Front porch ornament Sunday, 26-May-24 21:07:24 CEST

Recover the garden season Sunday, 09-Jun-24 22:50:19 CEST

Sunday, 02-Jun-24 21:58:52 CEST

Finished the raised bed

This week, I worked on the raised bed. It got sowed in and is ready to produce! The sheep got sheared, so now they are ready for the rest of the season.

Monday 27 May

I worked from home today. DW celebrated her sabatical. Before work and after work, I had a quick round in the garden, nihilating slugs. I just realized that I lost all squash plants last week. I will need to bounce back from this catastrophe. DW also experienced considerable loss in her bean garden. Seeds I sowed in pots that had not sprouted came up during our holiday. DS kept them moist, so that is good. I will not transplant them in a hasty action. Instead, they will grow more in a safe environment. When the time is right, I will let them out.

I started working on the raised beds behind the house. Not to populate them with seeds or transplants, move them to the front garden. I realized there would not be sufficient room for the two beds, and if I combined the soil from the two beds into one, it would be just about right. I am also not sure if I want to have two beds going. This year, we are concentrating our efforts. Last year, I had the flower garden, the garden along the driveway, and the two beds. This year, I got one raised bed, no flower garden, and the garden along the driveway has become a little bigger. The photo shows that the bed is hovering a little over the ground. I will put an extra plank there to fix that.

While working on this, I found a Cinnabar moth in Latin Tyria Jacobaese. This species lives off the ragwort plant. It is a beautiful plant with yellow flowers, but it is toxic. We don't like it because the sheep cannot eat it. I started to move the plant to prohibit it from spreading.

Tuesday 28 May

It was great weather this morning. Before going to the office, I went out in the garden to eliminate a couple of slugs.

Today, we learned that DD may graduate, which is good news. Now, she can work on the final things in her studies, and graduation will occur on 25 June. The critical milestone was today, and the ceremony on 25 June is for the show.

We also got another good news today: the municipality has accepted the layout changes for our property. That is the foundation for submitting the building permit for the shed. We will talk to the builder tomorrow about the plan. We need to check a couple of things before proceeding with that project. When we are happy with the design, we will get the construction drawings from the builder, and we can submit materials for the building permit.

This was the moment: the puzzle was finished! We will move to a new office, so it was just about the right moment to have the puzzle finished and packed into the box.

Here is an animation of the final result from 14 March until today. It is magic to see the progress of the puzzle.

Wednesday 29 May

Today, I worked from home in the morning. After lunch, DW and I had a telephone meeting with the shed builder. We went through the offer details. It was a four-page document with many details, and we had questions and suggestions. It took some time to finish this. Now, the builder will rework the offer, and we will consider the new one when it arrives.

After the meeting, we went to the alternative grocery store. I picked up another bag of squash seeds to replace the squash plants eaten by slugs. Finding out that the bag should contain 8 seeds but only had four wasn't charming.

Anyhow, I planted these in pots.

I brought numerous wheelbarrows of soil from the old place of the salad beds. When I finished the first bed, I continued with the next bed. In the evening, I was rather tired. I sat scrolling my feeds for no purpose.

Thursday 30 May

Today, I went to the office. During the lunch break, I tried to go and shop for clothing, but that failed. The store did not have what I was looking for. I made a mental note about another failing shopping experience. There are a number of these on the list. It is gradually more futile to go shopping in the city. It is better to order things online, as it appears.

In the evening, I brought in another couple of wheelbarrows to the moved bed. Today, we got the news that the sheep shearer will come to us tomorrow to shave our sheep.

This evening, when we were about to go to bed, we got the news that the jury had a verdict in the case of business fraud of Mr Trump.

Friday 31 May

In the morning, I discovered that one of the two remaining pickle plants had been eaten by slugs. That means there is one left. I have more pickle plants that sprouted in my plant nursery set, but I hesitate to transplant them into the garden. I need to do some slug work first.

Today, I went to the office. It was a good day; my current sprint ended successfully. I had no time to check the news throughout the day, so I wondered how Trump's conviction was reported.

Our sheep got sheared today! It was Mr Splint doing it. He was a bit whimsical about when he would arrive. It was the end of the day, and I was at the office. Should I rush home or stay? Had Mr Splint been a little more predictable about when he would arrive, I would have gone home. No worries, though; DW handled this perfectly fine. When I came home, the sheep were already sheared.

The sheep had a little confusion, though. Where were their sisters? Suddenly, they were placed in a new flock of slank sheep, but they wanted to be with their fluffy, good old sisters. How could this be? So they ran around, bleated for their true sisters to arrive, and banged their heads with those new girls. I recall that this continued for a couple of days last year. I do hope they are a little more used to it this year.

In the evening, I had plenty of time to check up on the former resident of the white house. Convicted felon of business fraud and convicted sex offender, Mr Donald R Trump. The anti-Trump bubble was happy. The non-anti-Trump bubble was awfully silent.

I was not up for work in the garden this evening. Besides, it rained, so it was not very appealing. When it is raining sufficiently, I turn off the watering system. Last year, I did not do that; I did not even know how to do it. This year, I read the instructions for the watering clock repeatedly, and it has a rain-stop function. Would it not be nice if the rain watering system detected that it rains and let the watering out if it is unnecessary?

