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.

Another week has flown by, and I'm half happy that it's Friday (yay weekend!) and half unhappy (but... but... I wanted to get more done this week!). It's nice and sunny outside at the moment, so the happy half is much louder right now as well.

Speaking of nice and sunny, there's something hanging in the sun here, and it is seeing some use:



These are "wild bee hotels" - ceramic blocks with smooth round holes in them, deep enough for wild bees to make their nests in there. They hang in front of our winter garden, where they get plenty of sun (warmth is important for the brood), and we're happy to see that they are all getting some attention from the wild bees. Their season has only started a bit ago, so we're hoping to see much more action around here during the summer.

Our placing the hotels is not completely altruistic, by the way. These small solitary bees are excellent pollinators, and we have a few fruit trees in the garden that I definitely want to see well-visited when they are in bloom. Which is around... now, for most of them. So go little bees!

It's well and truly spring now hereabouts - which is good for the mood, and thus very, very good at the moment, with all the stupidity running rampant in this country. The planned lockdown-esque thing over Easter? It's been cancelled again, because of reasons. So we'll be going on just like right now... which, according to my personal prediction, will mean we'll have a 7-day incidence of about 200 by next Tuesday. And then it will rise some more. And, with the incredible ingenuity and flexibility of our politicians, combined with their courage to do the things that are necessary even if they are painful and the lobbyists protest, and their disregard for bureaucracy when things need to move quickly, nothing will happen for at least three more weeks.

My unexpected laugh of the day from yesterday, by the way, was hearing that the Irish news say Germany wants to have all adults vaccinated by July. To which the most patient husband instantly commented that yes... they may want that.

Me, on the other hand, I think it's entirely possible that this happens - as they did say July, but not which year. July 2023? Totally possible.

Ah well. Nothing I can do to change all this. So - let me entertain you with the flowers currently blooming in the garden!

The first violets are coming out...



...while the crocuses are still going strong. And there was a white-butted visitor snacking on these this morning:



Also - mini-Iris blooms!

We've made good use of the beautiful weather in the last days and got the garden partly cleaned up for spring. The bushes and shrubs are all pruned, most of the leaves have been removed from the beds under the willow fence, and I've started clearing out unwanted things from under the raspberries. There will be need for fertiliser at quite a few places, and there's still a chunk of work left to do, but it begins to look a lot like Chrisma - no, spring, of course.

The neighbour's bees are also stopping by occasionally, and he's told us that all his hives have survived the winter. We've also seen at least one bumblebee queen - the white-arsed variety, probably Bombus Terrestris.

There has also been some spring cleaning in the wintergarden... and there, unfortunately, losses were quite considerable. The lemon tree and the two physalis plants made it fine. Of the three Ecuador Purple chili plants, one survived, one is dead, and on the third jury's still out, but it's not looking good.

[caption id="attachment_5878" align="alignnone" width="159"] The Ecuador Purple sprouting again!


I also suspect that the tomatoes are a complete and resounding nope... which is a pity, because they are so much earlier when you get them to survive the winter. Ah well.

The smaller of my dwarf pepper plants also survived, without even shedding its leaves:



The other, large one, is probably dead too. As are all my coffee plants. There's some avocado trees still growing happily - but of the Marconi Red pepper plants, none seem to have made it. I'm not sure if one or two of the noname spice rack chilis have survived, but most of these are crunchy as well.

On the positive side, all three of the Bishop's Hat pepper plants did survive, and are working hard on new leaves right now:



We got those seeds because the fruits look quite weirdly funny.



These are recently harvested, by the way, so they are from last year. And they are tasty as well!

So this year will see a lot of new, young tomato plants. And then, who knows, some of them might actually make it into the next year...