kesä – Page 6 – Owlnature

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

All peonies, every pic…

Today the peony pics I talked about yesterday, I said that there would be poppies, too, but I’ll have them in an another post. This one’s devoted to peonies – the last ones for this summer… I took the first six pics on Saturday, they all look almost the same… almost, but not quite! I have them all in this blog post, for myself and for everyone else who loves peonies.

The peony moments go so fast every summer…

There cannot be too many peonies in one’s life. 🙂

The next two pics are from Monday.

And drying peonies:

First I must thank my friend who reminded me about the drying – as much as I love peonies, I would have just let them all go without realizing that I could dry them and have a lovely memory of summer in the dark wintertime, some of my peonies still with me! So, thanks A! 🙂

So, this is the traditional and simple air-drying that I’m doing. – My peonies are drying in our storage room which is the darkest and coolest place in our house, and yet, not very dark and not so cool – we live here in this warm but light jungle in the summertime. 🙂 My peonies were also fully opened as I cut them to dry on Monday, but I checked them today and the process was going just fine – the dream of my peonies being still with me in the winter is still alive! But if I cut the last peony to dry, I’ll cut it before it is fully opened.

And the very last peony bud in the bush today…

I think I’ll try to dry this one, too, if it still grows – I wasn’t so sure that this one would start to open… 🙂

-Leena

Interesting flowers

Pics I took between Saturday and today, in this blog post today… I have already so many pics that I’ll have to save the last peony pics and some poppies, too, for the next post, for tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, hopefully… 🙂

Burning love… we have it here and there in our garden. 😉

Well, this flower has many other names, too: Maltese Cross, dusky salmon, Flower of Bristol, Jerusalem Cross, nonesuch… Whoa! 🙂

Getting there! – In style! Don’t rush m… us!

Maiden pink again. This time not pink, but dark red. I call this an endless battle, trying to capture the true colours of maiden pink with camera… And the flowers come in so many shades – the neon pink, deep pink, lighter pink, redder, very red… Just marvelous!

My maiden pinks got some new friends. And I don’t know who they are. 😀

This is getting a bit tricky. I planted some summer flower seed mix – I naturally don’t know what will grow, aaand there’s so many flowers of this kind growing there now that I don’t know what to think of this… I googled a bit, and I found viper’s bugloss, neidonkieli in Finnish, which somehow looks like this. I also planted some butterfly flower (perhoskukka in Finnish) seeds somewhere (here?), but this doesn’t actually look like it. Have I forgotten that I planted something like viper’s bugloss, too…? – Completely possible. 😀

Oh, nice flowers! 🙂

“Not interested, actually, you know…” :

“Me neither.” :

Some bellflowers. Especially violet bellflowers we have here and there in our garden – the previous owners of this house got wild with them, too. 🙂 And I don’t know what bellflowers these actually are, but they are always lovely.

And the maiden pinks and their friends now have a purple cornflower amongst them since yesterday – this definitely has grown from the seed mix…

-Leena

Tea, flowers, Medieval Market, birch sap, coffee…

Some miscellaneous yesterday and today again. I’m visiting Turku now. – I’m on the second floor in a block of flats. I wrote a “story so far” in the sidebar of my blog the other day, telling that I studied in a city, and so on. So, clearly, I’ve lived again in the countryside for two years now, but I’ve had one part of my belongings still here in Turku. But, that’s about to change soon – I’m moving out of here completely now…

…like this – having some tea with no hurry whatsoever, trying to figure out my place in the solar system… 😀
OK, there’s a lot of coffee here in my blog, but… I do drink tea, too! Coffee is coffee and caffeine for me, but my tea I prefer without caffeine. Tea is an evening or a night drink for me. My favourites are chamomile tea and rooibos tea. Yesterday evening (in the pic above) I had chamomile, honey & vanilla tea. Sweet. 🙂

And again flower pics I took in the garden of our country home earlier yesterday. Again phacelia.

And more pics of maiden pink, too. It’s difficult to capture with camera the striking neon red colour the flower has, it dazzles the camera… 😀

One peony bud, three pics…

Yesterday we visited the annual event, the Medieval Market of Turku. The Medieval Market is one of my favourite places in Turku. It’s a place for old, traditional and genuine things, scents, sounds, atmosphere… And I had my traditional cup of nice super drink, ice cold birch sap there. 🙂 Nature’s renewable and healthy magic potion that I’d love to have a little more often.

And morning coffee today. Here’s to us, I guess… 😉

-Leena

A tar kiln, a muffin, flowers… miscellaneous yesterday and today

It all starts with a couple of pics of peony flowers. 🙂 (Peonies earlier here and here.)

Yesterday evening and a summer tradition in the village of Sydänmaa in the municipality of Säkylä, here in Satakunta region: a tar kiln – the real making of tar in a traditional method. The tradition of making tar has its roots in the 1600s in Säkylä. This annual four day (& night) event has been created by skillful local volunteers for 20 years. Yesterday the tar kiln was set on fire, I took these pics right after the blaze started.

Such a nice event and nice memories again! And the fire from the big tar kiln is so hot, I already started sweating as I was taking these pics. 😀

And from the tar kiln we came back home to make some muffins. These are made of gluten free flour; a mix of buckwheat, potato flakes, ground linseed and psyllium. And dark chocolate and banana. We have made different kinds of good gluten free muffins before, this was again something different. 🙂

And again flowers in our garden. This is some sort of phacelia, I don’t know how to say it better in English. In Finnish this is called kellohunajakukka. Lovely flowers and so charming the colour blue! Fairy-tale like. The seeds of these flowers were, by the way, planted by a man. 🙂

Maiden pink. I planted the seeds. 🙂 It’s said that this is one of the most red wild flowers in Finland, if not the reddest. Actually it looks very striking with the colour partly being screaming neon red. Maybe I try to take more pics of this, too, later… This flower can be planted or wild in Finland, but it is, unfortunately, near threatened in the wild.

And today we stopped by the lake Pyhäjärvi…

-Leena

More irises & peonies

Now a pic overflow with my favourite perennials. Yesterday I still took some rainy day pics, pics of irises, too. My first blog post about iris flowers here.

A rainy day can be an inspirational and a lovely day to take pics!

And today peonies again… peonies on a sunny day. My first post about peony flowers here (the rainy yesterday it was).

One way to enjoy the scent is to take pics of the flowers… 😉

Those luxuriants… 🙂

-Leena

A bounty of peonies on a rainy day

Today is a warm and rainy day. It’s really nice to have some rain, because it’s been so dry for the garden for so many days now. And we don’t have to use tap water now, have to be grateful.

So, today, finally some big peony flowers, too, in Owlnature. 🙂