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

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

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

Nordic gardens – a book and everyday reality

A while back we came upon a book tip. It was Paddy Tobin who did a review on his wonderful garden blog: https://anirishgardener.wordpress.com/2021/03/04/new-nordic-gardens-anneke-zetterman/. Naturally we bought the book – since we’re living in a Nordic garden that just seemed like common sense. Now our garden – the Bubble Garden – has a story. Most garden’s

Garden design – what’s been planted in the new front garden?

So, a little update on the current major garden design project we’ve got going. It’s been a slow process this past month – we’ve had so much to do with maintenance in the rest of the garden. But we have planted the front garden – most of it – and this is a brief update

Garden design – building a home for the Bubble Garden chicken

So the four year old is planning on naming his chicken ‘Marshmallow’. This is a huge improvement, since for weeks he was dead set on ‘Tom Holland’ – a result of his oldest sister’s obsession with Marvel’s Spiderman. To say she’s relieved that he’s given that name up is an understatement. We’re going to have

Garden design in the heat, tulip madness, and vegetable mishaps

The cold part of spring is over, and the warmth is here. It’s a division we’ve got specific words for here in Scania – ‘kallvåren’ literally translates to ‘cold spring’ and ‘varmvåren’ to warm spring. ‘Varmvåren är här’ – the warm part of spring has arrived. And today it did so with abrupt intensity, it

Garden design – new garden slowly emerging

It’s slowly coming together in the front garden. We’ve made one change in our plan. Or another, is perhaps the more honest description. We said we’d plant annuals in the ‘hedge-lines’ this year, to be replaced by boxwood next season. But we had a change of heart. And now there’s a hedge of Lavender (L.

Garden design – planting in the front garden

So right now the front garden looks like a mad chessboard. Our nine-year old politely said ‘Well, stuff normally don’t look good while you’re building them.’ And the thirteen-year old pointed out, rather dryly, that – ‘It’s going to be an obstacle course getting to the trampoline’. The four-year old meanwhile is just loving it,