September 2016 – Owlnature

Summery September

Still all summery, warm. I’m actually already ready for everything autumnal, but… it will happen soon enough… again… 🙂 So now some flower power! Again! 😀 I took these pics yesterday and today. Some of the flowers are old friends – flowers that have been in my blog already in summer, but here’s also some new flowers, a bit late blooming, and I took pics of them only just today – flowers with a bit more autumnal colours…

First the strawflowers and tiny marigolds. The tall strawflowers are very sturdy flowers! I wouldn’t have believed they are still standing. 🙂 And the rustling petals have been very tough, too!

Marigold, gold…

A runaway marigold growing wildly beside our porch. With a birch tree. 🙂

A bit of cosmos…

Evening light…

Above some late blooming flower of summer flower seed mix, I presume. Autumnal colour…

And the rest of the flowers today are bigger marigolds, pot marigolds or calendulas, grown from seed in summer.

Late blooming autumnal beauties…

And yesterday by the lake Pyhäjärvi. Eating ice cream and taking pics at once… 🙂

A summery, calm lake…

-Leena

Coffee, pink flowers, blackberries

Today’s morning coffee pic along with some more pics of pink flowers, taken lately and today, and a couple of pics with blackberries in them. – Pics in the still very warm September here in Finland. 🙂

Other one of my upper eyelids is a bit red, very swollen and somewhat sore today, it started already yesterday. My boyfriend had the same thing a while ago. But my eyelid is a lot more swollen than his was. Nice. Just taking it easy today…

These two flowers I met amongst the shaggy ink caps. We haven’t planted these. I’m not even sure what these actually are – they look a bit like tiny, and somewhat dark-coloured annual mallows, though… 🙂

Blackberries! And I’ve missed almost everyone of them, when it comes to taking pics. 😀 – I’ve just been eating… We planted the blackberry bush in our garden last year. This year we’ve gotten many berries, so juicy and delicious.

Dasiphora fruticosa or shrubby cinquefoil, ‘pink paradise‘. We planted the bush a couple of weeks ago.

A tiny bush to fill the empty space ( a bit too big, and not to be seen wholly in the pic) in the middle of our garden. – This is a start… 🙂 Very flowery shrubs are shrubby cinquefoils in autumn…

And these old friends today:

Annual mallow, one more pic…

And a bit of cosmos…

-Leena

Cosmos flowers & annual mallow flowers

There are still many cosmos flowers and annual mallow flowers in our garden. And still so many buds of them, too! 🙂 I took these pics of some of the flowers yesterday and today.

Cosmos flowers.

One of the cosmos flowers has this different, interesting colour combination. One petal missing? Charming. 🙂

Annual mallow. Other names for this flower: rose mallow, royal mallow, regal mallow.

I have now started using Owlnature’s Instagram account a bit, too. Our, mine and Owlnature’s, username in Instagram is owlnatureleena. 😉

-Leena

Mushrooms

I absolutely love mushrooms! And mushroom hunting. Self-picked mushrooms and self-prepared food with them are something totally different from the canned mushrooms that we meet on pizzas, for example… – No wonder many people believe that they don’t like mushrooms at all… 🙂

And probably we all know how dangerous mushrooms can be – that is a fact indeed! We, me and my boyfriend, got our first facts on mushroom hunting, and bolete mushrooms or porcini mushrooms in particular, when we were mushroom hunting for the first time, with my boyfriend’s father in Eastern Finland. After that we have used a mushroom guide book and the internet, both. 🙂

This blog post of mine is not a proper guide to these two types of mushrooms that I have in the pics below, so don’t eat mushrooms based only on knowledge you get from here! – I’m just having a bit of fun with mushrooms here in this blog post, with a little bit of information! 🙂

The first five pics I took on our front yard on Friday.

We have numerous shaggy ink caps on our front yard every year. They have their own special place there. 🙂 Shaggy ink caps are quite charming and funny mushrooms; they have many phases when it comes to their appearance.

First they are just white, short and chubby ‘trunks’. Then they grow to be tall and thin mushrooms with a proper cap, which then starts to melt away, to dissolve, to drip down, as black liquid or ‘ink’.

