

In the garden
I love our garden in spring, when the smell and the look of the cherry blossoms make it a joy to sit and eat outside. The inspiring colors provide the garden at this time of the year with incredible beautiful variations of colors and the young vegetables in the greenhouse are ready to be moved to the garden.
The weather is changing again: less cold, but still some frost at night. In the greenhouse, you can already see the difference. There is a lovely smell of plants that start growing again.
I have a greenhouse and as is the case for many gardeners, the number one harvest there are tomatoes. No, not the ones you usually buy in the supermarket, which are often not ripe yet, big and with no taste. My idea that there is a problems with the tomatoes in supermarkets just got confirmed by an interesting article in Science: Why tomatoes got bland and how to make them sweet again.
Time to get back at work in the garden, now that the winter is over - or so it looks like. The first job is to start pruning fruit trees and prepare for planting new ones if you are in for that.
In 2018, we created on orchard on a piece of sandy agricultural soil with a surface of a bit less than 1 acre. A small part of it is occupied by birches and other trees. The rest was grass - in the past used to feed horses.
Strange weather this year. Nearly no winter, then an early spring, followed by severe night frost - killing all the blossoms on pears, apples and quince. And the fresh shoots of the Buxus sempervirens also died - but the plants restarted growing later on.