What a summer....

The weather this summer has been very strange I must say. Late June, around midsummer, the weather in this part of Sweden has been cold and wet. At some point there was a minimum temperature lower than the overnight low on Christmas night.
But when July started the weather became hot, dry and sunny for over one month. The forest fire in the area of Sala was a direct consequence of the weather. And then we had a pretty early arrival of ‘autumn leaves’ with the first frosty nights in the third week of August.

The results of this are clearly noticeable in our garden, of course. We have plants, like corn, which for the first time, gave results. Squash/zucchini and pumpkin on the other hand have produced not even 10% of what we harvested last year.

During the dry period I haven´t added any water to my plants. It probably had an influence, but I´m pretty sure that adding moisture would not have given much better results. Instead we did as we have learned at Yggdrasil: to make the plants stronger and let them retrieve water themselves from deeper levels below. Their roots are able to handle these "extremes" a lot better than we might expect. Of course you need to keep mulching all the time to slow down the evaporation - that goes without saying.

Now that the first leaves are falling I can say that our garden has been a great success again. I´m very glad we invested so much time during the last months in redesigning. The effect of looking at the garden, without even thinking of the results, has made me, along with many visitors, a happy person. We shouldn´t underestimate this effect of nature and what it does to mankind, to my humble opinion...

The next question for me now is what will happen if the next winter will be cold. We had an extremely warm winter and summer. Will our plants be able to deal with temperatures below -20°? We´ll see... Now time has come to slow down and harvest. Later on in September the process of analysing will become number one on our priority list…