becoming self-sufficient – Page 2

About some of the edibles in the garden II

Garlic! 🙂 This is the first time that garlic has grown in our garden. – We’ve tried to grow garlic once before, but nothing really happened then…

Now, all of a sudden, we have both smaller and bigger garlics. They are marvellous! I love the smell and taste of garlic and I eat small amounts of raw garlic, too.

We used some of our onions fresh from the garden, but the rest of the onions we dried, because they were pretty small. There are both yellow onions and red onions. Dried onions are delicious as well.

Here’s our fruit and vegetable dryer. A nice machine. The scent of onion, for example, was wonderful when the onions were drying in there.

This year we tried to grow zucchini for the first time ever. Well, actually, we weren’t trying that hard, we didn’t pay that much attention to this try. Here in the pic is our biggest oddball, our smaller zucchinis didn’t have the time to grow bigger before the weather got a bit colder.

And another try… My broad beans… In a raised garden bed with wooden frames these were.

I didn’t get that many broad beans, but some broad beans anyway, and I want to try growing them again next year! 🙂

About the sweet corn… We’ve got more sweet corn now than a year ago. 🙂

And we are drying some sweet corn, too, for seeds, hopefully.

I’ll write about a couple of edibles in the garden a bit later again.

-Leena

About some of the edibles in the garden

Today I’ll write a bit about some of the edibles in the garden right now. Here’s really only some of the edibles in the garden – about a few more a bit later…

This is the second time that we are growing sweet corn in our garden. Last summer our sweet corns grew from seedlings, these are grown from seed now. This summer has been very good for growing sweet corn here in Finland, it has been very warm and sunny.

The tallest plant is much taller than I am.

There are cobs growing in three plants or stalks, two cobs in each plant. We had several sweet corn stalks growing, but only three grew taller and are now growing cobs. Hmm, I’m still not sure how to talk about the different parts of the corn plants, how to call them, and not even in Finnish… :p But yeah, I’ll write about the harvest of our sweet corn then later. 🙂

Our potato patch this summer – new patch for potatoes this year again… We haven’t dug up any potatoes yet.

This is how our carrots grow this year; a raised garden bed with a wooden frame. Neat, no weeds.

Beetroot, parsnip and turnip. A raised bed with the frame as well. And we are growing all these three for the first time ever. We haven’t dug up beetroot and parsnips yet.

But we have dug up some carrots and turnips already. I used these in soup.

And we have only one tomato plant growing this year, we had more than one, but only this bears fruit. But yeah, the plant doesn’t look very good anymore. The nights can already be a bit colder, and a bit cold for tomato plants, but we still have warm days. The temperatures have been around 20 degrees Celsius in the daytime.

But there’s fruit turning red all the time now.

Our first ripe tomatoes this year. I will never stop wondering at the taste of home-grown tomatoes – they taste so sweet and amazing. 🙂

-Leena

More crocus flowers, onions growing, year-round composter…

Spring days… But it’s been a bit cooler now, but not cooler than normally in Finland this time of the year; the temperatures have been around 10 degrees Celsius in the daytime. – Some days it’s been more like 5 degrees, but some days it’s been 13 degrees. And in the nighttime the temperatures have been a bit above 0 degrees Celsius. It’s been a bit more cloudy now, but in the daytime there still has been more sunshine than rain altogether.

I took all the pictures in this blog post in our garden today.

More crocus flowers. Now we already have crocuses growing in many places in the garden. We don’t even remember all the places we planted crocus bulbs last autumn, and I don’t even know all the places my boyfriend planted them. 🙂

That white stuff on the ground, by the way, is spring fertilizer for the cherry tree…

Charming surprises.

And more butterflies… I saw the first butterfly in our garden on Sunday the 15th, it was a brimstone butterfly, and I’ve seen brimstone butterflies here a few times more after that, too. A few bees have been buzzing as well, and we saw a tiny hedgehog in the woods next to our garden, too.

We’ve been working in the garden for some time now, turning the garden into our outdoor living room again, clearing it up and so on. And raking, raking again – how come we have so, so many fallen leaves on the ground now in April even though we raked, like everything, last autumn…?

Onions, red onions are already growing, from onion sets, in these pots in our garden. Planted about two weeks ago.

A composter with a crown on the top. 🙂 We have been using this composter for fruit and vegetable peels, coffee grounds, used tea bags, and so on… for over a week now. This is our first composter for kitchen waste, Biolan pikakompostori – quick composter 220eco, a year-round composter. So simple, useful and nice. And the crown is a container that we use for collecting the fruit peels, coffee grounds, et cetera, in the kitchen.

-Leena

Growing tomatoes this year & some bird related things

The story about growing tomatoes this year… It is a short story, very short… so short, that I already wrote it on my Instagram (owlnatureleena) a while ago.