These mushrooms are edible when they are very young and white, that mushroom in the pic above is already too old. We have never eaten these, but they say, these are quite good edible mushrooms when they are young.

This ‘ink’ of shaggy ink caps actually was used as ink in days of old. 🙂

Ink dried up?

The rest of the pics I took on Saturday night, after a walk in the forest. – We came out of the forest with our hands full of woolly milkcaps.

Fluffy mushrooms! Cute and delightful! 🙂

Woolly milkcaps are fully edible, but they must be boiled, and they must be boiled longer than some other mushrooms. Woolly milkcaps must be boiled about 20-30 minutes. The taste of raw woolly milkcaps is strongly bitter and raw woolly milkcaps don’t agree with one’s stomach, at all. Cooking, boiling and rinsing the mushrooms removes the poison from them. The taste of woolly milkcaps after boiling them is very delicious! We cooked a creamy sauce with these.

Mushrooms always have funny and cunning names. In Finnish, for example, this woolly milkcap has two names – other one of them is karvalaukku – fur bag, literally. 🙂

-Leena

The last pictures from August

Now the ones from August I talked about yesterday…

The first two pics I took at the lake Pyhäjärvi, on a dock, 8th August. At the end of the dock.

The next five pics are peony poppies, 9th August. I thought I already had seen all my peony poppies this year, but all of a sudden there were two more – with colours totally different from my previous poppies this year. 🙂

Two pics of the first one…

And three of the other:

Nice surprises they were… 🙂

On August 21st we visited for the first time a bird watching tower quite near our home. It’s called Kauklaisten lintutorni in Finnish, Kauklainen bird watching tower in English. 🙂 It’s located in Rauma.

A beautiful, soft, quite harmonious view it was from the tower…

There’s also a walking trail there, but we visited only the tower – have to go back someday.

So, this was the last from August here in Owlnature. From now on it’s all about September, mushroom hunting, and so on… 🙂

-Leena

A plum fruit in the garden, autumn thoughts coming, too

One delightful plum fruit in our garden! Our plum tree really has grown and ripened one fruit this year. Well done, wonderfully happened, as this is the first whole year of the tree in our garden. It did have more than hundred flowers in spring, but I was hoping to get only two fruits, because that’s how it goes in the early years of the fruit tree’s life… Yeah well, I was actually hoping to get “any fruit”, so one purple fruit in the tree is a marvel. It looks quite amazing! 😀

My previous blog posts about the tree here and here.

This is even more amazing, because we already thought, at one point, that also this fruit had gone – one day I just couldn’t find it in the tree. I said that to my boyfriend, and he also searched the tree, and said that he couldn’t find the fruit either. What are we? A couple of morons? 😀

All of a sudden then, the fruit was there again, on another day… And it still grew bigger. Then suddenly it started to change colour from green to purple, and once it had started to do it, the colour change happened very quickly.

Wow, oh dear oh dear, I’m grateful! 🙂

So hey! It’s already September! But I’m actually quite content with the fact – the autumn may begin. 🙂 And in Owlnature, too. I was away from here for a while, because I had the moving in and out project, or an ordeal, as it turned out to be, a bit. 😀 – Too big closets to store your rubbish there, years of dirt in some spots in one’s student apartment, and so on, but it’s all over now. 🙂 But I do feel that I should have started, everything, that I’ve been doing now, and that I’m about to, hopefully, do next, already a year ago… Buuut enough of this right now, maybe a bit of reminiscing the old things later, again, and we have to rearrange this whole country home of ours here, too, every room, now. Aaand I still have some flower pics and some other pics, too, from August, that I’ll reminisce here in my blog a bit. And for this autumn I indeed have some plans, other than cleaning the house and everything, too, but let’s see what happens – just taking things easy… but very, very, seriously… ;D – And I can say that it all comes down to the fact that I want to grow mentally and I want to learn to do new things, too. And no matter how diminutive the new things are, it’s always an adventure. – Let us not destroy our inner child!

-Leena