This morning, after having watered the flowerbed below the veranda, I noticed this acrobatic snail. Perhaps he escaped the water sprinkler by climbing up the name tag stick in the flower bed. And right on this photo he is trying to climb down again …
The Grand Finale has come at last, to the Heart for the World. Tulips in different forms and colors are overflowing the heart bed. I managed to prolong the poles that hold the chicken net, to give the flowers more room to grow. But now, in full bloom, the tulips struggle to get through the net. And I struggle to decide whether to “let them free” and be afraid every morning to see the tulips all eaten up by the deer. But perhaps I do anyway. People say the deer are more interested in buds, not the full blooming flowers. A heartful greeting from me and my garden 🙂
Some of you have been wondering what the Heart for the World looks like today, in the beginning of spring. For you who have not read about it, go back and read about the construction of this special heart, a flower bed filled with tulip bulbs. The post is called A Heart for the World. As a reminder, here is a photo of how it looked at the end of the autumn 2015.
Today, april 2016, the heart looks like this. I have protected the tulips against deers with a chicken net across the bed, placed on poles to hold the net up in the air so the tulips have room to grow. Really, I have no idea what to do when these 30 centimeters (12 inches) of room for growing is used up and the tulips need more space.
For extra protection I put wads of unwashed sheepwool here and there, and soaked it with the badsmelling liquid I get as a side effect from my Bokashi compost. I dilute it a bit and spray on the wool. I have noticed the deers avoid places where I have sprayed this stuff.
I will keep you posted on what happens with the Heart for the World. I can tell you all the neighbours are as excited as I am about it.
To be continued…
Slowly, slowly spring is approaching and everything is coming to life. Good for me, to be able to enjoy the awakening during a longer period of time. Some samples:
Well, now, look what came by today in my garden! A really royal visit, the “queen of the forest”. This time a mother and her two one year old calves. They banged through my too tiny fence, broke a post on the way, hurried down the slope, missed the roses and the tulips – and were chased away by me so they couldn´t have their usual apple buds meal. But before that I had the chance of taking a picture!
If the Dutch are famous for growing and knowing everything about tulips – the Swedes are known to be the people buying most tulips in the world. A fact confirmed by statistics. Right now I am part of all those crazy Swedes, with my mind only tuned in on tulips, tulips, tulips.
I see tulips – and only tulips – everywhere. And buy them. And arrange them in different groups depending on color, form, size, state of ripeness.
Sometimes I let the tulips stay in the vase, when the decay is setting in. There is a beauty in the changing of color, in the petals falling off and leaving only the pistils on the stem. 
And of course do crazy things like hanging them upside down outside, with the bulbs still there! It was an experiment. It was winter and freezing cold outside, and I let the tulip with its bulb hang from the bird feeder. That was one
month ago, and it has met wind, snow, ice – and is still alive. Seems like the bud is waiting for spring, because it has not yet started to blossom. So yesterday I bought some company for this courageous flower – six different kinds of tulips, all attached to their bulbs .
And of course I am waiting with eagerness to see the tulips in my “A heart for the world”, showing themselves. But that will take some weeks still, before they are peeking up through the soil in the garden. If you are interested, go to the post called “A heart for the world” and read more about how I made a huge heart flowering bed in the garden.
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?
My parsley was a gold mine last winter. I had covered it with blankets against snow and ice, and whenever I wanted some fresh parsley for cooking, I just went out and looked under the layers of blankets and could pick some. It was really amazing.
When spring came, I soon saw the parsley wanted to go blooming. Then I decided to make an experiment. What do they look like when blooming? I followed the plants developing into flowers. In the middle of the summer I had parsley flowering all over the planting place (see photo).
The flowers of the parsley are very, very small, and they were a gift to all the very small insects. It was sheer pleasure standing near, hearing the buzz in the air and seeing the small ones enjoying their meal 🙂
And no, I did not get any parsley to eat this season. Well, the experiment continued, and by autumn the pollinated flowers had turned into seeds. Some weeks ago I cut off the long stems and put everything to dry on the veranda.
