There has been a distinct lack of progress in the garden since I finished planting the bushes behind the house. (I see I have posted no photos of the end result – I have to do something about that soon.)

The last time I mowed the lawn, I decided that my next gardening project was going to be around the bushes in the front. Mowing around them is getting very frustrating. Yes, I was going to focus on planting a plum tree, but that can wait until later in the season. The lawn/grass needs to go NOW, so I can plant something else underneath and around those bushes. Something that doesn’t need mowing.


I’ve been digging here for some days already. Today I mostly finished cutting away the sod. I started out with a more curved shape for the planting, but then I started thinking about maintenance, and keeping the grass away from this new planting. I like the steel edging I’ve used before – but it’s quite stiff and I don’t think it can be bent into those shapes. So today I evened out those curves.

Digging under bushes is not a lot easier than mowing there… the branches of those Chaenomeles bushes lie close to the ground and are a bit of a tangle. I tried getting them out of the way by binding them up with string, but in the end the best solution I found was to just push a bunch of branches to the side and stab a garden fork in the ground in front of them to keep them there. That’s why it looks in the photos like I’m wielding two spades at the same time.

Eric and Adrian were out catching Pokemons while I was digging, and came back just when I had set up my camera on a tripod. Adrian took charge of the camera instead and took some action photos.

Then he tried digging, and discovered just how stiff the clay soil is here. His body weight is simply not enough to push the spade into the ground. Mine is – sometimes barely.

Happy birthday to me! It turns out I’m now forty-three years old. I have learned by now that I’m forty-something. I still can’t keep track of the exact number of years, though, and have to do some mental arithmetics whenever someone asks. Funny thing, that. Eric could probably recall my age better than I do. Even Adrian can, I think, but he on the other hand cannot remember my date of birth. For him the age is more interesting than the date.

Forty-three is a great age. I’ve had about twenty-five years of adult life and I expect at least as many more, before I might start thinking of myself as “getting old”.

Eric made the lovely cake. It’s raspberry mousse and lemon frosting on a brownie base. Just the kind of cake I love best: light and moist and with a fresh, tangy, fruity flavour.

Last time we went out walking, it was Adrian who suggested that we should go out. Except his suggestion was not that we should go walking – he wanted to go out and grill sausages, and maybe do a bit of geocaching as well. I somehow lost the grilling part completely as I was planning the outing. While we had a nice walk, Adrian did not get what he had suggested, at all.

Today we rectified that. We went out again and this time we totally did grill sausages.

What we originally had planned for today (and tomorrow and Tuesday) was a trip to Tiveden for some walking and canoeing. The weather report promised rain for all three days, so we cancelled those plans. Plan B was to go canoeing somewhere near Stockholm. But all the canoe rental places we called were fully booked by covid-cationing Stockholmers, so we were forced to cancel this plan as well. Walking near Stockholm fortunately requires no bookings and no advance planning so that’s what we fell back on.

Gålö is a place I’ve read about but not walked before. I’ve been there twice for nature photo mornings (once, twice). At those events we generally move within a very small area, so I didn’t really feel that I’d seen Gålö. And because we always drive there in the dark, following someone else’s car, I don’t even know exactly where I’ve been.

Today we walked the Havtornsuddslingan, which is a 4.5 km circular walk along the coastline of a narrow peninsula at the easternmost end of Gålö.

The path sometimes hugged the waterline, sometimes went through pine and blueberry forest and sometimes hovered between the two. The northern coast, which we walked first, on the way out, was steeper and the path was generally high up on cliffs. We had lots of lovely views there of the sea and small islands and sailing boats, which I somehow missed to photograph.

On the southern side, on our way back, there were more pebbly-rocky beaches instead of cliffs, and the path was even closer to the sea. The wind was from the south, so the sea was rougher and noisier on this side. Adrian and I tried bathing on one of the beaches but the sea bottom was so rocky and uneven and slippery that we kept stumbling all the time, so we turned back before we made it into deep water.

The actual sausage grilling we did on a new grill I bought just last week. We’ve been buying disposable grills for these kinds of outings, but the wastefulness of this has come to grate more and more on me, until I just couldn’t any more. Now I bought this portable, collapsible pop-up grill which I read about on some website some years ago.

It was all sold out in Sweden because of manufacturing issues due to the coronavirus, but I found one in a Danish web shop. I promise to use it lots and lots to make up for the wastefulness of shipping it from abroad. Although it was probably made in China so the trip to Denmark was most likely only a very small detour for it.

The grill worked really well. It was super easy to assemble and use. And the sausages came out really good! The grid on the disposable things sits right on top of the coals, so the food always comes out somewhat burned. It’s sort of an expected part of the grilling experience by now.

The grid on the pop-up grill is much higher up, so today the sausages were not the least bit burned, which might be a first for us. In fact we had the opposite problem – it was hard to get the heat up. Eric ended up blowing on the coals a lot to get them to burn hotter.

Our favourite vegetarian sausages come from Anamma.

Eric and Adrian went to the cousin’s birthday party. I stayed at home, because those parties tend to be too large and too full of strangers for my taste, and I just didn’t have the energy right now for a big party. (Although afterwards I found out that it had been much smaller than usual, with only people I knew. If I had known that, I’d have made a different decision.)

