There is again a dead animal under the fold at the end of the article, although this time I am not to be blamed for its death.

The spring officially begun and hopefully, this is the last time we switch from astronomical time to summer time. I hope that decision lasts and I won’t have to deal with that nonsense for the rest of my life. Another sign of real spring beginning is that the narcissi started to blossom. I cut a few for my mother and put them in a vase like every year.

Warmer weather spurned me to start working on the strawberries. The raised strawberry bed needed a major overhaul. You have seen it before. For an ideal harvest, I would just pick off some of the excessive plants but that was not possible – the bed was starting to collapse in on itself and the strawberries had nowhere to grow. One reason for that was a loss of organic material due to decomposition – I used substrate rich in organic material to fill the bed originally and that has lost a lot of volume over the years. The second reason was rodents, who dug up holes under the bricks and caused them to tilt inwards. So I dug out all the material and I put some aluminum slabs under the bricks to keep them steady even if a mouse digs under them.

I filled the raised bed with fresh substrate, containing less organic material and more natural soil from my garden. Then I planted back an adequate amount of strawberries and I still had a full bucket left over. With that, I started a new circa 1×4 m bed near my greenhouse and I planted about 12 plants near each of the three freshly planted fruit trees. That way I will have an incentive to water them and I should get some use out of that piece of land even before the fruit trees start to actually bear fruit. In my typical fashion, I forgot to take pictures of any of that.

Just as I was finishing, the weather forecast that the Antarctic vortex is sending cold air our way and the temperatures will plunge below freezing again for two days. So I watered the beds and I covered them with reed stalks to insulate them. Two days of dark will not harm the plants, they will certainly do less harm than frost would.

Here you see on the left the stump of my late apple tree. The stump might sprout, but it also might be completely dead. We shall see. The huge bird’s nest in the middle is the mound made from moss in which I planted two blueberry plants and on which strawberries propagated spontaneously. I only thinned out those strawberries and covered them with reedstalks too. On the right is then the raised strawberry bed and the first stages of my sewage cleaning facility.

I divided my small field into seven vegetable patches by digging ca 25 cm trenches as walkways between them. The patch adjacent to the greenhouse is the one that I planted with strawberries and then too covered with reeds.

Theoretically, I did not need to dig the trenches this deep but I prefer to do it. I get slightly deeper beds that way and need to bend slightly less when working on them afterward and I am not needlessly compacting good fertile soil with my heavy boots. It took me a whole day since my back was not entirely fine and I also had to do more work. As you can see, on the right the trenches go apparently into the lawn. That is not the case, it is the other way around – the lawn grass is encroaching onto the vegetable patches. That was always a problem, therefore about ten years ago I delineated the vegetable patches with concrete grit paving stones. They are completely hidden by the grass and they cannot stop it from going into the beds, but they do provide a hard boundary to which I can work back. Which I could not do with the plow, unfortunately. I had to do that manually, with a pitchfork and spade and a lot of elbow grease. Now all the beds are clean and delineated, I only need to wait until the frost spell is over and I can break up the lumps with an electric hoe and flatten them. After that I can start planting – I will start with onions and carrots and in whatever space is left I will plant beans and peas.

When digging the grass out of the patches, I found this fellow underground. I did not kill it, but I did not put any effort into saving it either. It is technically a pest but they never emerged in my garden in numbers big enough for me to notice them at all. Although there is occasional news about them emerging en masse in warmer regions and decimating fruit trees. With global warming, this could potentially happen here too, I guess. It is something to watch out for as the weather gets warmer. I also found two or three of their grubs but I did not take pictures of those.

And lastly again one dead animal. It is not all pink and cozy in the garden.

I found this unfortunate fellow in the garden a few days back. I left him lying there and the next day I could not find him anymore – I thought something must have eaten him. Two days after that, I found him again near the pile of moss that I raked out of my lawn. After that, I tossed him into the compost pile to finish the circle of life.

I do occasionally find dead animals in my garden every year, sometimes whole, sometimes just their remains – clumps of feathers, pellets regurgitated by kestrels, etc.  I even found a gnawed deer leg last year, which was definitively brought in by a fox. But the most likely culprit for the death of this one is a cat. Here is one interesting thing – cats will occasionally kill shrews or moles, but for whatever reason, they do not eat them afterward. When we had cats, I found dead moles or shrews just lying in the grass more often, now it only happens when someone else’s cat wanders by and manages to intercept one. And since this one was lying around for several days and was apparently picked up and moved a few dozen meters without being damaged in any visible way, others do not find moles tasty either. (Another interesting thing – shrews will eat dead shrews or mice). I was thinking about preparing its skull, but I could not be arsed. The weather is still too cold for ants doing the work for me.