I’ve been away for over a month and the reason is that I’ve just have been too busy to blog, or do any garden work. Life has been hard the past couple of months, turning this year into a very very bad one.

We started off with exploding meteors, lockdown, and earthquake and ended it with covid and earthquakes again. As I wrote in my previous posts my whole family had covid, it took me over a month to recover, not so much from the virus itself but from the cough which hits me each time I get sick. Each time it takes me longer to recover. I still get cough attacks from time to time but not as often or as hard as in the beginning. Just as I started feeling good enough to go back to the garden in November my mum broke her ankle. She had to have surgery and due to the covid situation in the hospitals she was sent home 24h after the surgery and I had to take over her care 24/7. With my mum not being able to get out of bed and the rest of the family to care for I just didn’t have any time for gardening. I didn’t even put my summer plants in the basement on time. The frost got them really badly and I’m not sure some of my plants will survive this. Some of the carnations already died and we’ll see in the spring how many of the other plants will survive. 

The garden is still stuck in the same place as it was in October. Four beds are left without deep digging and I have no idea how I’ll manage to do it in the spring. Hubby said he would do it, but we’re having showers every single day and there’s no way to do any digging. The garden is completely soaked. 

On top of everything this Monday, we had a major earthquake again. M5.5 earthquake woke us up and shook us really badly, and just as we started to recover and relax on Tuesday noon we got another one even stronger which was M6.4. Luckily we didn’t have any structural damage but the shaking did a lot of damage everywhere, especially in the epicenter cities Petrinja and Sisak. Whole villages have been erased from the map and it doesn’t stop shaking. Since then we had over 100 earthquakes, some of them we can feel and others not but just knowing they are happening is enough to keep us on the edge. Especially knowing that the aftershock one was stronger than the first one. 

Petrinja today

The earthquake was so strong that somehow it got to us, 60km away, in almost full strength so there is damage to our church, school, hotels, and every older building in the municipality and the nearest city. There are even some buildings that are so damaged that the people had to be evacuated and as I said we’re not even close to the epicenter. The shaking was so bad that I couldn’t get down the stairs to get to my mum and help her get out of bed. I was caught in the middle of the stairs waiting for the shaking to stop to go down because I couldn’t catch the next step. The whole staircase was swinging left and right.