About every year around the same time, there's pictures of our willow fence, I think.

I've always liked the idea of a living fence - and even though we have a non-living additional fence around our place, the willow one is the higher one, and the more visible one, and the more exciting one.

It's also planted a little bit too close to the actual border of our garden, which, in retrospective, was not the brightest of all ideas. We had thoroughly underestimated how far the new shoots would branch out over the street, and how many of them there would be. We're handling this now by trying to guide everything as straight up as possible with the help of strings; the trick is to tie those in while the new growth is still green and fresh and very malleable.

We planted the fence back in April 2012, when it looked like this:



It's a kind of willow suitable for making baskets, which was important to us - after all, if you cut back the new rods every year, it would be sad if they weren't useful in some way.

Now it looks like this:



The fence, over the years, has taught me a few things. Among them, first and foremost: Even if willows are bendy, and even if you try to get the shapes all nice and even and just so, they are living things and they will react differently. Some will grow more, some will grow less, some will die off. Nothing will be just as accurate as planned, and planted. And in some places, you'll just have to live with something looking different because of a missing bit.

There's limits to what the trees will accept, and the more horizontal you try to make something grow, the closer you get to this limit. Parts of the tree may go up and die suddenly. The low arches are an issue every year, with plenty of them growing only to about the thirdway point, and then the tree puts everything into the new rods and we end up with a dead part beyond.



Another funny thing is when two trees meld together at their contact point. (That was what I had, in my youthful optimism, planned for all of them to do, by the way.) Sometimes, nothing extraordinary happens. Sometimes, though, the new united tree then decides some part of it is not necessary anymore... and there's another bit of dead wood for us to prune off.

What is really fascinating, though, is the difference between the "before" and the "after" harvesting the rods, and how much biomass this fence puts out every year.

Here's the before look:



And here the after, of approximately the same bit:



Every. Single. Year. Amazing, isn't it?

Here's this year's yield, all bundled up. Want to guess how many kilograms of willow?

It's still not Friday. Am I relieved, or am I disappointed? A bit of both, I guess - there's a stack of things left to do this week, and I feel like I'm way behind on many of them.

There is progress, though. Actual progress on all fronts - spinning for the Egtved blouse fabric and getting the new website version ready for a relaunch. There's also the February newsletter in the works, due out today or tomorrow. (Probably tomorrow.)

[caption id="attachment_6991" align="alignnone" width="225"] Flowers in the wintergarden! I'm still amazed that this plant can flower. My mum's specimens never did. Maybe it's due to the fertiliser provided at my place? Or more light in the wintergarden? Who knows...


There's also some garden work progress... it's the time of the year when our willow fence needs pruning and some care. We're more than halfway through with it, but the last part still has to be cut - and now, after the stormy winds have calmed down, it is time to work on this some more. With the side benefit of having some fresh air to clear the brain for a bit more work later on.

What do bees do at night? Well, they sleep. Sometimes, if you have a lot of (native) flowers in your garden, and there's consequently a lot of bees... you can find them sleeping there. Like this tiny bee, who curled up for a cosy night on the bottom of a bellflower:



Or this bumblebee, who hung underneath a scabiosa flower:



When they sleep, they are certainly much easier to photograph than when they are flitting around!

It's getting summery warm here, and things in the garden are sprouting - including, to my great delight, the old variety of beans that I've been sent last year. Yay!

A lot of other things are already in full bloom. Including the potato plants:



Most modern potato varieties have been bred to not bloom anymore, so they spend all their energy on making potatoes. It's a little sad though, with the really nice look that these flowers have.

The lupine is also blooming:



And there's lots and lots of wild bees, honey bees and bumble bees around, getting their nectar and pollen from the flowers in the garden.



That's a quite small wild bee. Unfortunately it's quite hard to classify these critters, not only because they are hard to catch well enough on a photograph, but also because there's quite a lot of species and sub-species that look very similar to each other.

