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The more eagle-eyed viewers may have noticed some nifty markers in recent pictures of the garden.  We got one of those burny-writing-on-wood-pen-things, and split and whittled a huge stack of hazel sticks to make markers for our plants.  All the markers are in Swedish, but you can probably get the gist of most of them

Well, it’s not quite new, but I haven’t been able to put up any pictures of it because it would ruin the surprise.  But now that Mum has her birthday shawl, I can show it to the rest of you.

Project page here.

I’m so happy about these beans.

These are the first dozen green beans from our garden. I don’t know why, but you just don’t get green beans in the shops here, and I hadn’t realised how much I missed them until I saw these little beauties curling out of the flowers on the bean plants.

Following the instructions I’ve seen that you should pick your beans pretty hard in order to get them producing more, I pounced today and picked out the biggest 12 I could find. I ate one raw while I was cooking, and threw the rest in our dinner for a short while, so they were still a little bit crunchy. Adults and toddler alike agreed that they were very good.

These were from seeds sent to me by my Mum in NZ. They’ve grown very happily here so far and there are signs of many many more beans to come. Hurrah!

This weekend I made my first ever batch of jam. Late last summer I picked about 3 kilos of blackberries from our garden, and froze them all, intending to spend some wet wintery day making jam.

Now it’s summer again, and our blackberry bushes are heaving with little green berries. So, in anticipation of a really bumper crop later in the summer, I figured I should use up some of those frozen berries now.

And here they are, six happy little jars of jam. There was another half a jar too, which is in the fridge for using right away. In the absence of scones and clotted cream, I mixed a couple of spoons into some of my home made yoghurt, for immediate nom.

For a while, I’ve been considering colouring my hair with henna instead of using chemical dyes.  This has partly been driven by the fact that I hate the thought of all the icky chemicals I’ve been smearing on my head for years, and partly because I’m consistently disappointed with their lack of grey coverage.

So, finally, this week I took the plunge.   I used 200g of henna and about 50g of indigo, to darken it up a bit and make it a bit more brunette than just red.

Here are some before photos – I had a cocktail of colours including old dye jobs, old highlights, and my natural blend of mouse brown and badger grey.

And here are the after photos.    These were taken the day after, and since then the colour has darkened up a bit.

I was concerned that I’d still have a really strong tide mark where the old blonde was growing out – but although it’s still there, it’s slightly less obvious. I was also a bit scared of coming out fire-engine red, but since the henna sits on top of your existing hair colour, that is unlikely unless your hair is very fair to begin with. Plus, the addition of indigo was a good way to tone it down.

Most of all I’m impressed with the grey coverage. I have tried endless dyes that claim “100% grey coverage” and each and every time I have still been able to see greys immediately after I used the damn stuff. It’s been a few days now, and several shampoos later I still can’t see the greys peeking through – I can tell that some hairs are lighter than the others, but they’re a pleasant coppery red rather than grey. Plus my hair feels like it’s in better condition than before. It’s a double win!

I used to be hard to buy things for, because I earned good money so I bought things I wanted for myself.

Now I’m skint, so I can think of lots of things that I want 

So if any family members are stuck for ideas for my looming birthday, take a look at my wish list here.

When I lived in Hamilton, we used to shop at Big Fresh supermarket.  They had a fibreglass cow in the dairy section that mooed when you pushed a button, and sometimes you could buy big bags of chicken feet.  On Saturdays they sold goat meat, and there would be a big banner hanging up in the meat department saying “Saturday is goat day!”

Well, Saturday might be goat day, but Sunday is definitely moose day.  I have seen moose on the last 3 sundays in a row, so clearly I’m on a roll.  The first was when driving between Bjursås and Falun.  I spotted a moose standing just in the forest at the edge of the road, canoodling with a tree.  The following Sunday, we had just come back from a garden fair in Gothenburg and were sitting in Linus’s mother’s house when a moose went galloping across the open field in front of the house, pursued by a flock of birds.  And the next sighting was, we think, the same moose – we were there again, waiting for a taxi to collect Linus’s grandparents.  We saw the taxi pull into the driveway to the neighbourhood, and then stop … because a moose was standing in its path.  Once it had let the taxi go by, it came for a stroll back past the house.

So, if you want to see a moose, come to Sweden and hang out with me on a Sunday.

In other wildlife sightings, I’ve recently seen a fox (much nicer looking than London foxes – orange, with a bushy tail & everything), plenty of deer (who’ve been eating my tulips – more on that later), and two badgers.  Both of the badgers were road-kill, so Linus said that I wasn’t really allowed to count them in my wildlife tally.  But as my friend Ben pointed out:

“Dead Badgers are still badgers. If I saw a dead Dragon I would count that as seeing a Dragon.”

So I reckon they count.

We had a lovely Easter weekend with beautiful spring weather, and we had an Easter feast with the family at our house.  There was smoked salmon, Jansson’s temptation, pate, exciting cheeses, cake, hot cross buns, and eggs with little hats on.

I thought I’d post an update on the performance of the cloth bag for storing mushrooms. I used some mushies last night, and they were much dryer and less slimy than they get when stored in plastic. The bag felt damp though, so I think I’ll swap it out for a dry one, in case something sinister starts growing on it. Mostly, I really like knowing that my food hasn’t been resting against icky plastic.

Oh, and in case anyone is wondering why I just don’t get a paper bag for the mushrooms, the availability of paper bags in the produce section is very random at our supermarket.  I think I’ve only managed to find them twice.  And anyway, a cloth one will last much longer than a paper one.

Looks different, doesn’t it?

I moved the site to my lovely husband’s lovely server this weekend, and moved my blog from an FTP published Blogger account to a new WordPress blog.  I had been meaning to move hosts for a long time, and generally give the site an overhaul.  But I finally got motivated to do it when Blogger announced that they would no longer be supporting FTP publishing.  So, I said bye-bye to Blogger.

The look of the site will change – I am using a free theme but I really want to customise the look for myself. And I haven’t moved all my photo pages across yet, but hopefully all my old content will start trickling back into place, as and when I find the time to do it.