Christmas

Decorating for Christmas

~ Eva the Gardener ~ Leave a comment

With less than one week to Christmas, I am full of decorating inspiration. Everyone coming near me will experience that. Even the guys digging in our area for water and sewer cannot escape it 🙂 Every week I serve them a cake for their morning break – just for the fun of it – and today they got a Christmas cake decorated with delicate fir branches sprayed with the finest sugar to make it look like snow. And dotted here and there among the branches were small bulbs of marzipan colored with red eatible cooking color.  And I am so sorry, but I did not take a photo of it, before bringing it down to them, you will have to use your imagination 🙂

For the rest of December I will bring in some decorating inspiration on my blog.

By us here in Stockholm, there have been some cold days. Every morning I feed the birds, and give them new lukewarm water. That means I take away the icy cake that has formed during the night.

I carefully remove it and place it on the veranda. After four cold nights there are now four beautiful round ice sculptures leaning towards the glass wall of the veranda. In the day, the sun reflects in it, and in the night the light from the lamps inside the living room give them a very special glow. A pity there will soon be warm weather again and they will melt. But that is life with ice sculptures … isn´t that the essence of mindfulness: to live in the moment?IMG_0571

 

Competing for hazel nuts with squirrel

~ Eva the Gardener ~ 1 Comment

When we moved into our dream house three years ago, there were many plants and trees I did not know. We had a bunch of some mixture betweeIMG_0411n tree and bush growing next to one of the neighbours and I couldn´t figure out what it was. Until I saw a squirrel! Yes, of course, it was hazelnut! Full of nuts every summer. And strange enough, empty of them in September. Where did they all go? Well, I blamed the squirrel. Thought he had collected them all in a secret place for winter use.

Anyway, this autumn by chance I found out the hazelnuts let go of the tree and fall down to earth when they are ripe. Just like apples or any other fruit. In the grass under the hazelnut tree I found a lot of them. And I silently asked the squirrel to forgive me for accusing him. In fact, there was enough nuts for both him/her and me.

They are so beautiful how they grow, often sitting several of them together – and when ripe opening up their protective green shield to let the lime green nut IMG_0412fall out. Then, on a dry place, they will quickly turn brown. I will certainly save some for Christmas, to treat my friends and relatives with gardengrown hazelnuts.