What a beautiful day it has been ....

It’s a beautiful Sunday afternoon here in good ole Deutschland and we have escaped in to what will most likely become our “home away from home” for the months from late spring through fall. Just about a stone’s throw away from the house, across the street and the railroad tracks, is our beautiful little garden. Well, it’s not that little actually, it’s about 12,000 sq ft in size, with a little shed to keep the necessary things protected from the elements. We are connected to the water system but there is no power so we have to “rough it”. Guess we’ll have to break out the BBQ frequently. We spent the last couple of weekends with the help of a friend to clean it up. It was pretty overgrown, with lots of brush and bushes and we filled a 180 cubic feet big container full (yes, that big orange thing and no, it’s not part of the decoration …) with cuttings and other thorny things. Now we are sitting here trying to decide what to plant and where to plant it. There are two established cherry trees (one bigger and one smaller) and an old apple tree along with a few other trees that we haven’t identified yet. The apple tree and the big cherry tree were already here when I was a kid. I remember my Mom getting us up at 6AM during summer vacation to pick cherries “cause it wasn’t too hot yet for the day”. Needless to say we loved those mornings. But now as adults we have a different kind of appreciation for these trees. We’re actually looking forward to see what the summer will bring. Then we have some raspberries we think, I guess we’ll see for sure as the year progresses. There are a few rosebushes, lots of ornamental shrubs and a few color spots as you can see from the pictures. We are trying to figure out where the best spot for the compost area is, where we should plant the sunflowers, tomatoes, pumpkins, corn, zucchini and other vegetables that we’re looking forward to enjoy – not that we brought any seeds from our old Windsor garden with us or anything like that …. The unfortunate part of it is, that during the years where the garden wasn’t so actively used it was frequented, mostly in the evenings, by groups of teenagers that felt it was cool to make holes in fences and find “hiding spots” in the brush and under the trees. We found lots of lovely evidence (including some DNA …) as we cleaned up. But we got rid of all the hiding spots and now we hope we won’t have those visitors anymore. Sophie and Charlie are absolutely enjoying the garden as well; they especially like saying hi to anyone walking by. There are lots of birds around us constantly serenading us with their “Gezwitscher”. Now there is a great German word for you… . To finish off the beautiful day we just had an early dinner at a nice beer garden overlooking the river. Now it’s time to settle in and get ready for the new week. Make it a great one…