cuckoo bird – Owlnature

Summer, everything is in bloom, bats, cuckoo, I do not know why I cannot post pictures on my Instagram…

On Monday a week ago, May 25th. I went outside, there was a pretty gentle breeze, it was fairly quiet, only birds were singing, butterflies were flying here and there around me… It was nothing new, but something felt strange, wonderful… Everything was so green around me, grass and leaves had grown fast. It was warm, it was 21 degrees Celsius – the first time that it was 20 degrees Celsius or more this year. – It was the first day of summer!

And my first parrot tulip had opened. This is the first time that I have parrot tulips in the garden.

It was, again, around 15 degrees Celsius on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday last week, but over the weekend it was again around 20 degrees Celsius in the daytime. On Monday this week, June 1st, it was already 24 degrees Celsius. And around 21 degrees Celsius in the daytime it has now been yesterday and today. But at night the coldest temperature was again a bit over 5 degrees Celsius here.

All the parrot tulips opened.

We have seen the first bats for this year here. On Saturday a week ago and last Saturday as well. – Saturday may be the best day of the week. 🙂 It may be just one bat that we have seen, though, because we have seen only one at a time. Anyway, lovely creatures!

Okay so I cannot post pictures on my Instagram, and I do not know why. I have already tried to do everything… I have been restarting, checking, uninstalling, reinstalling… trust it, use it, prove it, groove it like Spice Girls… I even changed my username just for the heck of it, and changed it back again, just because I could do it… But I cannot change my profile picture or post pictures. I can like other people´s pictures and use Instagram in every other way, but my own pictures are doomed…

There has of course never been anything shady about my Instagram or about my actions, the last time that I posted something on my Instagram was on December, but come on, that cannot be the reason! 😮 Can it? And my boyfriend has tried everything and more, and he is a professional software person. I don´t know what I´m gonna do… I can always follow other people and like their pictures, but if I do those things and I am not posting anything, then I´m just weird, a stalker, a creeper… And I still want to post pictures on my Instagram! Perkele.

Grumbling followed by gorgeous flowers…

This is a pic from my phone, the pic that I was kinda trying to post on my Instagram.

Hyacinths, a lovely scent…

The pear tree is in bloom. It´s not as flowery as it was a year ago, but there are flowers, on four spots, as seen on the pic below. And the tree has grown!

In the back of our garden, I think that this is peony tulip. 🙂 It has a wonderful scent.

Forget me not, forget-me-nots… In the back of the garden, and near them…

…our small bird cherry tree is flowering, too.

I had already waited for it… “Cuck-koo!” – Cuckoo bird came back and started calling cuckoo on Sunday evening, and after that it has done it both in the daytime and evenings.

Tulips by my dwarf spruce…

My spruce is growing every year! 🙂

Parrot tulip break ~

I love parrot tulips, they just get better as they get older…

Random 🙂 Viola

The apple tree is in bloom. As marvellous as ever…

Our plum tree already bloomed. – Whoa! We´re just hoping that it had the time to get pollinated… Yesterday when I took this picture there was only a few flowers left to be seen.

Lily of the Valley flowers are here! Love the scent, love them.

Lily of the Valley is the national flower of Finland.

The first lilac flowers have begun to open.

Also our cherry bush and cherry tree are in bloom, hopefully I still have time to take pictures of cherry flowers tomorrow… I have been sitting at this desk for too long today and I have already seen too many pics today as well, phew…

Peonies have grown! I should like clean this spot up a bit…

Leena

Flowers flow

There’s a wonderful scent in the air everywhere outside. It’s a combination, a mixture of everything; earth, grass, flowers… Trees are blooming, too. Our plum tree is blooming and our pear tree is blooming, bird cherry trees are blooming outside our yard…

And yesterday evening I finally heard the “cuck-koo” – I think I heard the call of the cuckoo bird already before, but yesterday I heard it clearly.

Our plum tree is full of flowers. We planted this tree four years ago, it has been flowering every year now.

Our pear tree is full of flowers, too. This is the first time that this tree is full of flowers. – We planted it in September 2017. Oh, the scent… 🙂

Hyacinths are blooming in the garden as well.

