Week six. The garden is starting to look less like post-apocalyptic ruins and more like an actual working vegetable plot. The days are getting sunnier and longer, which makes it much easier to pop out here and there as time allows. You know gardening season has arrived when you’re out at 7.30PM grubbing around in the raised beds and it’s nowhere close to dark yet.

One — The View From Above

Ten beds done. The cleared boxes are slowly gaining on the ones I haven’t gotten to yet, and I’m starting to imagine what it will all look like once they start sprouting. By the end of April, it should look much more orderly. By the end of May, it’ll be unrecognizable. That’s the part I’m here for.

Two — The Willows Are Fluffy

No deeper point here. I liked the way the pussy willows looked against a blue sky. When my son was younger, we’d cut some and decorate them with ribbons and feathers for Easter. Now he’s more interested in hitting the supermarket for those post-holiday markdowns on all the fancy chocolates. And really, big same.

Three — Baby Plum Adoption Program

While clearing the beds, I weeded out a bunch of baby Victoria plums — volunteers that sprouted during the fallow year. I couldn’t quite bring myself to compost them, because Victoria is a prolific cropper and the fruit is genuinely excellent, so they’re getting potted up instead. I’ll probably put them up for adoption on through local social media groups, with the hope that someone might have something fun to swap.

Four — Someone Has Been Eating My Pea Seedlings

I had a suspicion last week, but this week I have evidence: bits of pea stem and root left behind where the seedlings used to be. A crime scene. Forensic gardening.

The suspect list is long. Great tits, blue tits, house sparrows, magpies — they all nest here, they’re all singing loudly from before sunrise, and they’re all in full breeding-season mode. So while it is technically my pea bed, I’m having a hard time mustering real outrage about birds eating tender green sprouts in early April when there’s nothing else around and they need the calories. They’ll pay me back a thousandfold in pest control later in the season.

The plan: pick up a couple more packets next week, re-sow, and put a net over the bed this time. Live and let live, with appropriate countermeasures.

Five — The Allium Experiment

The allium beds are planted, which is a sentence I’m saying with more confidence than I actually feel. I’ve never grown onions from seed before. I also don’t have the patience for indoor seed starting. The lights, the hardening off, the pricking out, the moving trays around for weeks while waiting for spring — none of it appeals to me. So my plan is the lazy version: direct sow into the bed, let them get as big as they manage in one Finnish growing season, and save whatever I get as sets for next year. Full-sized onions in 2027. In theory.

The varieties are a deliberate mix because if you’re going to do something the slow way, you might as well make it interesting. Hamund (yellow storage onion, Swedish heritage variety) from NordGen, Walla Walla (sweet yellow onion, West Coast American heritage variety) and Senshyu Yellow (classic Japanese overwintering yellow onion) from Poppa Dom’s (a farm in Killarney, Ireland, that I hope is still around), and Rosé d’Armorique (French pink heirloom variety from Brittany) from Alsagarden. Four varieties from four different sources — Swedish, American, Japanese, French — which I realize sounds like the setup to a joke about international onion diplomacy, but is actually just what happens when you let yourself buy seeds from too many catalogues over the winter.

Rounding out the second bed: a few rows of Winter Giant 3 leeks from Seedaholic, to stay on theme. (Traditional British overwintering variety, so let’s hope that means they’ll do okay in our climate.)

Six — The Birdhouse Bistro

The feeder. I like this design so much more than the tube-shaped ones we used to have. There’s more surface area for the birds to spread out comfortably, and they like to perch in the middle like it’s a swing while snacking at their leisure. The yellow-and-black guy in the photos is a great tit — our most common visitor after the house sparrows, and a relentless little hustler. The other regular is a great spotted woodpecker who looks comically oversized hanging onto one side, but he’s perfectly happy gorging himself. And really, it’s a bird feeder, he’s a bird, the contract is being honored on both sides.

(That’s a rock-hard two-week-old baguette propped at the base of the tree in the middle photo. It was gone by the next morning. I have no idea who took it, but they probably enjoyed it thoroughly.)

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