In Germany we celebrate two days of Easter (Sunday and Monday), so technically I’m not too late. Yesterday we were busy hiking the Baybachtal (link to German site), and after 20 km (12.5 miles) I was too exhausted to post.

As you can tell from the lack of updates, I’ve been very busy during the last couple of weeks. This was mostly school-related, but during the last week we finally started working on our garden in earnest, which had been neglected by the previous tenants. I can’t quite offer before and after photos, but I do happen to have a picture of the surprising amount of snow we got on March 22. Luckily we still had the snow tires on our cars, but a neighbour didn’t and managed to get stuck right in front of our driveway at 7 am, just when André and I were trying to leave for work.

Fortunately the snow (all 20 cm or 8 inches of it) only lasted for two days, and after that, the weather has improved considerably. It’s been warm and sunny for the last week, and the temperatures have reached 20°C (almost 70°F) over the weekend. The same area of our garden looks like this today:

The flowering bush in front of our neighbour’s walnut tree, by the way, is a Ribes sanguineum, or Flowering Currant (Zierjohannisbeere in German). The bumblebees just love it.