Except for lots of swimming and ice cream, summer is also the time to fix anything and everything before the next winter!
it’s absolutely great to adopt the concept of “that we’ll handle after winter”, but that also means you have to roll up your sleeves once the ice melts 🙂

After storm Johannes last winter, we still had a part of the tree to remove, and the old garage to fix. We planned on tearing it down because it looked kinda hopeless, but one day, a young man, hired by the insurance company showed up with tools and materials. This young father (I saw a baby seat in the front of his car), braved the house of cards my garage had become and installed an proper new roof. We felt compelled to then fix the rest…

The stairs to my entrance was also in bad shape after the last winter (after holding up for decades probably), so we replaced the steps.

My Pith sketchbooks were screaming for stickers, so I made a bunch from sketches and older artworks. They are available in my Redbubble shop.

The studio garden is still a work in progress, and I’m not always sure if I will be able to make all my ideas a reality (plants are so expensive here), but I focus on one part every year.  This year I extended the flower beds with as many insect friendly plants as I could get. But I also got to watch last year’s efforts bloom and grow again.

As always I plant lots of peas. No summer without my favourite snack plant.
Strangely, a part of one plant gave purple flowers.

For years I’ve been trying to grow pumpkins. Without any luck. The seeds got eaten, plants die, or they flower too late to produce anything before it gets too cold, or Swedish summers are not pumpkin-friendly.
I tried again this year. Only a few seeds and a lot of zucchini. As always I labelled everything, but during their ‘outdoor training’, a sudden cold and rainy week, things must have been mixed up. I thought all the pumpkin plants died, and I planted the zucchini outside.
But as these plants started to grow. And grow. And grow.
I realised it were the zucchini’s that had died, and I still had the pumpkins! It was way too late to start again (super short growing season here), so I tried everything to support the pumpkins. They are still going strong despite a few cold nights. I have no idea how big they can get, but I’m surely encouraged to try again next year and plant them in a spot with more space to grow.