My precious… The summer this year was not very good for growing tomatoes outside in the garden here in Finland. But some tomatoes did grow! We can still, in November, eat tomatoes that have grown in our garden. So… it’s not that bad after all. 🙂

We had only few bigger tomatoes, but many smaller ones. And again, they had to be taken inside the house for ripening. They were ripening on a plate in the kitchen, for weeks. Home-grown tomatoes always taste so incredibly sweet! They are just perfect.

And some bird related things… I found something that is over 20 years old, something that I missed – something that I thought I had lost forever…

My pendant, my bird! 🙂 I did not believe that this still was somewhere, somewhere safe… but yes, I found this at my childhood home, (where else!). A bronze pendant necklace called Tintti, made in Finland by Kalevala Jewelry. The stone is hand-painted ceramic.

Okay, I found these; my Tintti with its original box and another bronze pendant necklace by Kalevala Jewelry as well. Another bird! A bird called Tampereen seudun lintu, as old as my Tintti, but I didn’t remember that I even had it.

So, I had these in my childhood. I am so happy to have found them! My treasures… I think that these, too, will be in my pictures every once in a while. 🙂 I love jewelry and it can be seen in my blog…

And something I made over the weekend… I was knitting a bit, testing this rainbow yarn that I have. 🙂 At this point in time, another owl. My design – my problems – more fun in the end. I think he needs some fur around his beak…

-Leena

About the fruit trees, new trees and a bush, an unidentified flower…

Our plum tree had last year (it was the first whole year for the tree in the garden) only one plum fruit, this year it has six! And what’s more, last year it had well over a hundred flowers, this year not many more than 20. Cool! 🙂

A nice fruit.

In July our grafted cherry tree started to grow a branch on its on. After that it has grown three more branches. What great balancing! 😉

The tree has grown further its ‘original’ branches as well.

A tree in progress…

A cherry bush now, too, we planted it next to the cherry tree last week.

And a pear tree, we planted it last week as well.

The pear tree has such flawless leaves!

EDIT: This could be gladiolus, miekkalilja in Finnish… I suddenly remembered this name, and it sure looked like gladiolus when I searched it. 🙂

An unidentified flower. – Yet another new flower for this autumn and we have no idea what this could be called. I tried to google it a bit, but no luck with that. It’s a fairly big plant, big flowers. We knew that something was planted in this spot, but didn’t believe that anything would bloom here this year.

Beautiful it is…

And another new tree. We planted this aspen tree the other day.

The autumn colour of the aspen trees is always so enchanting, bright, brilliant… And the sound of the aspen leaves quaking in the wind is lovely.

Populus tremula erecta is this tree.

I got a bit carried away with the colours… Well, autumn is once a year. 😉

-Leena

About some of the food growing in the garden & more flowers

First about some of the food growing in our garden. We had some strawberries to eat still in August – a bit different summer indeed, usually the strawberry season has ended well before the end of July in our garden. Peas, potatoes, carrots and onions all grow easily. The pea season is at its end now and we’ve been harvesting our potatoes, too, for some time now, but there are still many potatoes underground, that’s for sure.

Homegrown food is always just so delicious, and sweet… 🙂

We’ve been harvesting our carrots, too. I took a pic yesterday evening when I was about to make soup.

One of the most delicious things you can grow in your garden! This actually is the first time ever that we’re growing onions. – I wonder why we haven’t done it earlier! Here in Finland, in the north, we usually grow onions from onion sets, not from seeds. And onions indeed are easy to grow from sets.

Come out, come out! This year we have more blackcurrant berries than ever before (-during the three previous summers that we’ve lived here). And it’s so nice! Our redcurrant bushes have been loaded with berries every summer, but our blackcurrant berries have been hiding somewhere. (?) 🙂

More common poppy flowers. Other names for common poppy: corn poppy, field poppy, Flanders poppy, red poppy, corn rose.

Our fly honeysuckle has berries now. Not edible, poisonous.

Phlox paniculata or fall phlox ‘early red’, in the middle of our garden. We planted it a bit over a week ago.

And there is no summer without strawflower flowers… 🙂

-Leena

Pictures yesterday and today

More peony flowers…

Follow the red petals! :

It was the peony flower that is the first peony flower who is dropping her petals this summer.

And we grow spinach from seeds in our garden. I made spinach soup. It’s delicious! 🙂 – Spinach, milk, some cream, a bit of butter, a bit of oat flour, a bit of salt.

Other herbs are growing from seeds with the basil in our garden, in the shelter of the house wall. There’s summer savory and rosemary, and then there’s some fourth herb – I can’t remember what it is… I must think about that a bit now… 🙂