Blog revival

Summer 2010 was wet. Very wet. This blog suffered badly. Summer 2011 was wet. Even more wet. Wettest on record. So I decided to revive this blog.

Summer is back

Long time, no blog! This summer has actually been great for the garden. New countertop installed in the kitchen, cherry tree producing a few more cherries (closer to 50 than 5 this year), raspberries doing well (still all yellow) and loads of redcurrants just waiting for some use. Last year I tried making apple jelly for the first time. Ended up as apple syrup, more or less. Probably too ripe apples, I guess. Today I made redcurrant jelly. Instant success! Can't wait to try it on toast tomorrow.

Home Improvement

Couple of seasons of amateur handymaning in the cottage has made us adventurous. For a while we have been planning to redo our bathroom. This autumn we started the project and decided to do a tiny bit of the work ourselves.

Plumbers, carpenters and electricians did the important bits. Our task was small, paint half a wall and the ceiling. As the project progressed, our bit grew a bit and now include the doors. Our bathroom is now easily the most modern and up to date we have. But it looks almost like a 1930's bathroom.

Finding the bits and pieces for our perfect bathroom was not easy, but we are very happy with the result. The bath tub with labrador feet is from Gustavsberg. The basin is Imperial Bathrooms Astoria cloak basin with pedestal. The bath and basin mixers are from Damixa's Tradition series. The wall hung toilet is from Duravit 1930's series and the flusher Grohe Skate. We have a heated towel rail from Hafa and Eline found the shelf thingy with candle stand and champagne holder in the tub in Berlin, Germany. The mirror is from Skeidar and the mirror lifghts from Lampemagasinet.

The bathroom is rather small (1.5 x 2.5 meter) getting good overview pictures was not easy. Borrowing a full format digital SLR with 17mm lens did the trick.

End of season

Winter is here. The cottage is closed down for the season. The garden is ready for winter. We tried staying in the cottage for a while this autumn while our apartment was being decorated. Nice and quiet, but you really feel how it is to live in a house without insulation. Our little bedrom is insulated and would keep around 15C. But the main room would be just 2-3 degrees warmer than outside. Breakfast in 10C is rather cold. As a final project, I have changed the countertops in the cottage kitchen. Available space is doubled and it looks really nice. Of course the new kitchen sink is bigger so I have to move the hot water tank. Something to do for spring!

This years failures and lessons learnt

Of course I want all things in the garden to thrive and give oodles of berries or fruits or whatever. But this year has had its share of failures.

First of all the tomatoes. They sprouted well. Grew into nice tomato plants, some flowered and one started to bear tomatoes sort of early. The problem is that even our best bush still has only green tomatoes. And the summer is rapidly coming to an end here, followed by a rather chilly autumn. There may still be a couple of weeks of sunshine and ok temperature. Keeping my fingers crossed. Lesson learnt: Do not expect seeds taken from tomatoes from the supermarket to thrive in Norway!

Next is the chillies. Started out promising. But now (after two months!) they look puny. No flowers, not much going on. Again: Norway may not be the best place for this.

Same goes for paprikas. Seeds from vegetables from the store. No big success.

Not sure why the cucumbers are looking gloomy. They have a nice, sunny, fertile, sheltered spot... but are so far really really small.

Perhaps the biggest failure is the raspberries. We cleaned up the patch thorougly, creating nice ordered rows of plants. Since we had plenty of plants to start with, we picked the healthies to keep. For some strange reason, we managed to only keep yellow berry ones. Not a read raspberry in sight this year. The biggest mistake, however, may have been putting a protective sheat over the patch.

First of all, the sheet prevents many of next years stems to grow. We should have thought of that. Secondly, the sheet helps the soil retain moisture, preventing the patch from drying. Big big mistake this year. With this years rain, it may have helped drown many of the plants. Luckily, we have a bunch of extremely healthy plants leftover by the compost bins.

Another type of failure affected the cherries. The tree is still young, but this year it produced a fair number of cherries. I eagerly watched them grow, waiting impatiently for them to turn red. It almost never happened. Before I got around to putting a net over the little tree, most of the berries were eaten by magpies. The two berries I managed to save tasted lovely, though.

Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain

This summer has had a common theme. Rain. Lots of it, long periodes of it, plenty of days. Most of the time I don't mind, but after a week of rain everything feels a little soggy.

But the rain and the heat has some advantages. Everything is extremely lush and green. My sweet peas are 2,5m talls (and growing), the sunflowers are huge. Tomatoes and grapes seem to be lacking heat, though.

Sitting inside one day, I spottet this friendly leaf gently waving in the rain outside.

Harvest dinner

A fantastic perk of having a garden is the ability to grow things. This summer we have enjoyed a host of berries. Strawberries ripened first, closely followed by raspberries. The cherry harvest was small but good for such a young tree. Next year will be even better. The blueberries are just ripening and red and blackcurrants are ready to enjoy. Soon we can start picking apples and there may even be plums.

An absolute favourite for me is harvesting things for dinner. Today we harvested the first potatoes for a lovely dinner with wild lamb from the west coast. It was really just a test to see how they turned out. They tasted lovely and bodes well for the rest of the patch.

This year we planted seeds for colorful carrots. And today was the first harvest. One yellow, one red and the usual carroty orange. They tasted great and I was rather surprised that the dark red carrot was actually orange insde!

I almost forgot to mention that we had tiramisu for dessert. No local ingredients involved.