It’s that time of the year: the bleeding hearts are flowering.

We’re continuing work on Adrian’s boat-ferry-thing and now attaching the cabin thing to it. The builders working on the kitchen kindly lent us two minutes of their time and cut the parts for the cabin on their power saw, so that Adrian could focus on the fun part, which is measuring and then assembling it all.

I wanted cake but have no oven, so I made rhubarb cake in a pan. It worked surprisingly well; I even managed to flip it so it baked evenly on both sides.

Not a pancake, but perhaps a pan cake?

The ground cover in my front flowerbed is mostly doing pretty well. I’m a bit peeved that the Lamiums all died, while their wild cousins turn up here and there in the new hedge, full of vigour. I even see Aquilegia in there but I’ve given up hope about them blooming.

The flowerbeds I remember from my childhood summers in my grandmother’s cottage had single flowers planted at regular distances: tagetes, lilies, gladiolus, hostas. In between the plants the earth was bare. And I remember my grandmother and mother sitting and weeding those flowerbeds to keep them tidy. It must have taken up so much of their time.

I think that aesthetic is still quite in fashion in Estonia, although nowadays the general recommendation is to cover the earth with mulch of some sort to reduce the need for weeding.

The result can kind of look elegant if you can keep it totally pristine, but that bare-earth look just seems so unnatural to me. All gardens and flowerbeds are unnatural by definition, of course, but mulched or bare-earth flowerbeds are like perfectly even monoculture lawns and giant paved patios: it’s no longer bringing out the best of nature but a constant battle to completely dominate nature.

All philosophy aside, it’s also a giant waste of time.

Last summer I also planted some ground cover under one of the new hedges. I couldn’t make up my mind so I bought three different species and gave them equal shares. That turned out to be a very good thing. Out of the three, one has died out so completely that I can’t see even enough of a trace to recall what I may have planted. The second one (Waldsteinia) is growing well, and I’m planning to get more of those to fill in the empty section. The third one (Vinca) is surviving but not exactly doing a good job of covering the ground.

The front hedge I left to its own devices, because the “lawn” there has a lot of species that I thought might spread and cover the ground – Creeping Cinquefoil being the foremost among them. It is generally categorized as a weed, but I find it completely inoffensive in all ways and would happily let it take over all the ground under the hedge, and block weeds I don’t like. The cinquefoil is doing pretty well but there are places it hasn’t spread to yet, and those are now being invaded by less attractive weeds, so I think I will be buying some commercial ground cover for those spots to speed things up.

I went out into the garden to take photos, but then I discovered that the gooseberry bush was all tangled up with its net. I’d left the net out over the winter, mostly out of laziness but also thinking that it wouldn’t make much of a difference whether I leave it on or take it off. It made a lot of difference: the new leaves and berries had in many places grown through the net, so they were on the wrong side of it. They were still just small enough that with a lot of fiddling I could mostly poke them back and detach the net from the bush.

Meanwhile Adrian borrowed my camera, and by the time I was done fiddling with the bush, the camera had run out of batteries. So here is a photo of me instead of photos by me.

Adrian got inspired by the work that’s going on in the kitchen, and all the cool tools that the builders have there, and wanted to build things, too. So now he’s making a boat/ferry kind of thing of his own design, with some help from me.

Power tools are cool, and screwdriver bits are cool, so instead of using nails, we’re drilling holes and screwing all the pieces together. Plus it’s probably easier for a kid’s small hands to tighten a screw than to hammer in a nail straight.

This hob is hopeless. The left-hand burner is slow but more or less works; the right-hand one can barely keep water boiling. I tried to make pancakes today and they just never got done on the right-hand burner. The batter turned solid after a while but didn’t get any colour so it was more like drying than frying the batter.

I am so looking forward to being able to use the big stove again.

And another thing. I’ve always known that the floor in the living room has a bit of give to it. The floorboards sag somewhat when someone walk on them. It’s never bothered me, in fact I used to barely notice it. But now that we store all sorts of kitchenware and glassware here, the whole room jangles loudly and irritatingly whenever I move around. It is becoming really annoying.

Now that I know how easy it is to make temaki, we made some for dinner at home today. Making sushi rice wasn’t too complicated either, although it came out a bit too sweet for my taste.

I went to see and hear Philip Glass and his ensemble today. Eric couldn’t come with me because he had some activity planned with his siblings, as a birthday gift.

Imagine my surprise when, as I am sitting in my seat in the concert hall, Eric’s sister suddenly approaches me and says hi. And it turns out that their long-planned activity is this very same concert, and they have seats just a few steps away from mine. And then nobody turns up for the three seats between us, so Eric and the others move, and we end up sitting and enjoying the concert all together.

This concert made me realize just how similar all of Philip Glass’ music is. I got the impression that he has been writing the same thing through his entire career. It hasn’t felt quite this same-ish when I’ve heard it before. Perhaps he just selected pieces of a very similar kind for this evening.

It was very interesting and pleasant at first but towards the end of the concert my head was getting quite tired of it.

More cooking, more scouting, more unsettled weather.