And tulips…

Oh, colours…

Leena

Summer in full swing already

It’s been summer here in Finland all the time now… The temperatures have been between 20 and 25 degrees Celsius during the day, and some days it’s been even warmer than that, too… And when we’ve had like “a bit cooler weather”, the temperatures have been between 18 and 20 degrees. So, it’s been quite incredible to experience this here now… But one morning was cold this week – it was 4 degrees Celsius, whoa! But it’s been all sunshine, sunshine, and very dry everywhere…

And about myself… and my blog now. I’ve been working outside the home, so to speak, now, it has something to do with gardening (would you believe it? 😉 ) aaand not working at home with my computer means that I don’t sit by my computer that often now, because I wake up very early in the morning, and I drive to work very early in the morning – I’m some sort of an early owl altogether now, and I don’t have that much time or energy for this dear blog of mine. Well, I don’t mean that I was super blogger before, but I mean, for example, that some of the content of my blog will now be only on my Instagram (owlnatureleena), like most of the flower pictures, and so on. Well, let’s see how everything happens, just thought I’d mention that even if it looks like I’m doing nothing here in my blog, I’m actually doing many things out here and there and preparing myself for many things all the time. 😀 And yes, I still have some planting to do here at home, seeds, seedlings… Oh dear, oh dear…

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

Oookay, to begin with, our cherry tree didn’t survive the winter, it didn’t grow any leaves – it just stood there, all bare and dry…

So, this is our new cherry tree now. The dead cherry tree was by the woods, this is by the terrace of our house.

We actually thought that our cherry bush wouldn’t survive the winter, but here it still is. And it is flowering!

It still has many flower buds, too.

The pear tree is flowering as well. The flowers are… down there, all on the same spot… There’s been like five or six of them.

About some animals… Cuckoo bird has been calling here every day now – the delightful voice of the early summer! And my boyfriend has seen bats in our garden again. I haven’t seen them – I’ve already been sleeping…

The plum tree already flowered, it had perhaps around 100 flowers. And the apple tree already flowered, too.

Lilacs, common lilacs are blooming now. Oh, the lovely scent…

“Oh, summer, the light, the dazzle, oh, that shi…itake…!”:

-A bit of a night owl…? 🙂

-Leena

Bats here again, lilac flowers & other flowers, light summer nights, lovely scents all around…

We had one really rainy day, it was, like, more than 24 hours of rain here where we are living between Monday and Tuesday this week. Everything is so green and colourful out there now. And the scent of the summer is charming and fresh…

And the bats have been here again. – We have seen them here already three times now! 🙂 In the woods next to our garden and in our garden, and flying close above our heads. They were here for the third time last night. And we heard the cuckoo calling at the same time as well, the cuckoo’s been calling somewhere near here every day now, really around the clock. 😀

Lily of the Valley flowers now everywhere, in our garden as well. The scent of the flowers is one of my favourite scents in nature.

Lily of the Valley is the national flower of Finland. Lily of the Valley is called kielo in Finnish.

A week ago the lilac flowers were starting to open and the apple trees were still flowering…

Starry forest ground in the woods beside our garden after 23.45 PM a week ago. Chickweed wintergreen flowers or arctic starflower flowers. – The stars are not in the sky in Finland now, they are in forests, on the ground level, because of the light summer nights.

Today, here where I’m living, the sun rose at 3.53 AM, and the sun sets at 23.11 PM, the length of the day is 19 hours 18 minutes, and the darkest hours of the day are not that dark either… the special weeks up here… 🙂

I met this very busy friend at the fly honeysuckle tree in the back of our garden…

Our fly honeysuckle looks old, we’ve thought…

Lilac flowers! My darlings! 😀 Oh, the scent in the garden now… Okay, I’d better go outside, soon…

I took these pictures on Wednesday.

On our regular walk – in the raven forest near our home. A raven feather, one of them – there are always many of them there on the ground in the summertime. And the noble and funny ravens are croaking there… 🙂

And after the walk, more lilac flowers, in the evening light:

Under the lilac flowers, in the pictures above and below.

Lilac and the big Norway maple in our driveway.

Red campion or red catchfly flowers in the garden now as well.

These feet, duck feet, or what are they… Hmm, that’s tropaeolum majus or garden nasturtium or Indian cress growing. Something to admire and eat…

We’ve planted numerous seeds… flowers, food, everything. I’ll take pictures and write about everything here, when it’s the time… And if something doesn’t grow, I’ll think about it here as well. 🙂

-Leena

Bats seen here, new garden potato field, apple tree flower buds…

It’s been pretty summery now. But still no rain here where we are living – the rain that the garden and nature need now… They say that this afternoon it will rain here… *waiting*. 🙂 It’s now light green around out there everywhere as everything is growing, and in many places some bushes and trees are loaded with white flowers, for example bird cherry trees are in flower now, lovely scent…

