Restless night

I guess that when you are responsible for maybe up to five deaths it is hard to get a good night's sleep. Let me explain. Every time we get out to our cottage on Orust we have a few days of extreme gardening ahead of us. It involves lawn mowing, weeding, cutting, and planting etc. It's back breaking, but has to be done so you can enjoy the rest of the stay. Is it any surprise that most of our visitors choose to come after we have been here a week or two?

Anyway, I was tearing away some tall yellow flowers from last year to give the new ones some space when suddenly my un-gloved hand felt something very soft and fluffy that fell to the ground. I had, by accident, torn down a birds' nest with five newly hatched baby birds who couldn't fly. They fell to the ground and managed to hop away to all points of the compass, even though we found three of them hidden in the high grass later on.  It was traumatizing since we knew we probably couldn't save them and we also knew that the mother probably couldn't find them.

However, hubby set off to our nearby general store that sells everything, and bought something that he could transform into a birdhouse and put the three birds that we found into it and hopefully the mother will find them.  It is a little ironic that the store is called Göksäter which contains 'gök', the Swedish word for cuckoo, but they only sold kitsch little ornamental birdhouses. Hubby had to build one from a compost bin!  This story is to be continued...

Anyhow, soon the cottage will look like this, or even better!

Oh, another thing!  The lupines are fantastic this time of year. They grow wild everywhere along roads, in ditches etc, but you try to plant them, and it is impossible. Better just enjoy them in the wild!