time of the year they’re all gone, so I can only hope I saved at least some of them.

Of course this also means saving the weeds around them, so I’ll be eradicating couch grass here forever.

Here’s the elder when I planted it, twelve years ago:

And here are the bags of sod and roots and the occasional rock. The first one has been here since last summer and I am starting to worry about its structural integrity, given how much the material has faded.

This year’s deer kids are old enough to be walking around with their mums.

When mum jumped over the hedge and the chain link fence behind it, the baby instead found the cat passage under the fence and used that.

There hasn’t been much rain recently so the little plum trees need watering. The clay soil gets so compact that it won’t absorb water well at all. I’ve settled on giving each tree one watering can’s worth of water, but I have to portion it out slowly, or it will just run off without reaching the tree. So I water one tree until the water puddles around the tree, then walk around the house to do the same to the other tree on the other side, and back and forth like that until they’re both properly soaked.

Some kind of force had torn down the anti-gnaw protection around the tree, so now I tied them in place with string.