growing sweet corn – Owlnature

Warming up

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.

Leena

Tomatoes, a pumpkin, sweet corn, building a garden shed, KonMari (don’t ask…;))

The first four pics I took today:

An autumnal sunflower bowing beside our porch. Dignified, charming…

A bit bleak today.

There are still a few small marigold flowers in the summer flower bed.

Harvestman…? That’s funny. 🙂 This guy was waiting for us beside our front door when we came back from grocery store yesterday.

This picture I took today. I emptied our greenhouse yesterday evening. The things we can eat… Tomatoes, tomatoes, and some of them are still ripening here in our kitchen now. When we planted the tomato plants we used seeds from Finnish greenhouse tomatoes that we bought in grocery store last winter. And The Pumpkin, our only pumpkin this year. I already had a picture of it on my Instagram (owlnatureleena)…

This was a bit over two weeks ago. We harvested our sweet corn. Well, we get some seeds for next year again. 🙂 We also ate a good amount of ‘baby corns’ raw out there while harvesting, they tasted so… sweet!

The next two pics I took today:

Some sweet corn plant decoration in the garden now.

Purple coneflower in October… I love this colour, too!

This was last week. We are building a garden shed.

The rest of the pics I took today:

I love painting! This is the floor of the shed.

I honestly still don’t know what this bush is called…

So KonMari, the method of tidying up. Up! I read the book (had already a pic of the book here in my blog…) and I watched the Netflix series, and I liked them both a lot, and I like her. So it was time to start organizing The Mess. 😀 Here in our house. We just finally need to organize and tidy our home up, also for some empty spaces, and some places here need to be more reachable, so to speak, and so on. And just simply… for cleaning up. Now I’ve already done my clothes and our bookshelf. I find the KonMari method very helpful and inspiring. 🙂

A bit of our bookshelf now… Finally it’s presentable! More pics later…? ;D

It’s our big Norway Maple…

Things and stuff to do, these among other things. What’s enough? Hmm…

Leena

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

Sweet corn, grape vine, purple coneflower – the strangers in our garden

Now some more adventures in the garden. This year I grew sweet corn for the first time. It was a quite fascinating experience! An experiment. 😀 For a Finn corn plants are rather exotic plants, they are not like potatoes and carrots that are popular and are grown everywhere (and grow everywhere, too). Usually the growing of corn plants succeeds only in southern Finland, and even here the summer generally has to be very good, favourable.

This is how big my sweet corn plants grew, they were grown from seedlings. I took this pic a bit over a week ago when I harvested my sweet corns.

And something about my adventure… I wasn’t at all familiar with the growing of the corn plant, or… with the corn plant itself. – I didn’t know what to expect and what there should, like, be in the plant so that it would be able to be pollinated, and… what the plant should look like – where the different parts of the plant should grow… OK, so I was a bit puzzled with all the stages of the growing of the corn plant.

The only thing I knew was that corn plants need rich, fertile soil, and that I had to put some frost protection fabric on them when it was cold in May. And about the summer… the summer in Finland this year of course was not very good for the growing of corn plants.

Here were the results. Not so much corn… but wow, the plants had so much growing to do! And they did grow some small miracles and even one bigger with actual kernels on the cob. (In addition to these in the pic, there were also three more small miracles and one bigger with a few kernels, but they were already a bit mouldy.) I cooked these corns in the pic in water and we ate these ‘baby corns’ and these real kernels in the bigger corn. They were just delicious!

OK, so, now I know how to actually grow corn plants and what kind of plants they are in the first place. 🙂 And I would definitely grow sweet corn plants again! And I would write about it, from the very beginning… now that I know what to write. ;D

We’ve had this grape vine plant growing in our garden for three summers now. In spring this year we were just looking at the spot where this had grown in previous summers like “will it even grow this year… or ever again…” But it did grow this summer, too, and never before it has grown this big. And what’s more…

…this year our grape vine started to even grow some grapes! Quite amazing, a bit unbelievable. – I have not expected that our plant would actually grow fruits. Now it has two bunches of grapes growing, this bunch in the picture has the bigger fruits. OK, they won’t grow more now in autumn… A bit of grape tasting next, no matter how small or unripe these are. 🙂

My echinacea purpurea or purple coneflower flower for this year in the garden now. I planted my first ever echinacea plants in May, three seedlings in total. I wasn’t sure if I should see flowers this year or not, or perhaps next year, this should be perennial… Well, this is not a perfect echinacea flower, but a pretty autumn flower anyway! 🙂

The other two seedlings didn’t grow that much, the one on the right can hardly be seen in the pic.

But this is tall…

Echinacea was, and still is, one of my dream plants or flowers for my garden, now I would like to plant a few seedlings more of this. 🙂

-Leena