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Growing tomatoes this year & some bird related things

The story about growing tomatoes this year… It is a short story, very short… so short, that I already wrote it on my Instagram (owlnatureleena) a while ago.

My precious… The summer this year was not very good for growing tomatoes outside in the garden here in Finland. But some tomatoes did grow! We can still, in November, eat tomatoes that have grown in our garden. So… it’s not that bad after all. 🙂

We had only few bigger tomatoes, but many smaller ones. And again, they had to be taken inside the house for ripening. They were ripening on a plate in the kitchen, for weeks. Home-grown tomatoes always taste so incredibly sweet! They are just perfect.

And some bird related things… I found something that is over 20 years old, something that I missed – something that I thought I had lost forever…

My pendant, my bird! 🙂 I did not believe that this still was somewhere, somewhere safe… but yes, I found this at my childhood home, (where else!). A bronze pendant necklace called Tintti, made in Finland by Kalevala Jewelry. The stone is hand-painted ceramic.

Okay, I found these; my Tintti with its original box and another bronze pendant necklace by Kalevala Jewelry as well. Another bird! A bird called Tampereen seudun lintu, as old as my Tintti, but I didn’t remember that I even had it.

So, I had these in my childhood. I am so happy to have found them! My treasures… I think that these, too, will be in my pictures every once in a while. 🙂 I love jewelry and it can be seen in my blog…

And something I made over the weekend… I was knitting a bit, testing this rainbow yarn that I have. 🙂 At this point in time, another owl. My design – my problems – more fun in the end. I think he needs some fur around his beak…

-Leena

Observing November

It’s November – the fifth season has started. 😉 Now just some observations I made in our garden yesterday and today.

Under our biggest pine tree.

A dandelion and November secrets…

It’s time to start feeding wild birds.

A November apple… Now the apple tree, too, has lost almost all of its leaves.

Hawthorn berries. We have two hawthorn hedges, this is the one that we haven’t cut – and the one that has a lot of berries…

November came for the red oak. But the tree still hangs on to its leaves…

Someone from the couch: “Here’s some observation of November for you…

…I’ll be available again on the first of May, or on the 21st of April at the earliest.”
Me: “What are you doing?”
The tiger: “I’m observing November.”

Me: “Okay. Wait… What?”

-Leena

The first snow of the season

Today, on the 26th of October, we have the first snow of the season. It started to snow last night. Fairly early here in southern Finland – already in October, usually this happens here in November.

We have to enjoy this now, today and perhaps still tomorrow. They say, and we know, that this snow will melt by the end of the week. So, now, some pictures that I took in our garden today. 🙂

The corn plants and stuff…

Echinacea and peony covered with snow…

And leaves of the cherry tree…

I see something pink… They are clarkia amoena or godetia flowers! 🙂

Peony poppy pods…

And there are Christmas trees… :p

-Leena

Red oak & more October flowers

The nights have been colder now, the temperature has been around zero degrees Celsius and below. Right now, in the morning, it’s -4 degrees Celsius. Now it’s the time for our red oak to have autumn colours.

Quercus rubra or red oak, we planted this tree in the middle of July this year. A very young tree, tall and slender, hopefully it grows a bit stronger. 🙂

They say (in Finland) that red oaks have the colour red in their leaves in autumn when the trees are young, but when they are older, the autumn colour is not that bright anymore. But… some have seen old and red red oaks in Finland in autumn, and some have seen even green, very green, red oaks in autumn. So, it depends…(?) 🙂 Our red oak stayed green for a long time this autumn, compared with many other trees that have already lost all or almost all of their leaves.

The apple tree in the picture is the other one that still has a lot of leaves. But the red oak is the only one that still has all of its leaves.

Fall phlox grew a bit further after August. The new parts of the plant are flowering now, the older parts were flowering already in August.

Still some cornflowers… with their faces already down.

There’s still one new clematis flower blooming, I was surprised to find it. And I was delighted by its colour… deep thoughts, the colour October…

And viola is still there…

-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

October colours and some of the flowers in the garden

Last year it was like we didn’t actually have Virginia creeper at all – but we did have it a year ago as well. It was the second year for this creeper in our garden last year, and it didn’t grow that much, and it had no autumn colour whatsoever then.

This year our Virginia creeper has grown fairly big and it already has… some colour red, too. So nice! 🙂

Gladiolus, the surprise bloomer.

Still pot marigold or calendula flowers…

The already bloomed sunflowers just hanging…

…hanging around…

And still common poppy flowers…

The pear tree with some autumn colours now as well.

-Leena

About the fruit trees, new trees and a bush, an unidentified flower…

Our plum tree had last year (it was the first whole year for the tree in the garden) only one plum fruit, this year it has six! And what’s more, last year it had well over a hundred flowers, this year not many more than 20. Cool! 🙂

A nice fruit.

In July our grafted cherry tree started to grow a branch on its on. After that it has grown three more branches. What great balancing! 😉

The tree has grown further its ‘original’ branches as well.

A tree in progress…

A cherry bush now, too, we planted it next to the cherry tree last week.

And a pear tree, we planted it last week as well.

The pear tree has such flawless leaves!

EDIT: This could be gladiolus, miekkalilja in Finnish… I suddenly remembered this name, and it sure looked like gladiolus when I searched it. 🙂

An unidentified flower. – Yet another new flower for this autumn and we have no idea what this could be called. I tried to google it a bit, but no luck with that. It’s a fairly big plant, big flowers. We knew that something was planted in this spot, but didn’t believe that anything would bloom here this year.

Beautiful it is…

And another new tree. We planted this aspen tree the other day.

The autumn colour of the aspen trees is always so enchanting, bright, brilliant… And the sound of the aspen leaves quaking in the wind is lovely.

Populus tremula erecta is this tree.

I got a bit carried away with the colours… Well, autumn is once a year. 😉

-Leena