mints

I'm thrilled! The mints have survived. That is the mints that our friends in Hampshire gave us when we visited them last summer. The mints traveled to Finland through various places including Guildford, Cambridge and Nottingham and they were still alive when we arrived home more than a week after they had been taken from our friends' garden.

I planted the mints to a very temporary place last summer since I had no herb garden yet. They lived through the summer and outlived all the weeds around them.

This spring I started to look for them. The pineapple mint I could easily find since it looks a little different from the other plants around the place. But I couldn't find the regular mint. I thought it should have been hardier than the pineapple mint but I just couldn't find it so I thought it had died.

Sometimes I sensed the sweet smell of mint in my nose but since I couldn't find anything on the ground I thought I'd been mistaken. Tonight when I started to water the rows I had just seeded I sensed the smell again. And I found the mint, next to the apple tree where I had looked for it before, on my way to the water container. The mint looked superb and very much grown so I don't understand how I can have missed it earlier.

Now the mints are both planted in a better place where they hopefully will grow well. Maybe I should start worrying more about them growing too well...

summer morning

 

a bright summer morning up on the hill behind the house

garden progress

I don’t know if I expected my garden to look more finished in our fourth summer of living in this house. I know some gardens look very finished at this stage but ours doesn’t. Some gardens probably have spent much more money from their owners’ purses than ours has, and have employed professionals planning and planting which ours hasn’t.

I made a garden plan before we moved in but we had practically no time to anything according to the plan until the first summer which was after a little less than a year’s worth of living here. There have been several things slowing down my garden work, one of course the pregnancy and first year of our semi-demanding youngest child. Others reasons include occasional lack of garden enthusiasm although that probably isn’t very significant.

In time of a sudden desperation of never-getting-anything-done it is good to remind myself of the state of this garden four years ago: There was a sandy desert in the middle of weed fields. There was construction rubbish scattered everywhere around the house: pieces of timber, broken tiles, curved rusty nails. The nowadays most used way to the main entrance of house was part of the weed field. There were no garden plants anywhere, just those that grow here naturally, and the latter being dominated by high grass.

Since then we’ve build the way to the main entrance nice and firm and formed many other parts of the plot to their current state. We have laid a stone retaining wall, founded and sown a thick lawn for ball games to be played on it and planted dozens of small bushes to slope parts of the plot. There are crocuses, spring lilies, daffodils and tulips in several parts of the plot. The meads have been taken care of, some of the plants weeded, some moved to a better or more suitable place to grow in.

A huge amount of work has been done every year. My garden plan has changed over the years. Most of all I’ve added to my plan elements based on ideas I’ve gathered by keeping my eyes open whenever going anywhere from the garden of our own. I’ve browsed and read gardening books and magazines in Finnish and in English. I’ve taken pictures of beautiful English gardens on our trips there.

At the moment our garden looks like a Finnish country garden – that is it looks like a garden, not a wild forest. I have still so much to do about it to even partially meet my plans that I dare not to make a full list of things to be done. The-English-garden part of our garden so far only lives in my thoughts and dreams, there are not even lists of plants or illustrated plans of it. But it will be there one day. Until then I’ll just keep digging and weeding and planting and planning.

sunny morning

 

Today I finally managed to get a sunny picture of the view towards the river which is maybe quite far from the lense and not so easily recognisable...

profits at all costs

Go on and sell
formula powder to developing countries
give free samples
You make mothers
who naturally breastfed
believe formula is
superior to their milk
Who cares if a couple of
hundred, thousand or hundred thousand infants
die of dirty water
even though their mothers could have given them
the best and safest food on earth
Sleep tight through the night
profits under your pillow
skeletons of a hundred thousand children under your bed

Through the weekly Finnish blogging event Runotorstai (Poem Thursday) I learnt about Bloggers Unite - blogging for help and their event on May, 15th, to blog about Human Rights. I was inspired to roughly translate my original Runotorstai's poem in English. This is about children's right to breastmilk (bestmilk).

spring rain

 

Spring rain by the birdriver - nature had hard time deciding whether to pour down simply raindrops or something between snow, sleet and hailstones.

living by the birdriver

We have a view of the birdriver nearby. There are fields and a small country road between our house and the river but a view of the river we do have, however distant it may be. The river is very inviting, we are already waiting anxiously for the weather to warm up enough so the children could go swimming there. In summer they swim in the river and in winter they skate on the ice of the ditch wide enough coming from the river towards the fields. In spring the cranes stop by the river among many other birds. Some times in spring the river floods and the water pours on the closest field. A few years back we had such a rainy summer that the river flooded in the middle of the summer and as the result the children went rowing on their grandparents' barley field.

The river is very dear to me because I've lived by it since my early childhood excluding only a few years of studying elsewhere or living abroad. The riverside is a place where to find a sanctuary, to let the eyes rest on the surface of the slowly flowing water and to let the thoughts flow with it.