Yesterday I saw the seeds had dried and I carefully cut off the top of the stems, with the “seed flower”. An easy way to get the seeds from the “flower” is to put the whole “seed flower” in a plastic bag. When you have filled the bag you shake, press and rub the content for a few seconds – and all the seeds fall off so you will have a nice little heap in the bottom of the bag. I learned this trick from a Norwegian writer, Annemarta Borgen, and her book “Urtehagen på knatten”.
I got so much parsley seed that I can give it away as gifts, in addition to planting parsley next season. See to that the seeds are dry, when you put them away for the winter. A nice way to store them is to fold your own “envelopes”. That is also a nice package if you want to give away seeds as gifts. Here is how to make the envelopes:
Choose a nice piece of paper, it should be square in size. Fold it in the middle.
Fold the right and left corner into the middle, so that they overlap. 
Then insert one corner into the other, this makes the envelope hold together.
Open up the top angle (which consists of two layers of paper). Now you have an envelope to put the seeds in. Then fold the top angle into a lid. Fold it so that a little part of the top reaches below the bottom of the envelope. 
There you tuck it into the bottom to close the envelope.
And here is your envelope, ready to give away as a gift or to store the seeds for future planting.
I don´t know if the heart called me, or if I called the heart, but two weeks ago I started thinking of building a heart in my garden. There is a dull slope from our veranda and down to the lawn. It´s pointing east and has a lot of sun during spring and summer season – a perfect place for a flowerbed with the shape of a heart. And what would I fill it with? Well, tulips of course, lots and lots of tulips. We Swedes are crazy about tulips, in fact we are one of the largest buyers of tulips when spring season comes. Why then? Well, I believe here in the north of Europe we are so so tired of the winter 
darkness, and when spring peaks out we want colors and colors and colors. Tulips!
I decided to build a heart of tulips. A week ago I bought lots of different sorts of red tulips at a huge garden shop north of Stockholm. Don Quichotte, Cummins, Red Shine, Pacific Pearl, Bastogne, Blue Diamond, And topped with a few black and white as a surprise among the others – Black Hero, Purple Prince and Ice Wonder. What names! They all sound
like some ancient knights, don´t they?
And perhaps they are. The more the heart took form in my head, the more it came to be a symbol of love and empathy. A heart for the world.
So how did I make this unusual flowerbed? I started measuring out the area. With sushi sticks. The size is about six yards high and four yards wide (5 x 3 meters). It took a while before I was satisfied.
The digging started. First I cut the edge of the heart with a spade, continuing with cutting out piece after piece of the lawn inside the heart. It took me nearly eight hours to dig the whole heart. There were a fe
w bigger and smaller stones that had to be coaxed out. It did not seem much, but when I looked at the heap of stones I realized it was.
I don´t know how many loads with the wheelbarrow I drove from the heart and up to the compost. Loads that also emptied the heart of soil, so I needed to fill it with fresh soil. Six big bags of soil from the local store made the heart a cozy place for all the “tulip knights”.
While I was busy planning, digging and filling with soil, our neighbour’s ten year old son helped me with some of the “bling bling”. I wanted to fill out the borders of the heart with pine cones. It looks nice, it makes it easy to see the border and I hope the cones with help stop the soil from being washed away by autumn rain.
Now to the creative and artistic part. I put all the bags of tulips beside each other, just to admire and enjoy the colors of the photos. Also I divided the heart into two parts, a right and a le
ft one with a piece of string between two sushi sticks. Every bag of tulips I shared equally between these parts of the heart, but was not so strict inside the parts, just spread the bulbs out more or less stochastically.
Planting was easy. In the planting store I found this very simple little scoop. You just press it down to the desired depth and
then pull – and all the soil follows, leaving a nice hole to put the bulb in. With the bulb in the hole, one presses the handles together and – whoops! – the soil in the scoop let go, covering the hole. I suppose many of you already know this to
ol, but it was new to me and I was like a child with a new toy, playing down all the bulbs with a smile.
And this is the result! For protection, so the deers will not dig it up in the winter, I will put c
hicken wire over it. Also I am thinking of planting the new sprouts of strawberry I got this season, to make the heart a green bed. Hopefully the tulips will give joy in springtime,
and the new strawberries will give tasteful berries in June and July.
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 betwee
n 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 
fall 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.
Crazy Swedish Gardener 