So much has happened since I returned from the hiking trip with my husband’s family. Let’s make some elderflower syrup while I catch up up a bit. We’d only been gone a few days but grass had taken over everywhere. Sunflowers urgently needed to go into the ground, so I prepared beds for them. I also made a whole lot of elderflower syrup.
After a week on vacation, I was eager to get back to the garden but one of the wettest rainstorms we’d ever experienced kept us inside. During a weather break, I went to check on everything in the garden. This is essentially another May garden tour, just after the vacation.
At the end of May, we went on a hiking trip with my husband’s family to the Kleinwalsertal in Austria.
We never go on vacation. We prefer to stay home–or move to a new place. 25 hours of driving. 8 people. Thousands of liters of rain. 3 days of hiking. I’m not sure it’s in balance. I’d rather move again.
A year ago, I adopted neglected land to restore and enjoy while we live in an apartment nearby. So much has happened since.
I restored the garden house–well, mostly. We cleaned up endless amounts of trash and cut free trees and paths. We also added a second plot. Even more has happened there. But let’s go back to the beginning.
Leaving my new garden for a few days at the beginning of the planting season made me nervous. For weeks, I’d planned and prepared. I was ready–at least the garden was. Now it was time to hand over the garden. I did a final tour of the land before we left.
Things take more time with a splint on one hand. And with only six days until my vacation, time was short. I made the best of the last days to stay on top of weeds, free up some strawberry plants, and get the last seedlings into the ground.
When I got a chance to harvest a lot of free rhubarb, I ignored both my injury and the vacation preparations to make a rhubarb BBQ sauce, some rhubarb syrup, and a sweet treat. While I share it all, I ramble on about the myth of the Tragedy of the Commons.
Everything takes long with one hand in a splint. I have to adapt routine tasks, and rescuing the seedling that got neglected after the injury was a lot less easy than it would be with two functioning hands. But I adjust and manage.
I got injured in the garden. While digging the final potato beds and pumping water around the plot, I take a careless step and fall into a rain barrel. Don’t worry, there is no accident footage. I only share the time leading up to the accident and tell you how I got injured.
The gap between my food forest and growing plot is tiny. When the golden dead nettles finish blooming, this is supposed to be a path. To get the cart from one plot to the other, I have to remove part of the very old fence.The old fence itself is no problem to remove. But there is a barrier dug in at the bottom.