hyötykasvi – Owlnature

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

Autumn? And pears, grapes, flowers…

So it’s officially autumn in Finland. I can’t believe I just wrote that.

I was travelling in Eastern Finland with my boyfriend for two weeks, and I will have some pics from there here in my blog a bit later. I have most of the pics on my phone (and there are for example pics of our plums on my phone, too) and I have to find a way to get all the pics to my computer (I have no idea what I’m doing… ;D ) But I did post a few pictures on my Instagram (owlnatureleena). We even saw a tiny bit of Russia. 😀 – Where the country begins, so to speak.

hill Kipari, lake Keyritty, Rautavaara, Northern Savonia, Finland

So now only one pic from the trip. This was on a hill Kipari in the municipality of Rautavaara, in the region of Northern Savonia – Pohjois-Savo. The name of the lake is Keyritty. We stayed in Rautavaara. Such a lovely place.

The first ever pears from our garden! I didn’t have time to take pics of our small pear tree when it had all the pears, but I took a pic of the pears on a plate – all the pears had fallen down from the tree during our trip, they were ripe, and I just picked them from the ground. They were delicious! I made jam.

This year we have grapes, too! I took all these pictures of our grapes yesterday. We had a very little amount of grapes two years ago, but now we have quite a lot, well, relatively lot. They, too, taste so sweet…

The grape vine itself.

The rest of the pictures I took today:

I’m still very much immersed in my reading hobby. Now I’m even reading how to get organized, so this is getting pretty serious. ;p

We have a small patch of lovely little sunflowers. They are grown from our last winter’s bird seeds.

And echinacea purpurea or purple coneflower charm…

This is my “I’m about to finish this blog post” coffee in our greenhouse, with some tomatoes. 🙂

Hmm, in general, I feel like I have tons of things to do now, but it’s just nice, I guess… 😀

The summer flower bed…

Leena

Cherries, cucumbers, one bat, flowers (& friends)…

Just making some lists… :p

Okay, this is the first time ever that we have cherries in our garden.

The small cherry tree had 11 flowers and a few cherries. That was so nice!

The young bush cherry had many many flowers, and many cherries, too. And there are still fruits ripening in the bush. I didn’t know what to expect. 😀 Love them!

The first ever ‘open-field’ cucumbers from our garden.

And there’s more growing, this was yesterday. I planted only one plant, one stem, this stem in the pic. Just a delicious experiment…

Cucumbers in our greenhouse. Greenhouse cucumbers grow really well and are so delicious! We’ve already had several.

Two pics that I took yesterday evening when I closed the windows and the door in the greenhouse:

More cucumbers growing…

I wonder if these tiny ones will still grow…

We saw a bat, the first bat here for this year, on 30th July late in the evening. It was flying, flapping in our garden and in the woods.

Some flower pics that I took in our garden yesterday:

Clematis, by the oak tree.

Tricolor daisy and a friend.

Garden rose and a friend.

Red flax and a friend. Friends everywhere in the garden in August. 🙂

Lily

Sunflower

They come in August.

Good morning today:

With clarkia amoena or godetia flowers…

And a busy friend here as well. 🙂

A little bit of rain and then sunshine again. It’s nice when it rains a bit, it has been rather dry all summer again.

I Have to go to the library today and I should wash the car…

Leena

Greenhouse, hot, light, bright…

It’s officially summer! And lately… First it was very freaking windy for many days, and a bit cold, too. Now it has been very warm again, even hot (too warm 😀 ) for a few days. For example here where I’m living it was 31 degrees Celsius in the shade in the daytime on Thursday, and not much cooler on Friday, and yesterday it was around 29 degrees as well. Today it’s 21 degrees Celsius – oh, normality… 😀

Our greenhouse is ready, yay! It has been fully ready for a few days now. First pictures that I took when it was still possible to ‘see through’ the greenhouse a bit:

And these are what we put into the ground, going round and round… hmm…

There it is, one of them…

The greenhouse is almost, but not quite, under the monster, our biggest pine tree.

Two pictures from the inside.

A few pictures I took today, the first ‘ready pictures’:

It was a lot of work and everything, but “Phew!” now finally… 😀

There are for example watermelon and sweet peppers growing. We carried 1000 litres of garden soil in bags into/outside the greenhouse.

Fuchsia flowers.

And viola flowers today:

Love the scent in the air…

Sage, too…

stars on the ground — Stars on the ground…

The stars are on the ground again this time of year in Finland. 🙂 – Arctic starflower or chickweed wintergreen in the woods next to our garden, I took this picture at around 11.55 pm on Wednesday. (And I was attacked by mosquitoes, there are plenty of them evenings these days.)

So the days are long now, light and bright. And they are still getting a bit lighter. Today for example, here where I’m living, the sun rose at 03.58 am and the sun sets at 23.03 pm – the length of the day is 19 h 5 min.

Leena

Very warm & more flowers

It has been warm and it was very warm for a few days; it was between 25 and 27 degrees Celsius between Sunday and Tuesday. Today it’s 18 degrees Celsius and they say that we will get back to more normal – to around 15 degrees Celsius now…

The first seven pictures I took in our garden on Tuesday, yesterday and today:

Our second cherry tree survived its first winter. – Our first cherry tree didn’t survive winter and we had to plant a new tree a year ago. This new tree had 11 flowers this week.

Here’s our cherry bush today. We planted this bush cherry in September 2017 and it had many flowers already a year ago.

Our oak tree in the back of the garden. I love these small oak tree leaves… Oak tree is one of the last ones to grow leaves in the spring in Finland.

Our old apple tree is flowering. Oh, love…

And our little bird cherry tree is flowering, too, in the back of the garden.

A nice tulip in the back of the garden as well. – We have a few ‘surprise tulips’ there. 🙂

By the lake Pyhäjärvi yesterday.

Me feeling summery… ;D

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

Collecting stuff

We collected acorns in October.

First these…

…and then these – about 300 acorns in total. Some of the acorns were already sprouting, lovely. 🙂 We collected them from the ground, under big oak trees, here in our home village.

The first two pictures I took in October, the rest of the pictures in this blog post I took today.

So, we planted the acorns in our garden, here…

…and here.

And we also collected some acorns for the land that my boyfriend now has in the region of Etelä-Pohjanmaa – South Ostrobothnia, about 180 kilometres north from our home, that is to say, we already planted the acorns there, into the forest ground. There’s a certain spot or place, an island actually, where broad-leaved trees are growing in the forest, but there are no oak trees, not yet…

So, this is all an experiment, with these acorns, just nice and interesting.

I collected spruce cones, too. These were on the ground in our yard, on the driveway. We don’t have big spruce trees, but there are spruces just outside our yard. I started to collect these just because I think that they are lovely, but my boyfriend said that we could try to get seeds from these as well. Well, that’s a good idea, an interesting experiment, too. The cones have been drying inside the house now.

And I was shoveling compost, emptying a compost bin a bit today. We have this year-round composter for kitchen (and garden) waste.

We shovel the compost into this container, where the process continues, and in the end, it all goes back to nature again. 🙂

-Leena