Meanwhile, the cat is utterly unimpressed by all this and spends half her time sleeping in the wintergarden on a chair, and the other half sleeping indoors on the sofa:



 

Today was insanely busy - and I still did not manage to get everything done that I had planned to do. (Is that new? No. Do I manage, again and again, to plan too much to fit into one day? Yes.)

There was making of some distaffs, and then dressing said distaffs, and packing said dressed distaffs for the online workshop (the German one is full already, I will fix a second date soon). Then getting the parcels ready for a post office run tomorrow morning.

I also managed to sneak in a little time outside in the garden, which counted for my obligatory daily "time outside", and it did feel so good. (We agreed, early on in the pandemic, that getting outside at least once a day for at least half an hour was a non-discussible thing that we'd do. In some cases and on some days, it wasn't easy to get outside in the rain after a long day, but we both had the feeling that those were the days it was most necessary, and did us a world of good.) Flowers are starting to bloom everywhere in our garden, the raspberries are getting ready to bloom, and I planted a lot of the now-quite-grown seedlings outside. Hopefully they will all grow into nice plants that make lots of fruit and vegetables. One of the tomato plants already has a first fruit!



So - another really busy day tomorrow, and then there's the Pentecost weekend, which means  time off, and I'm very much looking forward to that. There's a bank holiday on Monday in Germany, but since the Most Patient Husband had some more vacation days to spend, he's getting two extra days - and it would be unfair to let him spend these on his own, right?

Which means I'll be back on the blog on Thursday next week. And since tomorrow is going to be really busy as well, I'll take the day off, too...

So - see you in a week!

Here's an update on all the things happening here:

First of all, the blog/comment issue. I may have found the culprit - it seems it has something to do with the blog template. How that could have changed from working without trouble to refusing to show comments, well, I have no inkling of the hint of a clue of an idea... but it means I can start to look into it with something like a bit more of a direction. The quick fix for this might be to install a different template for the time being, but that would look completely different to the rest of the site, and the one I tried this morning for a few minutes was... um... let's just say I found it not aesthetically pleasing or easy to use at all.

Secondly, the online spinning workshop - my plan is to include a spinning kit consisting of a dressed distaff and a spindle with whorl in the price for the workshop, and send these out beforehand. That way, everyone will have the same tools and materials, and we can all start on the same spot. This might not be the best option for courses abroad, but it's certainly something for Germany... and the international shipping option might be the DIY distaff kit, plus fibre, and then my spinners will have to dress the distaff themselves. I'll look into that some more - first course will be in German, and I'll fix a date and put it into the shop in the next few days.

Before that, though, I have to finalise and send off the two pieces I've been writing for two museums - both are materials for internal use, to help with setting up an exhibition or with museum projects. Usually the museum assistance things I write are directly connected to a reconstruction that I'm making for them, so it actually feels a bit weird to hand in "just" a written thing, and no actual goods in connection with them. If all goes well, I'll be finished with one of them before the weekend comes - at least that's my plan. Let's see how well it fares when it has to face reality.

Finally, for you to see you off into the weekend, some garden pictures - because there's also nice things going on there. There's still tulips blooming, among them this fuzzy-edged one:



To my delight, the first of my new tomato plants has started flowering. If the fruits will be ripe as quickly, and taste nicely as well, I might have a new favourite breed...



To my similarly great delight, the little lemon tree has not only grown a good bit this early spring, and bloomed nicely, it is also hard at work making lemons. This is the first one, and the largest to date.



All the care instructions in the 'net, by the way, say that lemon trees like it rather dry and must not be watered too much. I found that at least this one specimen hates getting too dry; it will roll up its leaves, never to unroll them again. So now it lives in a pot with a water reservoir, I make sure the reservoir is never completely empty - and that seems agreeable to the little tree. Which will, hopefully, provide us with lemons now I've found out what it wants.