Warming up

May

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…

May

I actually planted the potatoes quite deep, the pic doesn´t show it perfectly right. I scattered some chicken manure pellets there, too.

May

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!

May

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).

May

By the lake Pyhäjärvi here in our home village late in the evening on Wednesday.

May

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:

May

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.

May

The other bear´s garlic spot.

May

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…

May

The cabbage plants are still growing in the pots, the cherry tomato plants are planted inside the greenhouse.

May

I think that this is a green hairstreak butterfly.

May
May

Praestans shogun tulips have opened now.

May
May

Lilac flower buds are emerging.

May

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

~November reign

November, the fifth season, has been grey, brown, black… And then it started to really rain. But yesterday finally: SNOW! (The ‘third snow’ for this season.)

So now some November snapshots:

And then I was like...
And then I was like…

This was three weeks ago, after our ‘second snow’ for this season had melted. I truly loved our Jack-O’-Lantern, he was a very expressive guy. 😀

November

Still learning archery… I lost one of my arrows last summer. I shot it towards the woods and it got lost in the greenery. I think that the guy who cut the many tiny rowan trees there the other week found it and… this is how I found the arrow. Thanks! 🙂

November

By the lake Pyhäjärvi near our home on Wednesday this week. Well, that’s kinda light blue…

On Thursday:

November

Umm, our greenhouse in November. So I love all the seasons. But… meh now already… And it has been a bit difficult to get up in the morning lately. This late November thing…

November
Winter is coming
Winter is coming.

This was three weeks ago, almost right after my previous blog post. I looked out the window and saw this tiny insect flying outside and jumping on the snow there. Winter came for the tiny creature…

November

Yesterday morning, this was a lovely surprise – I heard the rain still pour down at night! And they say that the weather will now stay a bit wintry at least for a while…

November

Yesterday afternoon.

November

I’m reading Moominvalley in November for the second time. I read it for the first time many years ago when I still lived in Turku. The book was a bit odd experience to me – I was reading it and all the time I was waiting for the book to begin, so to speak, and… then I suddenly had just read the whole book. I don’t know what it was, but all the Moomin books are just great, I have now read them all and I love them, and I did like the November book already earlier, I love the language and so on, but something ‘made me waiting’… So now I must read this November book again so that I can see if I now get the nuances a bit better, or something, because I’m altogether a better person now. Well, no… But Now that I’m reading it again, I can say that I follow the book a bit better. And of course I like it a lot, and I like RuttuvaariGrandpa Grumble. 🙂

Today:

November

A pleasant morning…

November

Also because… I was watching cross-country skiing again. The Cross-Country World Cup started for this season already yesterday, here in Finland, in Northern Finland, in Ruka, in Kuusamo, one of my favourite places in the world. 🙂

November

And then sunshine! And our juhannusruusu – ‘Finnish Midsummer rose‘ bush again. This bush was loaded with white flowers in summer, but I don’t think I have any pictures of it, oh dear oh dear…

November
November

Blue sky! Haven’t seen that for a while.

The day is short; the length of the day today, here where I’m living, is 6 h 13 min.

November

A hare it was.

November

The sun was gently warming my face…

November
  • Leena

“Marco!” – “Polo!”

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 16 degrees, 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:

summer - kesä

A young hare in the forest. I love hares and rabbits. I had a rabbit when I was a child.

summer - kesä

Sheep here in our home village. They were baaing so much, they were just funny and adorable.

summer - kesä

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!

summer - kesä

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.

summer - kesä
~”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.

summer - kesä

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.

summer - kesä
summer - kesä

The last three pics I took today:

summer - kesä
summer - kesä

The summer hasn’t ended yet…

summer - kesä

And now just one picture that I took in our greenhouse today as well:

summer - kesä
  • Leena

Christmas time

Many things to do… I had some interesting new working experiences – it had something to do with getting some traditional Finnish Christmas food into stores, and now it’s Christmas time… Hmm, we’re cleaning our home now, and so on…

Christmas time

My morning coffee today. So, the house is a bit of a mess. That cloth… back there in the picture, for example, is a curtain from our living room. The curtain has fallen down because its handle got loose. And our couch ‘fell down’, too, so we’re basically sitting on the floor now. And we must clean the tables and take the carpets outside and hoover the house, and… But hey, it’s the shortest day of the year today! 🙂

The next three pictures I took in our garden today:

December
From the terrace
December echinacea purpurea and peony
Echinacea purpurea or purple coneflower and peony
December

We’ve had snow on the ground for many days now. And it’s snowing right now as well, and it’s -8 degrees Celsius, so we’ll have a white Christmas this year, too!

And here’s a video from our trail camera or game camera – I just call it an animal camera. We had the animal camera in my boyfriend’s land in the region of Etelä-PohjanmaaSouth Ostrobothnia. We brought the camera home for the winter. And here at home it was possible to get the videos to computer. We got some interesting and delightful videos. There were night-time wanderers… I’ll have a few videos here in my blog, too, so here’s the first one, a hare. 🙂 :

  • Leena