Adrian and Ingrid joked that I’d probably spend all afternoon reading. Nope! Recently, whenever the family is away and I have unusual amounts of time on my hands, I’ve been making things instead. Either physically – I started the napkin project when they were away, for example – or virtually, by blogging more.

Today I finished a bunch of bookends. I started this project a while ago, and some of the bookends in these photos I made earlier this summer. But today I finished several more, and now I’m feeling done. I could probably find a place in our bookshelves for a few more, but there’s no longer an urgent need for them. Our books are now standing up and not falling down!

All the bookends are made from scrap materials, leftover pieces of wood from the storage thing and other pieces I found in the basement, where we have a stash of odd pieces. So they have different proportions and designs, and some pieces are slightly damaged on the bottom.

The basic design is just an L shape of two pieces of wood. (But I found two triangular pieces so two of the bookends ended up with a different design.) Cut two pieces of wood, sand the cut ends a bit smoother, drill holes, screw together. I guess I could have glued them but then I’d have to find some way to clamp them, and wait, which I didn’t want to do. Screwing was maybe a bit more work but gave faster results.

The only part that was not scrap material was the rocks. I picked a few smooth white pieces of limestone when we were in Gotland, with the bookends in mind. The golden rock is just a random rock that I found in the garden. It was not very pretty so I prettified it.

Adrian reads a lot of Kalle Anka Pocket, but hardly anything else. No books, of the kind I consider “real” books. I’m even willing to pay him for reading – I’ve set it up as a chore in the allowance and chores app we have – but no. Somehow they’re not as interesting as Kalle Anka.

One of the smaller cousins has a birthday party this Saturday. Adrian and Eric looked through our old Lego sets to see if there were any that Adrian could consider giving away. There were a few, but most of them he was still quite attached to, even though he hasn’t used any for some years now.

Which is fine! It’s OK to keep things just because you want to keep them. I am still peeved that some of my old things got thrown out without me having any say about it. I would have loved to keep my old school uniforms, for example.

Who knows, maybe Legos will still be a thing when Adrian and Ingrid have kids, and Adrian might bring these out from the basement and they’ll build them up together, with Adrian full of nostalgia. After all, I played with Legos when I was a child, so they’ve been around for a while. Back then we only had rectangular pieces of various sizes, some flat plates, and roofs and windows – none of the fancy models or fancy pieces that they make today existed. Today’s kids mostly find the old plain pieces boring, so my grandchildren will probably think the same of today’s models. I wonder what kind of Legos they might play with. Voice-activated? Self-propelling? AI-controlled? Hologram-projecting?

Adrian and Eric came back from Hälsingland with loads of blueberries (bilberries). Adrian and his friends – the ones with a cottage in Hälsingland – made bluberry muffins and then went out and sold them to people.

First they put up a table in central Spånga, just outside the supermarket. They didn’t get a single muffin sold and came home quite demoralized. Then they went house to house, knocking on doors – and had no trouble finding buyers. The whole project took all day and earned them 240 kronor.

There was so much constant debating and arguing and deciding about the smallest things that really can’t matter to anyone but small children. “You mixed the dry ingredients last time so now it’s my turn. You’ll carry the table and you’ll carry the sign and I’ll carry the muffins.” I wasn’t even involved in the project, other than very peripherally, and still it left me exhausted.

I picked cherries today. Just the low-hanging ones – there’s more on the branches higher up. I got about 8 litres, I think. And nearly all of them perfect, unpecked by birds! Most years we throw away nearly as much as we pick.

Part of them will become a sheet cake, based on this recipe. It’s the best way to store cherries all year round.

Eric will use some of them to try and recreate Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream, with cherries and dark chocolate. It used to be our favourite ice cream flavour in London. It’s almost never available here in Stockholm for some reason. (Plus Ben & Jerry’s don’t taste as good as they used to, anyway.)

I put the final touches to the paint on the garden sofa yesterday (or was it the day before?). It feels like new, especially after Eric added a diagonal crosspiece to strengthen its construction. I used to be cautious whenever I handled it. Now I carried it up from the basement on my own (the family is still away) and it didn’t flex or wobble at all.

The sofa is back in its spot on the deck – right on one edge, where it gets shade from the cherry tree in the morning, and from the house the rest of the day. I like reading the morning newspaper there. It’s also a nice spot for sewing.

I’ve cut up the second tablecloth and now I’m hemming all those new napkins. By hand. I’m not entirely sure why I’m doing this by hand. It’s inefficient as heck and it’s going to be taking forever, but somehow it just feels right. Machine hemming vintage linen would simply be wrong.

The first tablecloth yielded 8 napkins with a total of 16 edges to hem, since I got so many edges for free. This one yields 16 napkins with a total of 48 edges. (4 napkins with 2 edges each, 8 with 3 edges and 4 with all 4 edges raw.) That’s a lot of hemming. Good thing I’m on vacation.

The deer are feeling right at home in the garden, walking through, nibbling on this and that. I went out and shouted at it when I saw it eating one of the new dogwood bushes. It glared at me and walked a few steps further away, but didn’t really seem very bothered.