My hoe… I decided to plant potatoes late in the evening on Monday. A garden hoe is one of my favourite garden tools, I just always get out of breath when I´m like really using it…
I actually planted the potatoes quite deep, the pic doesn´t show it perfectly right. I scattered some chicken manure pellets there, too.
The first ever snakeshead lily flower in our garden. This flower has many names, for example: snakeshead lily, snakeshead fritillary, chess flower, chequered lily, leper lily… Another new favourite!
Just for the record about some animals… A woodcock started its regular flights here already in late March. Usually it starts the evening flights in late April. “Orr, orr, orr, pist!”
We saw a deer walking in our garden and in the woods on Tuesday evening. And I saw a deer leaping through the garden last week, and when we were on a car ride at night, we were there with deer and hares… We saw around four times deer (one or more at once) and almost 10 hares (only one at a time).
By the lake Pyhäjärvi here in our home village late in the evening on Wednesday.
Wood sorrel, I ate some.
So yesterday, on Thursday, it was already a bit warmer – the butterflies returned! Today it was 17 degrees Celsius in the daytime and it was the warmest day of the year this far. Usually we have some days of 20 degrees Celsius, or warmer than that, already in early May or even in April.
Pictures that I took today:
That big… bushy thing is of course rhubarb, and under it in the pic is ramsons, allium ursinum, that has many other names, too, for example: wild garlic, bear´s garlic, wood garlic… We´ve never had this bear´s garlic before (credit goes to my boyfriend who came up with the idea), now we have it on two different spots and hope that it will start spreading.
The other bear´s garlic spot.
Cabbage growing in the greenhouse. This is the first time ever that we are trying to grow cabbage. We have some cabbage (normal cabbage? 😀 ) and Brussels sprout growing, but we can´t tell which is which anymore here…
The cabbage plants are still growing in the pots, the cherry tomato plants are planted inside the greenhouse.
I think that this is a green hairstreak butterfly.
Praestans shogun tulips have opened now.
Lilac flower buds are emerging.
One of my evening tasks today was painting which I love doing. Actually we both are making this small garden table and I have been the one filling small holes in it and sanding and painting it.
The summer is moving on… This summer hasn’t been as hot as last summer here in Finland, but we’ve had a few fairly short hot periods this year, too. This week it was hotter than ever in many places in Europe and in a few places in Finland as well. Here where I’m living it was 32 degrees Celsius on Sunday. Yesterday it was only 23 degrees Celsius and today 16degrees, in the daytime – last night it was around 11 degrees Celsius. That was fast.
This summer, thus far, I have been enjoying nature and gardening, naturally. 🙂 And I have been using my Instagram (owlnatureleena) a bit. I have been reading a lot. During June and July I have read 14 books and finished reading two books (I had read half of both of them earlier) and I’m about to finish reading yet another book, so this has definitely been a lot for me. And, naturally, I have a Goodreads account (leenannih) to keep track of books. 😀
Now some summer snapshots:
A young hare in the forest. I love hares and rabbits. I had a rabbit when I was a child.
Sheep here in our home village. They were baaing so much, they were just funny and adorable.
We found some cloudberries in a forest we had never been before, about 20 kilometres from our home. The berries were so delicious. And we can’t remember finding this gold here in the southern part of Finland before!
And there were quite many small blue butterflies flying in the forest, pretty magical… These two were on a rock by a small lake there.
~”Did you say ‘itsy bitsy’…?”
A spider on our terrace. There were a few of these guys there one evening. They, too, are just lovely.
I’ve tried to take pics of our summer flower bed. Last year we didn’t plant any seeds here, so there was only weed here a year ago. And this year we finally had the possibility to add a lot of compost to the soil thanks to the year-round composter we have.
The last three pics I took today:
The summer hasn’t ended yet…
And now just one picture that I took in our greenhouse today as well:
Spring, spring, Easter. It has been a sunny week. And it has been warmer again – a bit over 10 degrees Celsius, and even warmer than that – around 15 degrees Celsius it has been, too. We have seen coltsfoot flowers. And we have seen flies, mosquitoes, bees and butterflies – signs of summer…
The Ibizalizard, always covered in snow a bit…? 🙂 Well, in wintertime… and this was a bit over a week ago on Friday.
For the moon… The moon, a fullmoon on Saturday, at around 1.00 am. I was ~mooning around in our garden…
A picture that I took yesterday:
The first flowers on the ground in our garden are crocus flowers. We have those everywhere in the garden. They are lovely surprises also because we can’t remember all the spots where we have planted them. 🙂
The rest of the pictures I took today:
My coffee and friends…
Just a few pictures of crocus flowers now… And also daffodil stems and tulip stems have started to grow on the ground.
