Category: House

Today we continued with the gardening and started finally on our fruit planting. We have a long list of things we like and today we started with the berries. We have planted 4 small blueberry bushes, defining the property line with Jim and Joanie just across the sun room. I hope they will catch on, in particular as they do not get too much direct sun. They are supposed to grow as high as 2m, and they should form a solid hedge. We purchased four different types which will allows for plenty of cross pollination. In blueberries a decent fruit harvest depends quite a bit on the cross pollination. Of course it will take a while until we get a decent hedge and who knows when we are going to eat our first blueberries.
The three raspberry bushes we bought were a little more difficult to place. Those guys spread like weed and we wanted them to live in our forest, maybe even defining the forest line a bit and cover the ramp which is mildly visible from the patio. I wanted to put them on the left-hand side right on the tree line, but Ana pointed right at the middle, same line. The big advantage of that spot is of course that there is a big rock which will prevent the raspberries from spreading into the garden. Raspberries fresh from the bush are one of my favorite fruits. I cannot wait for them to carry the first fruit.
Meanwhile, we have also been improving on the living room furniture: we have found a super large coffee table fitting our large sofa. Ana added also a nice seat on the TV side. Both pieces are really breaking the general style of the rest of the living room but in a nice way, we think 🙂

This year spring started with a wonderful weekend. Friday had some beautiful weather in store for us, so beautiful in fact that I decided to leave really early (around 16:00). I spent a number of hours in the garden with the kids jumping around and Ana keeping Blake happy and chilling on our little terrace. This weekend we decided to make a big push in the garden instead of doing excursions to the local beaches. It turned out to be the right decision. We had a wonderful Saturday with temperatures in the high teens and maybe even into the low twenties.
We finished our project to fill the areas around the house with our natural stone from the terrace digging. After filling the north side, where we park the car, we liked it so much that we started considering filling also the south side in between the bushes in front of the sun room.
I also finished filling up the right front part of the garden with a layer of good black dirt and planted grass seeds for a dense lawn. Once I drove by the garden center I was tempted and further encouraged with the kids to buy some vegetables. We bought a broad variety but only planted three types in front of the back window: carrots (Markus’ favorite — he likes the color and if they are cooked he even likes eating them), water melon (Ivan’s favorite — he loves to eat them) and broccoli (Gisele’s favorite — first thing she will eat on any plate). We marked the location on the retaining wall and hope that there is no more frost, otherwise we might not see any of those veggies.
Finally after cleaning up the back of the garden I continued digging our terrace. I established a new and more efficient scheme, in which I will take care of the smaller stones while digging. Instead of storing them in a temporary location I was using them to fill in the houses’ south side. The dirt from the dig is now used to even out the bottom of the terrace right at the houses south side. I increased the wall and the filling goes well so far. I will have to plant a lawn there but that should be fine because the lawn there is terrible. I made quite some progress on Sunday, which was another beautiful day with lots of sun but it was rather chilly. The terrace building has been going very slowly because the ground has become mostly just rocks. On the positive side though I have been finding a lot of rocks which are big enough to build the retaining wall 🙂 . Presently, I am estimating that the terrace will be completed after maybe one but definitively after two more weekends.