Yes, it's been a bit quiet in my garden blog for the past year. I wish I could blame it on laziness and injuries, but this time a large contributor was the fact that I moved into the city last winter and therefore can't use my parents garden as frequently as I was used to, anymore. I still managed to drop by about once a week and planted some crops, hoping for at least some yield, but visits are short and my time in the garden not as relaxed as it used to be. Obviously all my windowsills are populated with plants, but the sunny side of the appartment is towards a busy street, which turned out to be a bit of a problem... Anyways, there's something growing in my indoor garden now, that I couldn't have imagined in my wildest dreams would be growing there. Let's have a look, shall we?

The fomo is real as May 15th, the magic day of gardening is rapidly approaching and I have a somewhat sneaking suspicion that I'm still lacking many essential plants for this season. It's finally warm enough to do some work in the garden and I was able to get some free goodies that might make for some interesting projects. There have been many mishaps already, including me killing my tomato seedlings, but luckily I had some help from a little bee-friend...

I guess it's finally spring again and it's definitely too late for those January peppers now. Looking back at my photos, it seems like I'm indeed a bit late, but also some of the seeds that I really wanted took some time to arrive, too. The birds are already busy building their nests and like every year we got a pair of blacktits and I also saw a pair of bluetits checking out the new box that I set up last minute. Unfortunately the magpies decided to build their nest in our pinetree right next to the nesting box. Good thing I added a cover to the entrance hole, that hopefully prevents them from stealing the baby birds. But before we start, how about we play a fun game of 'Where's Waldo?' with our squirrel in the meantime?

It's early February and winter is covering the northern hemisphere. As I started an evening job in August, my motivation to write went into negative territory, which resulted in no late-summer gardening post from me. As I'm about to start the first seedlings again, I shall wrap up the passing year real quick. Screw procrastination and et ready for some beautiful plants!

Here I am, watering the dirt, and I hear you asking: 'Why da heell you diddly done do that, exator?!' Let me tell you, I ain't gone mad or something, it's actually 200 IQ next level gardening tactics! I gon' explain soon...

I guess today it's clickbait time, but also not clickbait at all. It is actually almost impossible to climb up into the leaderboard right now, no matter how good you or your cards are!So, yesterday I was minding my own business, just playing some matches to unlock my daily chests, when I noticed something weird. I was getting matched with players that had significantly less rating than me. OG players will know: this is something that happened a lot in the old days. Once you went up the leaderboard and air got thinner you were mostly getting matched with opponents that had significantly less rating, which meant you were getting +3 rating for a win and -36 for a loss, which required a 95% winrate to reach the top spots. A while ago the matchmaking had a behaviour adjustment which put an end to the bullying matchups and only allowed battles of similar skill (rating) levels. Therefore I was quite a bit surprised when I saw this happening again! But not only is this happening again, it is WAY worse now. In fact the splintering has gone so far, to where I'm literally earning +0 rating for some matches! Or in other words: Even with a 99.9% winrate you might not be able to move up, as even a single loss puts you a day worth of games behind. Or how are you supposed to climb with +0 every other match? Not the only match with +0 rating that day.