‘A walk-in closet’ in the corner of the terrace – that’s the short description of our first ever greenhouse, here. 🙂
The summer has been unbelievably hot in Finland, as it has been all over Europe. At least for now the temperatures have gone down here in Finland, and yeah, there shouldn’t be temperatures like 30 degrees Celsius anymore this summer. (?) Anyway, this summer we learned that temperatures around 25 degrees Celsius are kinda cool. I mean, usually 25 degrees Celsius has been the Heat for us, but this summer we had 30 degrees Celsius or even a bit warmer for so, so many days that, yes, one truly felt it. And it was so dry everywhere for so many weeks that we couldn’t light campfires.
And about me, myself and I… I woke up at 4.30 am when I was working, and with so many early mornings during the week this summer, I didn’t quite yet learn to get my shi…itake together in my free time, I mean, it can be seen, for example, here in my blog… or, you just can’t see anything here… But I learned that I can make money by doing something that has something to do with gardening, funny. 🙂 And now it is the time to do… many things, I have a ton of things to do, but that’s nice, and I’m quite excited about writing here in my blog now, too. 🙂
Echinacea purpurea or purple coneflower flowers in our garden now. I planted three tiny young echinacea plants last summer and two of them have been growing this year – the one in the middle didn’t grow at all a year ago either.
Butterflies, too, love echinacea flowers… The right wing of this beauty was a bit damaged.
New flowers still growing.
Echinacea has been one of my dream flowers for my garden.
And here’s another one of my dream plants, in our garden now as well:
Bougainvillea. My ‘mini Spain’. – Bougainvillea is “the miracle bush in the south” for us here in the north. 🙂 These plants are so huge in the south! And the first time I met this wonder was in Spain. My plant was tiny and there were no bracts or flowers when I bought it, and it cost me only a few euros. I’m glad it began to flower!
The actual flowers of bougainvillea, small and sweet.
This summer I’ve seen a bat in our garden. One bat, only once. My boyfriend has seen a couple of bats a couple of times here this summer, but we definitely saw more of them a year ago.
And last week I saw a raccoon dog here for the first time. My boyfriend has seen it here once before this summer. I’m not quite sure how to feel about raccoon dogs here…
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 kitchenwaste, Biolan pikakompostori – quick composter220eco, 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.
Warmer, warmer… The spring is near, the spring is like here! – The nights have still been a bit colder, the temperatures have been around 0 degrees Celsius in the nighttime, but in the daytime it’s beginning to feel a lot like spring! – The temperatures have been around 10 degrees Celsius and now even between 10 and 16 degrees Celsius during the day.
First two pictures that I took by the lake Pyhäjärvi here in Satakunta region on Friday.
Okay, most of Finland still has snow, the northern part of the country like tons of it – well, that’s not even a bad thing, they have lovely spring days there, too, but just for comparison – here in the southernmost part of Finland the snow has mostly melted. But for example our lake Pyhäjärvi still has a lot of snow and ice and on it, an ice cover, but there already are some ice-free spots somewhere as well.
We saw the first butterfly for this year for us on Friday as well. Not here at home, but in our neighbouring municipality Säkylä. It was a peacock butterfly.
Tiny insects have already been dancing in the evening sun everywhere here, too.
Yesterday we found a new walking track for us, and it’s not even far from our home. 😮 🙂 We took the shortest route now first, just to see the place, the forest. The forest was mostly spruce trees, but there were also some pine trees and other trees as well.
Parts of the track were still covered with snow and ice…
…so it was a bit slippery with these old ‘bad ice skates’ of mine. But it was warm there, I had too many hoodies on me…
Ants, too, were already busy in the forest.
And we saw another peacock butterfly there. A charming, silent forest it was. Glad to have found it! It’s been there all this time, but we’ve noticed it only now. 🙂
And we saw the first coltsfoot flowers for this year for us, too. There were several coltsfoot flowers by the car park there.
And a few pictures that I took in our garden today:
The smell of the earth that is free of the snow now is lovely.
Swans have been flying and honking here, and we hear loud voices of waterfowls every evening again, from the lake I think.
We planted many crocus bulbs in our garden last autumn. And I wasn’t prepared for flowers yesterday… 😀 But yes, we already found two yellow crocus flowers!
One in the front yard and the other in the backyard.
