Last week I did a pre-season walkabout of the garden in the snow. This week, the snow is gone, the ground is thawing, and I have dirt under my fingernails for the first time in two years. Things are moving fast.
One — The Pea Beds: First Planting of 2026
These are the first intentional seeds to go into this garden since 2024. Two hundred and seventy-four grams of homegrown mixed peas, a mishmash of Fruhe Heinrich, Kelvedon Wonder, Meteor, and Shiraz, saved from plants that have proven themselves in our weather. I pressed every single one into the soil by hand, going over the whole surface with my palms, tucking them in. It felt like more than sowing. It felt like an apology and a promise rolled into one grubby afternoon.
Seeing those two beds of pristine dark earth smack in the middle of all the faded winter browns is such a good feeling, and I know that soon more of them will start appearing like a checkerboard. The comeback year is officially in the ground.
Two — Survivor Thymes
The orange thyme (the scraggly little thing in the foreground) is pushing new green growth through the wreckage of last year’s dead stems, and the lemon thyme (the much larger and more enthusiastic mound in the background) is doing the same. I didn’t protect them. I didn’t mulch them. I basically plopped them into the ground two years ago and forgot about them and they responded by surviving a Finnish winter on pure spite. The little white labels are still there too, which is more than I can say for most of my plant markers.
Perennial herbs don’t need your attention. They just need you to get out of the way.
Three — Budding Lilac
Fat buds on the lilac, right in front of the house. This is the part of Finnish spring that’s all anticipation — everything visibly preparing, nothing quite there yet. You can see what’s coming, you just have to wait for it. (The blue and white house in the background is looking rather dignified in the grey light, which is more than I can say for the garden beds right now.)
Four — Immortal Bergenias
The bergenias are doing what bergenias always do, looking absolutely battered and being absolutely fine. I did not plant these things, they’re just what Finns put in places where nothing else wants to grow. Those paddle-shaped leaves have been lying flat under snow and ice and leaf litter since November, and here they are, already green, already photosynthesising, already making me feel guilty for wanting to clear them out to make room for prettier plants when they’re just so damned dependable. We’re still in negotiations, I might give them their own corner just out of grudging respect.
Five — The Zombie Apple
This is our White Transparent apple. She’s old — been on the property since the 1950s, when the original owners planted the orchard. She’s gnarly, lichen-covered, half-wrenched out of the ground by decades of weather, and multiple branches are dead. She also appears to be budding on the ones that aren’t.
I’m not ready to have her taken down. She still fruits. The deer eat the windfalls. And there’s something about a tree that’s been here more than seventy years that earns the right to look however she wants.
Six — The Circle of Life Beds
And now for something completely different.
These beds at the far end of the garden are currently serving as a buffet. Last week, I cleared out twelve years’ worth of frozen surplus from the cellar: things that had been down there since my son was born, things that had lost the will to be food. Then I spread it all out here. The pregnant doe who crosses the property every morning has been picking through it. So has the fox family behind the woodpile. The hares. The squirrels probably. The magpies. (The magpies are the most brazen about it.)
Whatever the wildlife doesn’t take will break down into the soil and feed whatever I plant here later. These beds usually house summer crops, so it’ll be two months decomposed by the time I start working in them. The freezer graveyard becomes the 2026 nutrient base. Nothing wasted. Everything cycles. Even the things you forgot about from 2014.
It’s still early. The garden is still mostly brown and bare and unphotogenic. But peas are in the ground, the perennials are waking up, and the wildlife is well fed. That’ll do for week two.
Thanks for visiting — see what the other SoSers are up to over at Jim’s page!
11 responses to “Six on Saturday | 14th March 2026”
I like the recycling of forgotten freezer food.
Thank you! It felt very satisfying to finally put all that forgotten food to good use. It’s nice to someone is eating it, despite my forgetfulness, and the wildlife doesn’t complain about the quality. Unlike certain family members who give the stinkeye over a little burnt toast…
How wonderful to see the freshly prepared beds! It’s a nice time of year when everything is starting to sprout! I also really like the idea of your buffet bed – we will probably do something like that, especially as our new garden’s soil really needs some fresh compost.
Thank you! The buffet beds are honestly my favorite kind of lazy gardening — it costs nothing, the wildlife does the cleanup, and the soil gets fed. Once it starts to break down a bit more, I’ll just toss some of the dry stuff I’m currently weeding out on top, cover it all with a layer of newspaper and it becomes standard sheet composting. I hope it works well for your new garden as well! Fresh compost makes everything better, honestly. I can’t wait to see how much my piles managed to produce once it’s warm enough for me to go dig in them.
Oh my goodness–I love your philosophy about gardening, recycling, and renewal. Lovely. Congratulations on the return to dirty fingernails. Isn’t it a wonderful thing? Best wishes for a fun, productive gardening season!
Thank you, Beth! It really is — I didn’t realize how much I’d missed the simple act of getting my hands into soil until I was out there doing it. Well, actually, my hands were able to sink into half of it, some big chunks in the middle of the bag were still frozen solid so I also got the bonus cathartic experience of hacking away at it with my spade at full strength for a good few minutes… Here’s to a good season for both of us!
It is so interesting to hear how you garden in a climate so different from mine here. Ours is so benign it tempts me to keep trying out new things to see if they survive; I have the luxury of a huge palette of possibilities. You have a relatively limited palette and climate imposed restraints and I would barely know where to start. Yet I get the sense that as gardeners we very much have something in common. Like the two hundred and seventy four grams of peas; you weighed them and considered it worth mentioning the weight; exactly the sort of thing I’d do.
Thank you, Jim! I have to admit, gardening here feels a bit like playing a game you thought you knew, only to find that it got set to hard mode. The kind with no backup saves and instant death with one wrong jump. The palette is narrower but it makes you pay more attention to what actually works. And OF COURSE, I absolutely weighed the peas. How else am I supposed to know if I’m saving enough from year to year? We need the data, even when the data is completely useless.
This is so good, I must find time to go back and read some older posts. From the beginning, if I can really find the time. I’m retired but it doesn’t seem to help.
I am going to swipe, or more politely borrow, your layout of the number and name of item, then the photo, then the description. I only recently started sixing, and your layout is better than what I came up with.
Oh gosh, that’s so nice of you to say, thanks! And I totally hear you on that one — no matter how much free time you think you have, there’s always something else that needs doing. Please do poke around the archives, though fair warning that it’s a bit of a time capsule in there from when this was purely a garden blog. Also, please borrow (swipe swipe swipe) away, I’d be honored! That’s exactly how I learned my formatting too, by seeing what worked on other people’s blogs and playing around with it. I’ll come over and have a peek soon too 😊
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