This is what happens if you don't realise that this kind of flower (Bleiwurz) is not too resistant against frost:



I can't remember seeing them freeze spectacularly like this in autumn, so possibly it was just the time of year. They'll recover, though, and they still have some time to do so until they are scheduled to bloom.

I did take care to cover the fig for the last few nights, to protect them against the Ice Saints. Which is very important, because:



Figs!

There's also the first tomatoes hanging around in the winter garden. The plant is from last year, which explains why it's already working on fruit:



I managed to get another tomato plant through the winter as well, but since it didn't really get going, I finally threw it out. This one, though... definitely a keeper, if it will keep.



I have also finally done what I've been thinking about for years now: Try and raise some passionflower plants. They have beautiful flowers, and I find the fruit quite tasty. Our supermarket happened to have some purple passionfruit... so now I'm waiting for the seeds to germinate. Which can take a few weeks, according to the internet. We'll see!

There's been a debate for years now about whether to feed birds year-round, or not. I've heard pros and cons for that, but never followed the debate really closely, as we're usually not feeding the birds (our neighbours upstairs and next door do that in winter, and I figured that would be enough).

Yesterday, though, I stumbled across a post on my Facebook feed about the dangers of feeding birds with the wrong feed in spring and summer - as that will actually kill their young. If you read German, you can read the full explanation here. For those of you not reading German, here's the short rundown:

Feeding birds during summer, especially in areas where they have little natural feed, is generally a good thing. But it has to be the right feed, else it will cause more harm than help. Suet-based feeds and fatty kernels are for winter feeding only; in summer, you should only feed small seeds from grass and wild flowers that also occur naturally in the area you live in. Another thing suitable for summer feeding is fresh or freshly killed insects. Never feed dried insects, as their salt content is too high for both adult and young birds.

One of the common statements is that the feed offered at feeding stations will only be consumed by the adult birds, who will feed "proper" things, such as insects, to their offspring. This is, unfortunately, not the case. The adults will also feed their young with the fatty seeds or suet-based feeds which are so easy to get from the feeding station. The small chicks cannot digest these foods; they block their intestines, and the chicks die over the course of several days with severe colics and constipation. (The German article linked to above also includes pictures, if you'd like to see what this looks like. Scroll down the page. Not for the faint of heart.) If they do survive, they often suffer misformations due to the malnutrition (too much fat, too little protein) from the inappropriate food. (Even winter feeding with fat food only can have negative consequences, as this study shows.)

So if you feed birds in your place - please take care to feed appropriate things only. The best way to support wild birds in your area is creating an environment where they find enough spaces to hide, build their nests, and where there are plants teeming with insect life so they can catch enough food for themselves and their brood. (Lawns are overrated anyways - go for a wild flower meadow instead. Not only will that be much more colourful, it will also save you all the work of lawn mowing...)

This year will definitely be a year of more gardening than usual, due to the reasons you all know. In an attempt to a) have more variety in plants and b) more order in the seed stash, I've put all of the old seeds of some kinds into earth.

As expected, some of them just did not do anything at all - they were too old. I was especially sad about that being the case with my chili seeds, as my plants have all died, and I was so fond of the colours of the Ecuador Purple.

A week or so ago, I remembered that I have some home-grown dried and roughly ground-up chili in my spice rack, so I spiced up a flower pot... and lo and behold, these have actually sprouted:



It will take a while to find out whether they are Ecuador Purple, or the other kind (a no-name random one). I'll happily do that, however.

Some of the old seeds, it turns out now, only took a lot longer to germinate. I'm sort of flooded with tomatoes, accordingly... the day will come when I'll try to get some of them a new home. Soon-ish.

In other sprouting news, the willows are now really working hard at growing back:



There's daisies blooming:



and, of course, the neighbour's bees are still getting their free drinks here. (He's promised to pay for them with honey at the end of the year...)



(All hail the good macro lens on the camera...)

It's time for some garden pics for you - the sun is shining, it's been pretty warm the last few days, and that does show:



The first tulips are blooming now, as is the peach tree, the plum tree, and the morello cherry. You can see the latter in the background here:



The little one in the foreground is a dwarf apple tree (an old variety, called Goldparmäne) that was not overly happy on our friend's balcony, and consequently was allowed to go to a new home in our garden. It is showing small leaf tips now, and we hope very much it will like its new spot, and make apples for us.

The willow fence is also working on its new shoots - it always takes a little longer for the fully pruned willow to sprout again from the latent buds. On the picture, you can see how much difference in thickness there is between individual stems - and you can also see that the lower arches are troublesome, as they tend to die off at about halfway or three quarters up, and so we're re-bending a lot of last year's shoots to close the arches every spring (that's the slim, bright green ones).

One thing I learned this year: Nasturtiums are not necessarily an annual plant - one that I had in a pot in the wintergarden is now already blooming happily, and I've been enjoying the flowers a lot.



