fruits – Page 2 – Owlnature

Dark & cold, cosy fires & lights, and creating dream home

The campfire owl here again… 🙂 We’ve had already many campfires in our garden this autumn, too, but I usually just relax and enjoy them without my camera or my phone, but on Friday, late in the evening, I had the inspiration for taking some pics, too. (A pic on my Instagram (owlnatureleena) as well.)

Campfires in the garden are a part of my, our, dream home…

So, we have lived in this house for almost two and a half years now. But I still had one part of my belongings in Turku – as I was going on and on here in my blog last summer. 🙂 But since the end of August it has been only this, our country home, for me… and I love it! But this has been quite far from my (or our) dream home; almost everything, every thing, is in the wrong place here inside our home, only like the bookshelf and drawers are in the right spots, there are many untidy and disorganized spots in our home, and partly, naturally, because I brought so many things and pieces of furniture from Turku as well, and so on, and so on… Creating our dream home here now is not about renovating (we have done that, too – more about it later, in some other blog posts, too) and creating our dream home is not, heaven forbid, about buying anything, oh dear… yes, maybe buying some new candles and even more houseplants, but nothing more now… Creating our dream home is now about organizing, tidying up and cleaning up our home – it’s “a bit” of chaos here now… and almost all of our large windows still are without curtains, just window blinds are there… But yes, the only way to start the project for me was, first emptying, then cleaning and organizing, our garage, which definitely is not a place for our car, but for other useful things. 😉

And when we had some room for big items in the garage after rearranging, we removed a big pile of long wooden boards from the middle of our kitchen – they were taking over one third of the floor space there, so we didn’t have a kitchen table and chairs there for a year and a half, or so. (We were renovating some ceilings and walls…)

I now have a tag creating dream home here in my blog, so I’ll be posting, with pics, too, about the project here and there…

Morning coffee yesterday. And a satsuma! It’s the season of Spanish satsumas again! So juicy and delicious, and cheap. 🙂

Under the oak tree…

The strawflowers again! 😀 And they are still opening and closing their rustling petals, with the days and nights…

Yesterday evening, now this was in my dream kitchen. 😉 – Finally the big pile of long wooden boards is out and the kitchen table and the chairs are there! And the table and the chairs are the ones I had already in Turku. 🙂 I’ve been dreaming of candlelights in the dark evenings in the kitchen… warm and cosy… And the light of the warm oven can be seen in the pic, too – I was waiting for home-made thin and crisp barley breads to become ready.

Living candlelights in lanterns outside in the dark… and this lantern can also be seen from the kitchen window when sitting at the table. 🙂

One more pic of the Friday evening’s campfire to end this blog post… and to celebrate the dark and cold, bewitching evenings and nights! 😉

-Leena

Growing tomatoes

This is what’s been happening this year: we have grown tomatoes for the first time, we started the pre-growing too late, but we’ve got some delicious red tomatoes to eat. The pre-growing should have started already in March or at the beginning of April. I don’t remember when exactly our tomato seeds were planted, but it was like May already… 🙂

The pre-growing happened in small containers inside our house and the pre-grown tiny plants, seedlings, were then planted outside, in buckets with drainage holes in the bottom. The buckets were placed to our vegetable garden – the all day sunny spot between our house and the woods. The wall of our home was sheltering the plants a bit. When it was sometimes raining too much, we carried the plant buckets inside our house. Everything went fine – the plants or their soil didn’t get any mold. – One just has to carefully keep an eye on the plants – when to water them, and how much. And tomatoes like fertilizing, we always use organic fertilizers.

And oh yes, I just love the scent of tomato plants! 🙂

I took this pic on October 3rd. This was the last day our tomatoes were outside – the upper parts of the plants had finally been frozen at night (and the plants were like all gone, the next day, October 4th). We noticed that our tomatoes actually did like a bit cooler air – they were ripening so well in autumn – they started ripening with the combination of cool air and warm sunlight. And it really was so wonderful that we had so summery September for our tomatoes… because we were so late with the planting. 😀 But oh yes, these home-grown ripe tomatoes that we now have had – they’ve tasted so delicious, sweet… they are miraculous! 🙂

Tomatoes do turn red and fully ripen without the main body of the plant, inside the house (and tomatoes do ripen without apples, and so on… 😉 ). The already red tomatoes, that are ripening to be eaten, we have kept on a table in kitchen.

But the first ripening of our tomatoes – the green tomatoes turning red, happens in the cool and dark sauna in our home. And when the sauna is heated, we take the tomatoes to kitchen.

Our biggest tomato for this year, I took it outside for pics… 🙂

So, now we know what to do in March next year!

-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

Coffee along with some strawberries, raspberries… and peony poppies

Today’s morning coffee pic with some strawberries and raspberries.

Wonderful time of the year is this… We get lots of berries (hmmm, or them fruits… but let’s not get into that berry-fruit terminology right now… :p ), enough for two people to enjoy many berries every day – raw from the bushes – we’re not preserving them, just eating them when they are fresh, sweet and juicy and healthiest. And oh, the scent! And yes, I’m still dreaming of planting more strawberries – their season goes too fast in Finland every summer…

The next five pics I took between Saturday and today. Peony poppies. These are my ‘wild’ poppies that are already blooming, completely unattended – they have grown from the seeds of the poppies I had last summer – we threw them around randomly in our garden. And some of the poppies now blooming have also grown as a surprise to us – beside the flower bed in which I planted poppies last summer. The poppies are growing through stones and thick soil, I didn’t expect that…

I love peony poppies, too. 😉 They also have a charming and distinctive scent.

Someone else, too, was enjoying themselves. 🙂

I also, of course, planted peony poppy seeds this summer, but the plants of those are still growing…

You can feel that you are in Hawaii, if you just put your mind to it:

Headstrong. Focus.

Well, you just can! – You can lie on a Hawaii textile… like our furry princess in the pics I took yesterday… Or you can plant your own garden, your dreams and reality, outdoors and indoors, and you’ll have the world around you all the time… 🙂

-Leena

Some sun internally and a few delights in the garden right now

Today it was again time to get some sun… internally. 😉

Egypt meets Finland… Navel Oranges are so juicy and delicious, and cheap at this time of the year, even in Finland. 😀 After some heavy rain today I was sitting on the wet garden bench again, devouring my orange and after that I took a short tour with my camera around our garden.

Leopard’s Bane or doronicum has started to grow. Waiting for the yellow flowers, last spring there were so many…

Yesterday I noticed that one part of our chives has started to grow, too. I tasted a bit of one of them – the taste was so good and fresh!

The first yellow bud of the narcissus that was in my previous blog post.

This I’ve been watching the whole winter and even now; the blackberry bush in our garden has a few very strong leaves – they have endured there on the twigs the whole time. All the other bushes and trees have lost all their leaves many months ago. 🙂

-Leena