Ten o’clock at night, and it’s still light enough that I could read outside if I wanted to.

A very heavily pregnant deer stopped to rest in our lilac hedge. I was wondering if she would stay here to give birth, and we’d get a deer nursery again, but a few hours later she was gone.

A new plum tree, to replace the one that our neighbour crushed. This time the variety I wanted was in stock so I didn’t even have to wait half a year to get one. Let’s see if it gets a better chance than the previous one.

Ingrid bought two chili plants last summer. They grew, produced a few flowers, and even a couple of fruit each. And then they dropped most of their leaves – but not all! – and somehow stayed barely alive. Occasionally a handful of new tiny leaves appear in some fork, and even new flowers occasionally. They look mostly dead, except for that fruit still hanging on, but according to Ingrid, that counts as still alive, so we’re not allowed to throw them out.

Aren’t they magnificent?

The younger one, closer to us in the photo, is about twice as tall as it was when we moved here in 2008. It’s almost caught up with its older sibling behind it.

Here’s the oldest photo I could find of it:

The bird cherry is flowering.

The planting in the corner in front of the house is delivering mixed results, which is pretty much as expected. The Omphalodes and Alchemilla are growing well, like the Helleborus that I’ve photographed before. The funkias, lilies of the valley and Tiarellas are slower to come up, but are present and accounted for.

The toad lily is technically alive, but its shoots have all been eaten level with the ground. I can see them when I push away the soil, but the ends are all bitten off. I’m not going to try and coddle it through this; it’s going out. The Polygonatum are mostly gone – a single one remains – and I really like them so I might give those another try. The Thalictrum have all disappeared; there’s not a single sign of them ever having been here, even. Time to replace them with something more suitable.

Our neighbour has decided that he wants to replace the chain link fence between our yards. The fence is old, several posts having rusted through entirely, so I do kind of understand him. To that end he’s taken down four trees – all on his side of the fence so I can’t object but I’m still sad to see them go. We used to have a green wall on that side of the garden; now we have free views not just into his garden but across the street and into the homes over there.

What really pissed me off is that one of those trees he felled towards our garden, and it crushed most of my baby plum tree. The one that I waited half a year just to get delivered, and then two years to establish and start growing. I didn’t even get an apology – not even a note in the mailbox. Eric noticed the broken tree; I investigated and saw the tell-tale sawdust and a handful of maple flowers and twigs.

When I went to the neighbour to complain, his reaction was more or less “whatever”. He offered to pay for a new tree, which I will let him do, but that’s not going to bring back those years of waiting.

First of May, public holiday, great weather – gardening time!

This year I’m decommissioning the planting boxes in the kitchen garden. They’re more hassle than they’re worth. I can’t say they’ve been useless – the home-grown peas were nice – but overall just not worth it.

Most of all I’m tired of the endless watering. Maybe it’s because they’re raised (heated by the sun from the sides, no buffering from the soil around them). Maybe it’s because of the soil I’ve bought – much of the soil that is sold is very peaty. Maybe both and then some more. But the soil dries out so fast that I can never get a break from the watering. And then we go away for a week and come back to half-dead plants.

The work might be worth it if the yield was great. But with strawberries, for example, a planter fits six plants, which altogether yields a couple of breakfast bowls of strawberries. Maybe three. To share between the four of us. Enough to whet the appetite, but it’s not like we could eat home-grown strawberries with our cereal all summer. So to make it worth it, we’d need to have a much larger kitchen garden.

The raspberries, which I had hopes for – larger plants, more fruit – just died. Could be because I couldn’t keep up with the watering?

So now I’m giving up. I don’t know what I’ll do with this part of the garden instead, but whatever it is, it’ll have to tolerate dry conditions and shallow soil and survive without daily coddling. And as for strawberries, we’ll just buy all the strawberries that we can eat.

I’m using the soil from the planting boxes to fill in sunken bits of the lawn. I recall the lawn as being much more even when we moved in – now it’s got dips and bumps and depressions all over. If I really cared about the state of the lawn, I could invest much more work in evening it out properly, but this might at least improve the situation while utilising all this soil I have. Throw some grass seeds on it, and it’ll be good enough.

I really hoped we were done with the snow.