Last year, I was so busy with learning Swedish, trying to accustom to the culture and my surroundings, integrating myself in the local society and finding a job; all while also still being in nature, photographing and learning what to do and not to do around here, that I was a bit sloppy regarding my garden.

I only picked weeds about circa halfway around the house and even though I did buy a greenhouse and put some boxes with soil in it, it was rather sparcely taken care of and grew very wild very quickly while not offering me much to harvest except for some pumpkins in the autumn.

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So for this year, I obviously learned some things and made improvments. I picked weeds as early as the weather allowed me to, before the majority of mosquitoes, black flies and horseflies would hatch, so that I would make it all the way around the house. And I not only did that, but also managed to take away weeds and grass that had started to grow in my flower beds without getting eaten alive, so yay me! 🙂 Here some examples of what that looked like:

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Then I also made some improvements in the greenhouse. Firstly, I didn’t plant 1.000 seeds in one pot before putting them out, but instead had them more spaced out from the beginning. This left me with incredible amounts of sallad – who would have known that it would grow like crazy once it had space? I certainly didn’t!

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I also bought some stone plates for the ground, because even though it’s totally okay and managable to cut the grass at first, as soon as the pumpkin really starts growing, it ecpands it’s arms like an octopus and it’s impossible to keep cutting the grass… So now there are stone plates in place that will keep the growing grass at a minimum while the pumpkin can grow. I will need to cut the arms of the pumpkin though as soon as I have some growing fruits, because this year I have several plants and they are already starting to take up a lot of space in the greenhouse and will soon enough expand over the sallad, which I will try to stop from happening. 🙂

Those of you, that follow me on instagram, have maybe seen that I posted quite a bit in my stories the other day, when I organized the tomato plants that are also expanding all over the place and showed some insights into my garden. For those of you that missed it, here we go:

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On the evening of the same day, the gardening fever got me again and I decided to plant a row of roses by the side of my house, as I had several rose bushes spread at different parts of the garden and in my house and I thought it would be so nice to have a row of different kinds of roses that would grow outside 🙂

Why am I putting so much effort and time into showing how much I am doing in my garden, you might start to wonder. The answer is simple: I am incredibly happy and proud over how well I am doing. I am ususally not good with plants and manage to kill any plant that gets near me in the shortest amount of time. And I am so tremendously surprised and proud of myself that I manage to keep my garden nice and pretty and somewhat organized and thriving. Me – the same person that got an ivy plant and forgot about it for about halv a year and then found it again all brown only a few years ago.

Seeing this progress gives me so much fulfillment and motivation to keep it up, so keep your fingers crossed that I will be able to! 🙂

Here is also a little video of my greenhouse that I made the other day when I was going at it: