Christmas came early

Well I have felt super x-massy because we’ve had tonnes of snow lately! From the warmest November in a few hundred years, then suddenly it started snowing and temperature dropped to 6-8 minus °C.
Good and bad for my Christmas event in the gallery. Good because it added such a nice cosy feeling to the weekends and bad because I was outdoors for two weekends and thought I would never be warm again…

By the second weekend we had about 20cm of snow!

Even being frozen through it was a lovely weekend with so many nice people and talks. I had planned to do wetplate drop-in but the shutter froze on my camera and the light was pretty non existent at the time customers came so it will have to be later when the temperature drops.

Greenhouse was the best idea ever

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The greenhouse quite rapidly turned into a jungle. After the Plant and seed exchange day I organised in my gallery I was left with hundreds of tomato plants. It took two waterings a day to keep everything alive, next summer bigger pots and less plants…
My mushroom farm did nothing for a while apart from the odd one growing and spawning which made me nervous so I put all the bags out end of summer and my gosh! They loved it. In two weeks I harvested a few kilos of Oyster mushrooms and Lions mane, dried them and turned into a mushroom powder to add in stews and gravy.
Even with tonnes of tomatoes we have used them up, they are so versatile in soups and sauces. One kind of tomato, Dzalia, got infected with rot as soon as it ripened so I picked all the green ones and made green tomato chutney for the first time, lovely!
Plenty of chillies to, we have a lot in the freezer but used a lot as well.
All in all a success! Now the mushrooms are left with a couple of grape plants and loads of strawberry plants and suddenly it’s a very nice place to hang out in on windy cold days.

Choose what to see

As I was building my greenhouse the rest of the garden was left to grow wild. Now there are seas of nettles, marigold and all kinds of weeds but I don’t care, I am so happy the greenhouse is finished!
The whole family loves it, including the pets. Although it took some time for them to realise there was glass walls…
I have a small table and chairs but there’s only a question of time until the plants take over.
Mainly tomatoes and chillies but also cucumber, homegrown lemon trees and so much else.
My goal was to finish it before the tulips started flowering and I did it, just!

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I hate you so much right now

I’ve wanted a greenhouse since at least 20 years back, now I have one but Oooh how frustrating to put it together…
Ordered it in April last year and it was delivered in October (because of Covid) then the weather turned bad and the ground froze. I built the frame and now finally I’ve done the groundwork! Heavy work though 300 liters of cement plus grit and pebbles, but then thinking well now it’s just to put the glass on! Yeah right, after a lot of Googling and Youtubing I came across all these comments with other frustrated people going insane. The instructions are the worst ever! At least I know now it’s not just me.
Turns out I have to put all these little fiddly rubber linings all over the house, would have been so much easier to do that before I assembled it. Plus there are parts in there not mentioned in the instructions.
At least I’ve had four days out in lovely weather, last week it snowed and today it hit 18 C°!

Easter! Already looking forward to next year

Easter is THE big thing on the Island, better than Christmas and New Year and everything else. There’s the long build up to it with the old tradition on the Island saving and steeling X-mas trees, starting on the 25/12. You can read more about it here The big hunt is on!
This year no one really knew what would happen but everyone knew the bonfire would happen, and it did, big time! Such a great day. I went swimming at ten in the morning, then we had AS(After Swim) for a couple of hours. Cycled over to watch the fire being built, which is incredible, all the precise planning, everyone knows what to do and the kids do a fantastic job carrying all the trees and doing the building. When we left there was a thousand xmas trees and more coming.
In the evening someone let the smallest kid light the fire, it took some time to catch but then amazing!
There is as always a lot of discussions about the tradition, mostly negative(since Fb was invented) but I love it, I would totally be a part of the chase if I was a kid.

New territory

It’s amazing we’ve lived on this island for 11 years and still there are parts to be explored. We took a new turn from my usual swimming place to the harbour following the shore. It wasn’t an easy walk, did a lot of rock climbing but worth it. The rocks where amazing! I so have to do a geology tour or more research into why it’s shaped like it is and the colours. I know the name Hönö comes from an old word naming it after a flat rock(sorry can’t come up with a better translation in English). There are so many signs from the ice age when the ice shaped the land.
Very soon I’ll have to do a re-run with my camera!

Getting somewhere

A whole day in the garden, apart from when it started raining I slept for an hour, then sunshine came again! Finally I feel like the greenhouse is becoming real. It was ordered in April and delivered in October because of Covid and then the weather turned bad and then the soil froze. Only thing I have to do now is to get it levelled,, dig a bit more and to pour the cement and then just put it together…
I also decided to try mushroom growing in the garden. Put fresh chicken droppings, straw, wood and more straw plus the blocks of coffee/Grey oyster and Yellow Oyster(that I had two harvests from) and covered with binbags. Then I posted in a mushroom growing group on Fb and turns out I did everything wrong. Oyster mushrooms apparently don’t take well to chicken manure. So I moved all the straw and mycel to a basket and bucket and hopefully that will be more successful.

Also had a long talk with the neighbours kids(3 and 6). I generally don’t like little kids but these ones are so well behaved and funny. They told me there’s an opening in the fence and I said well I just closed it with my screwdriver. Which apparently made them a bit sad and they told me that they actually really like the hens coming over because they love to scare them back into my garden. But we all agreed on that the hens would probably find a different way. They wish for baby hamsters in their Easter eggs.

Indoors everything is growing like crazy! I will have to expand to more space, my sons room next.

That summer feeling

Starting your day like this…We took a long walk to the next island Öckerö, bought things for the garden and stopped at a café on our way back. The wind was cold but sitting outside sheltered by the rocks and boats, it felt like summer! And my prawn sandwich wasn’t too bad either.
Back home I put more mushroom mycel into substrate and planted most of my seeds. Borrowed a little thing that makes blocks of soil, it was a bit finicky at first but then super efficient. You pack it with soil and press down at a surface, then put seeds intone little indents and cover finely with soil and plastic. Really saved a lot of space and fingers crossed it will soon be warm enough to plant them outside.
My mushrooms are doing great. Any day now I can harvest my second flush of Yellow Oyster and I set some bags with King Oyster and Pioppino. Loving my new hobby!

Creativity waking up

Don’t know what happened last Sunday but I was suddenly on fire. Starting off the morning with Lumen prints outdoors, in good company of the kittens. Lumen is when you put plants or other things on old black&white photographic papers in the sun and then fix them in the darkroom. Sadly they loose the original colour after fixing but I still think the final result is awesome. It’s also simple and you can leave the prints in the garden for hours while doing something else.
Then wet plate photography to make some glass negatives and spent the evening in the darkroom making Lith prints from the negatives.
So good to get into it again! Typically I always do it at same time as the garden wakes up but luckily I can combine the two.

Shrooms!

Loving my new hobby and even though still a beginner, it’s starting to feel like I’m getting the hang of it. Reading a lot about it and asking questions I’ve learnt a lot about what to do and not do, but I sometimes do the opposite if it feels right and so far that’s worked out pretty well.
Today I harvested my brown Oyster mushrooms and noticed the Yellow Oyster started up again for a second time. Also I had totally forgotten about my other bag of Brown oyster that I hid in a cupboard and it’s gone mental!
So lovely meal today, that I could easily have eaten over again now… spaghetti with bacon, parmesan and crispy fried garlicky oyster shrooms. Hopefully the alien bag will fruit and then I’m going to try to make mushroom powder for a first. Apparently it’s really tasty to add to meatballs and burgers and I’m sure loads of other things.