This was my project on Thursday and Friday evenings last week; I made a new potato field in our garden. I dug it through the lawn, so to speak, using that garden hoe in the picture. The hoe is my favourite gardening tool, it’s so useful and comfortable to use! And I also used a shovel and, naturally, my bare hands – my bare hands are my other favourite gardening tools – I never use gardening gloves, they are only in the way, a disturbance, and I want to and need to feel the earth in my hands – I’ve gone crazy in that way… 😉 It’s earthing… Body, mind, spirit…

So I dug the new potato field all by myself, one part of the field was already ready; it was our strawberry field before – luckily, because it was hard work that digging. I also had some… theoretical help… ‘someman‘ was helping me to measure the size of the field and telling me where to put the seed potatoes. And when I was taking a short break, drinking some water inside the house, someone who had just gone outside offered me some practical help – this is what I found when I came back outside and to the potato field:

“No, you should do it like this!” – ‘somemeow‘ had moved some seed potatoes that were already placed on the soil, evenly spaced… 🙂

When the potato field was ready on Friday, late in the evening, it was time to go to sauna, with the first fresh birch leaves for this spring or summer… some more earthing… I wrote about sauna earthing already last year, here.
This year the birch leaves are still tiny, because the spring was so slow, but they are so wonderfully fresh and sticky, and naturally, the scent is heavenly. I took again a real bath with the birch leaves: I rubbed the leaves against my skin, buried my face into the leaves, hit myself with the twigs… Stay closer to nature, feel closer to nature, be a bit witchy! 😉

This year we seem to have only four narcissus or daffodil flowers – leaves of this plant we have in all the spots that we have narcissus plants in the garden, but only four flowers, two in one spot and two in another spot. They, too, are late, but they are here…

We’ve heard the calls of cuckoo bird somewhere near here every day now.

On Sunday, after 23.30 PM, when we were having a campfire in our garden, we had some visitors – bats! Three bats! It was a big surprise. We’ve seen bats before, but not here in our garden and not so close. It was the first warmer night with more mosquitoes here this year. All of a sudden the bats dashed and flapped into the woods beside our garden and into our garden as well, they flew all around here; into our garden, back into the woods, back into our garden… This continued for some time. And they flew also close above our heads every time they flapped into our garden. So close, and they were so cute! 🙂 I thought that bats avoid people, but no, they don’t… It was amazing! – I’ve hoped that we would see bats here in our land, and now we now that it can happen…

The apple trees have small flower buds now. They are late as well. A year ago the flowering had already ended!

-Leena

Dandelions, cuckoo bird, bug hotels… spring advancing

Yesterday I noticed that the spring was at the same point here where we are living than it was in Turku already last Wednesday ( – my previous blog post here). Now it’s greener here, too, and we have many dandelion flowers as well. We had the first few dandelion flowers here on Saturday – I saw them after I had written that blog post of mine, when we went for a car ride.

And on that car ride, we visited the lake Köyliönjärvi near our home village. The bench over there was calling… 😀

It was lovely to sit there on the bench… Truly, once again, after the wintertime (and all the hailing lately), it really did feel like I was in a fairytale! 🙂

Hepatica flowers… these we’ve seen already a lot earlier here as well! But on Sunday I took a couple of pics of these as we were collecting some material for bug hotels. This was by a forest dirt road here in our home village. The forest was loaded with hepatica flowers beside the road, from one end of the road to the other end. Marvellous!

The first dandelion flower in our garden on Monday… or, actually, after this pic I noticed another one, too, and yesterday there was even more. It was high time to start eating them! 😉

We heard the calls of cuckoo bird already last week. From afar. Last night then we heard the bird coming near our garden. We heard a “Cuck-koo!” – only one “Cuck-koo!”. – It was funny, but I said that we want more!

And the bug hotel or insect hotel… Even though we have many heaps of dry leaves and dry twigs and forest land for bugs and insects here, we are building some bug hotels – it’s just fun and helpful, and the bug hotels always look nice as well. 🙂

Here’s the first two of them in the picture. And we’ll build even more bug hotels, different types of them, too. More pics then as well.

The night-time and ‘hailing time’ frost protection fabric has worked its magic in our vegetable garden. The peas, carrots and garlic have started to grow under it. This is the biggest sprout there, garlic, today.

-Leena

I saw a cuckoo bird!

I don’t have any pics of this, but this was such a special event that it must be mentioned here in my blog… I saw a cuckoo bird for the first time in my life. The cuckoo in Finland is the common cuckoo or European cuckoo. It flew to the woods next to our garden.

Over the past few summers (that we have lived in this house) we have heard a cuckoo bird’s wonderful voice here coming from somewhere close. I’ve been missing the voice lately – I already thought that a cuckoo bird will not come here this year at all… but it came with a show! 🙂

-Leena