Too much heat? How we managed to seriously overproduce chili

So yeah. We built a new front garden. And this year we decided to start pre-cultivation of our vegetables really really early. And those two facts somehow combined into chili madness. Thing is, Sweden isn’t really ‘chili country’. Wrong climate zone and all. And yet we’ve grown copious amounts of chili outdoors this season. This

Wild mushrooms, a new house for the chicken and harvest big and small

We’re happy autumn is here. It’s a good time of year in these parts. School is back on after nine weeks of vacation, the forests are full of mushrooms and harvest is everywhere. Evenings grow dark and mornings aren’t unbearably sunny any longer. In Scandinavia summer nights only give you a few precious hours of

Summer vegetables, waterlilies, butterflies and birds

The Bubble Garden is too generous for words right now. And that’s a good thing. Since we don’t have many words. We’re tiredly stumbling through one of those times when the one thing we seem to be repeating is ‘thank god for the garden, if we hadn’t had it I don’t know how we’d have

Wildlife garden – building nest boxes for swifts

This post will teach you how to attract breeding common swifts to your garden. It matters, in particular in Sweden where swifts are in rapid decline. They are magical. And it’s not all that hard to help them. We’re complete nerds, anyone who knows us would agree. We’re both field biologists and evolutionary biologists and

Kitchen garden – harvest and rain (finally)

To our relief the drought we’ve had for well over a month just came to an end with two consecutive days of rain. We get a lot of vegetables and fruit already, but we have had to sustain it by a lot of watering, more than we’d like. It’s not just hard work – it

Designing the front garden – something out of nothing, and six chickens

The new front garden is finished. As finished as anything ever is in the Bubble Garden that is. Work in the garden is our therapy after all, the way we live trough our tragedies. We need to work in it, it must be ever changing to heal us from the drumbeat of angst. Today was

Garden design – top five plants right now

You don’t need a garden to enjoy flowers this time of year. The landscape around the Bubble Garden is in full bloom now, to the point where it’s overwhelming. Midsummer is flower mania. Midsommar, in case you didn’t know, is the largest holiday in Sweden, and takes place this week every year. It is a

Kitchen garden – summer harvest of broccoli

We’ve done well with the broccoli this year, after a disastrous first try last year – where despite trying hard we didn’t get to harvest a single one. We were too late, they only produced leaves – and we had a huge issue with cabbage butterflies. This year we sowed them indoors in early March

Wildlife garden – how to hatch Small Tortoiseshell butterflies.

We raise butterflies every year – and the first species tends to be the Small Tortoiseshells (Swedish: nässelfjäril). You can find larvae from this species fairly early on in the season, and this year we found them on stinging nettles that we had deliberately left growing in the edge of our garden towards the field

Garden design – control, not so much

When it comes to gardening we’re no more than competent amateurs. Ecosystems is our real expertise – but a PhD in biology teaches you plenty of how to study existing environments, and very little about how to create new ecosystems from the ground up. Which is what gardening is. You get a piece of land