A lick of paint in June.

Because half of our family comes from Sweden, we decided to add some decorative touches to our porch. In Sweden many old houses have what is known as “snickarglädje”. You could translate it into the Carpenter’s delight. It is seen around windows, porches and doors on many old houses. We choose a simple variation with a wavy edge created with the jigsaw and drilled big round holes. It was very easy to make from some rough sawn 4” by 1” planks. Many buildings in Sweden and other Nordic countries have much more elaborate designs.

It was time to spruce up our door with some new colours and we choose the classic park bench green along with a teal paint. We decorated our newly made Carpenter’s delight in the same colours. A couple of years ago we found two cast iron chairs and a table in a skip and this year we bought a second hand park bench for €20. We painted our finds in the same classic park bench green colour and we are now very happy to be able to sit outside the front door with our morning cup of coffee.

June has been a busy month in the garden and because of the sunny spell at the start of the month and the rain since then a lot of berries are already ripe. The vegetable patch has turned into a mass of green vegetation as you can see in these photos from this morning, before we tackled it armed with a pair of gloves. We have been harvesting spinach, rocket and other green leaves for salads almost every day.  The grass grows very quickly here at this time of year and we got the strimmer out today to clear some paths. We prefer to leave the grass quite long in many places so as not to hurt our many frogs.

Down by our little stream the New Dawn rose has reached half way across the ash arch we created last year. Hopefully it will reach all the way next year.

If you are a returning reader you will know that we take pictures of our main garden circle each month and here are the ones from the end of June. We are happy with all the grasses we bought on sale and planted last year in our east section, as they have really come on nicely. You can see what they looked like shortly after being planted in this post. Now they look very tall and move beautifully in the wind.

East

South

West

North

All in all it has been a great month in the garden and we are hoping next month will be sunny so all our tomatillos, tomatoes and corn plants will get a chance to grow and set fruit.