Saturday 1 June

Today, we will mainly enjoy a cultural program of small events arranged in the neighborhood. I do hope I can work in the garden as well. The courgette seeds I bought have not sprouted yet. I go around killing slugs, but this season has started worse than last year. Oh, well, I keep my head up and continue fighting.

We started the activities in the morning by moving the sheep to a new area. Previously, we let them graze along the edge of the north and west border, opening up around the apple trees. Now, we had them graze inside that area. This is a little more than the winter area they had over the winter, and it was heavily walked, but now it recovered nicely. There is grass growing, and it looks healthy.

With that, I first weeded around the garden along the driveway. 22 potato plants have sprouted and still have not been eaten by slugs. The remaining pickle plant got an extra line of slug defense. I can not weed the beetroot and carrot beds because they are sown in, and I don't know if I am weeding beetroot or carrot, so I have to keep them unweeded for now. I do fear that slugs are killing the sprouted plants in those beds.

I continued preparing the salad bed in front of the house. First, I removed the prominent rumex plant beside the bed. In the process, I probably broke the garden fork. There was a loud crack sound. I installed the watering pipes on the bed, but I had to have another 3-way water pipe junction for this. So, I went to the hardware store to get a junction, plus a few other bits and bobs. I learned this expression from Ukraine: the latest podcast. They talk about a lot of bits and bobs in that program. We got ourselves a metal wire hasp to hold the door in a Merida-friendly position so she can get in and out without the door being wide open.

When I came home with the things, we biked to the first show on the cultural program. It was the band Wimpies and the Dominos that played. I was impressed by the show!

Then, there was a carriage with a DJ playing behind a tractor. They played excellent songs while driving to the next venue. Behind them was a crowd of cyclists and cars. The DJ stopped at a crossing between two areas. To the right, there was a creative market. Also there you could enjoy music from a stage. People had art in various forms, but I think nothing was sticky enough for me.

Then we went to the left area where a food market was held. That was much better. A girl had cacao bean products. We tasted her brew, and it was delicious but not that sweet. We bought local beer and had a falafel each. Halfway through the falafel, I concluded we would have this for the evening meal. It was not raining, but it was solidly overcast and not that warm. I had brought a mat to sit on, and that was delicious.

When we came home, I was tired and took a nap. After that, the evening never really recovered. At nine, we went out and nihilated another batch of slugs. I prepared a nine-volt battery to power the slug fence of the salad bed. I will install it tomorrow.

Sunday 2 June

Today, it was supposed to be a little less cloudy. The sun barely came through, but it was a little more nice weather today. We poked around in the garden. DW weeded her beds. I started sowing the new bed. I decided on the following seeds (from right to left):

1. Radish
2. Iceberg lettuce
3. Rucola 3x
4. Chervil 3x
5. Parsley 3x
6. Dill 2x
7. Koriander
8. Chili pepper (4x transplanted)
9. Wild strawberry (transplanted)

DW sowed the wild strawberry and chili pepper a couple of weeks ago, and I could now transplant them. She guessed my efforts to keep slugs from the bed would be a little more successful and better for the plants. I hope she is correct.

I installed the battery on the copper lines. It is unrealistic that slugs will get past that barrier except if the slug is tiny. That could still happen, and they would get over the lines one after another. Slugs can hide in the soil I placed in the beds and get to the surface, so I will still need to monitor the situation in bed.

DW attended a wool event in the afternoon. She had to bike there, and the ride was 35 minutes long.

I started trimming along the road with the bush cutter. I used the trimmer head of the brush cutter. I managed to finish the area along the road in front of the house, plus a bit of the west border area. Then I had to put the battery in the charger. While the battery was charging, I refurbished three slug fortresses. It is just a PVC pipe with copper tape around the edge. The slugs cannot get past that tape because the copper shocks them. I placed two of the fortresses in front of the container and transplanted pickle plants there. One slug fortress was placed behind the container, and I transplanted a courgette plant there. I still have more plants to transplant, but I ran out of fortresses. I must make more fortresses for all remaining courgettes and pickle plants.

When DW came home, the battery for the brush cutter had finished charging, so I took a second round of brush cutting. I continued along the west border, then the north border. At our birch forest, I removed weeds below the birch trees. Then the battery needed charging again.

The thistles are not prevalent along the border. It is ragwort that starts to become an issue. I removed both thistles and ragwort. Next week, perhaps DW will have time to continue brushing the ragwort plants. We will see.

In the evening, we had a hunt for slugs. I must say that there are not so many more. We made a difference by nihilating slugs. Whether this will also make a difference in our vegetable gardens remains to be seen.

While working with the brush cutter, I listened to the Legal AF podcast about the conviction of Mr Trump. I like their style of explaining complex matters so that even listeners abroad, as they say, can understand what is going on. What is happening in the US right now will have consequences worldwide. Democracies must show that their leaders carry their accountability.

Next week, we will see how the stories develop. See you in a week!