You could see some more of the flowers in the picture if they weren't so damn tasty! I've been eating quite a few already, and I am now hoping for many, many more.

In case you've never had the experience of eating a nasturtium flower, it's hard to describe. You have both the flowery sweetness of the flower (thank you, Captain Obvious) and the sharp, mustard-like tang of the leaves, but without the leafy texture. That is just the flower and the crunchy crispness of the flower stem, with the tangy juice coming out. If you have the chance, try it.

I've not been as successful with some other gardening things - my Ecuador Purple chili seeds all have lost their will to sprout, so I need to find somewhere to get new seeds. I've also been unlucky with the last Angel Beans, sadly. Does this mean I have an excuse to do some seed-shopping? Hmm....

The cat is lying on the desk, purring quietly and looking outside, where it's cold, but sunny. I've been working on restocking some things (making new spinning packs, for instance); my mail backlog is the usual size, there's a paper to proofread and amend.

It's normal work, and life feels very normal at times, accordingly. And then some weird thing happens - like having to check whether postal service still runs to a specific place. Or the postie delivering something and asking me whether I want to sign or not (I didn't, for us both; he took a photo instead, documenting the delivery. Smart method.)

Sometimes it feels like this is all just a dream. All too unreal to be real - though, of course, it is. Still, the sun is shining, there's bees outside, the peach tree is starting to bloom... and there's a list of shops in town that are now offering delivery of goods, as the shops have to stay closed during the lockdown.

Now... to ensure that these businesses survive, it is of course good to shop with them, right? Basically, that is sort of a civic duty at this point in time. Probably you have a local shop in need in your town as well, struggling for business survival now. So this is the perfect excuse, actually, to buy hand-made chocolates from a fancy chocolate shop. Or some glorious yarn from a knitting store. Or from a small hand dyer. Get some new plants for the garden from a local nursery. Or splurge on something other nice... because you can, because it will make you happy in these times, and it will help the small business. (If you need something, consider not ordering online via one of the big players, especially the big A, which is still treating their workers very badly. Instead, try looking for a local shop in dire need of support and business right now. Who knows - you might discover a new favourite shop?)

I'm writing all this just in case you needed an excuse to get yourself something pretty, of course. And now I'll go call that local nursery. We need fertiliser... and a plant or two.

Very obviously, spring has not only come for the plants and flowers outside, but also for aphids. (Oh, and the cat brought home the first tick of the year yesterday.)

I have a few cooking herbs in pots in the winter garden, and they get used in the kitchen whenever I feel like it, or sometimes they even inspire me to make something that uses a lot of a specific herb (usually when that has grown a lot, and needs pruning or cutting back, and I don't want to throw all of the cutoff parts away). Among those are rosemary, thyme, laurel, marjoram, parsley... and chives.

The latter have been struggling for a while and not grown very enthusiastically, and so I left them alone over the winter - and now I discovered that they had gotten a new fan club, consisting of a metric ton of black aphids. Unfortunately, I didn't take a photo, but basically the green bits of the chives were almost solid black with the little suckers... before I got them.

With the vacuum cleaner.

I have a new aphid-removal method, folks.

That was sort of a random-half-by-accident thing - I was vacuuming up bits of dirt and small dry leaves on the floor, and by accident a few of the chives stalks got pulled into the tube, and lo and behold - all the aphids from there were magically removed. So, obviously, I treated the rest of the chives the same. Instant reduction of the aphid colony by a lot!

Obviously, this method is best suited for robust plants with small leaves, so you can have them sucked into the front part of the vacuum cleaner's suction tube. Chives and marjoram (which also had a few of the guys), my experience says, are perfect for this and will take it like little troopers. This loving modern tech treatment, depending on the suction force you use, might also damage some of the leaves, but hey, there's always something.

The trick to it, as I have found out by now, is to do a few repeat aphid-sucking-sessions: There will probably be aphids on the top of the soil as well, which won't get sucked away, and some of them will just escape your loving ministrations. These, however, will later tend to take up the premium spots that were previously taken by their luckier (or, in this case, unluckier) colleagues and sit nicely on the leaves or stalks a few hours later. Premium spots indeed... to be spirited away by the magic of the suction tube. Repeat as necessary. Have aphid-free plants.

(If you are now thinking of aphid problems on plants outside in your garden, and extension cords to get your vacuum cleaner where it needs to be: We once vacuumed our lawn to remove lots and lots of anti-slip-on-ice gravel that had gotten there together with snow from the walkway during the course of the winter. The easiest way to get rid of those, in our reasoning, was to vacuum them away (it's an older, bag-free vacuum cleaner that is only used for rough things these days). It worked wonderfully, but we did get quite a few astonished looks from the neighbours, and some remarks as well. You might get the same for aphid treatment with a vacuum cleaner.)