kevät – Page 6 – Owlnature

Very miscellaneous lately

Hi! Things have been a bit hectic for us here lately. Everything like normal things and some extra, too. By the end of this blog post you’ll know why this post is very miscellaneous this time… 🙂

My pics start on Monday evening… It was the first time we used our campfire coffee kettle that we bought at a flea market last week. We had been thinking about buying a kettle for campfire already for ages, and finally we found the perfect one at a flea market; made by Finnish Hackman and the price reasonable 12 Euros at the flea market.

So nice! 😀 Perfect. -Water boiling, ground coffee added-

Coffee was steamy and so good…

OK, hello! 🙂 My blog is not about killing my darlings, so to speak. I mean, in the miscellaneous part and with my coffee pics I can have the world…. So now, I like cars, too, very much. That’s who I am. This week we had to change our car, get an unbroken car. We had a 1999 Ford Mondeo station wagon with a V6 engine. It got too broken for our patience. I took this pic when it was time for me to remove our Ibiza lizard from it. We were visiting Ibiza exactly two years ago – in the last week of May 2014. Ibiza is swarming with these cute lizards. 🙂 And naturally I still have this sticker as a keepsake.

This. Is now our summer car. 🙂 Our own car, but it’s supposed to be somewhat temporary. We got this on Tuesday this week. This is a 1996 Volkswagen Golf GL. Very well-kept, very German, very red. 🙂

Yesterday I took a pic when we stopped by the lake Köyliönjärvi. We live kind of between two lakes here – the other one is the big lake, lake Pyhäjärvi, and this is the smaller one, lake Köyliönjärvi. As I took this pic I was sitting on a bench so high that I could nicely wave my feet without sandals in the air. And the sound of the waves of the lake was nice and relaxing, too. 🙂
The weather has been very warm and sunny lately, today is a rainy day, but it should get sunny over the weekend again, they say.

The apple trees are in bloom. We have two big apple trees in our garden. The scent of the flowers is lovely…

Hopefully there’s still some time to take more pics of the apple flowers… this is all I’ve been able to do now… 🙂

-Leena

Plum tree in bloom

Our plum tree is in bloom. We planted this tree last spring. Last summer it had two flowers, but no fruits. I was humbly thinking that we wouldn’t have any plum flowers this year – this tree probably doesn’t like it here, in our garden, and won’t thrive. 🙂

On Saturday I finally tried to count the flowers and buds the tree has… there was over a hundred opened flowers and several dozen flower buds. This is a self-pollinating tree. It would be great to have two plum fruits this year! 🙂

The wind was blowing nicely…. But it’s been a very warm day.

A fairly tiny tree.

When I first saw all the flower buds I could hardly believe what I was seeing. 🙂 So, let’s wait and see what happens when the flowers disappear…

More about the plum tree and taking care of it here and here.

-Leena

Rainwater, birch leaves, sauna earthing…

It was time to go to sauna again yesterday evening. And it was the first time that we had fresh birch twigs in sauna this spring. And I had some rainwater, too…

I was lucky enough to get the last rainwater that fell from the sky yesterday before the sun started to show up. 🙂 I love having some fresh rainwater in sauna, I actually should have it there just a little more often. Skin and hair likes it. And you feel so much closer to nature when you use water from the sky. More reviving, calming, relaxing… so delightful. It’s the feeling, too! 🙂 And rainwater saves you money. And water, for the world as well.

Oh, the scent of the fresh birch leaves in sauna! And the feeling, as with the rainwater. And the fresh leaves, too, are good for your skin. I love taking a real bath: rubbing some leaves against my skin, having some leaves on my face, burying my face into the leaves, smelling them… hitting myself with the twigs a bit – that’s what we Finns always do… And it’s all heavenly, healthy, also good for your blood circulation. If there’s some insect poop there in the leaves, despite rinsing them, it doesn’t matter, I mean, because you’re a witch anyway! 😉

I also had some more earthing (getting some good energy from the ground), walking from the sauna barefoot on the cold grass. And one of our two cats, the black with white markings, came to goof around, too. 🙂

The place where we got our birch twigs yesterday. An abandoned railway near our home.

And we stopped by the lake Pyhäjärvi on a rainy day, last Sunday. Under an alder tree and its leaves, catkins and cones.

-Leena

I saw a cuckoo bird!

I don’t have any pics of this, but this was such a special event that it must be mentioned here in my blog… I saw a cuckoo bird for the first time in my life. The cuckoo in Finland is the common cuckoo or European cuckoo. It flew to the woods next to our garden.

Over the past few summers (that we have lived in this house) we have heard a cuckoo bird’s wonderful voice here coming from somewhere close. I’ve been missing the voice lately – I already thought that a cuckoo bird will not come here this year at all… but it came with a show! 🙂

-Leena

Rainy day pics

But first one pic from yesterday:

I was playing a surgeon, a seed potato surgeon – you have to be very cautious when you’re taking the seed potatoes out of the net bag packing, because the shoots get so easily detached from the potatoes and then they will not give you any food… or the food will be very slow… 🙂

So yesterday we made our potato field. It was actually hard work… as it always is with garden… hard, but so nice and therapeutic. 🙂 I took this pic today, as well as the rest of the pics in this blog post.

A rainy day, fresh air and expecting it to be even greener after some rain. It hasn’t rained for days, weeks, at least for a bit more than two weeks it has been dry. Now we don’t have to use the tap water to water everything growing in the garden. Have to be grateful. 🙂

OK, I don’t know how to keep up with the rhubarb…

These, some fern, we have many, the previous owners of this house have planted them. I’m not sure, but the current man of this house may have planted some, too.

Just some of our fern…

This geometric flower plantation is a man made. 😉

-Leena

Some miscellaneous in owlgarden & identification ( – answer found)

These first two coffee pics are from yesterday. Some food included in the first pic. 😉

They say it will rain over the weekend. Today we still have some planting to do, and lawn mowing, too.

Our Norway Maple in flower beside the driveway. I took this pic in our front yard today.

Have some cactus, or… Bali? One of my favourite pastilles. Tasty.

Now I need some heeelp! What is this flower called? 🙂 I have a hunch that it’s actually quite common in Finland… The leaves of this plant look a bit poisonous… it’s the spots. I tried to google this flower, but couldn’t find it. This flower stands in the middle of our garden.

EDIT: I found the answer last night, on 14th May. It’s Pulmonaria officinalis, rohtoimikkä in Finnish. And common names in English: common lungwort, lungwort or Our Lady’s milk drops. It’s not poisonous, but an old herb used for medical purposes. It’s a perennial plant and cultivated, not natural, in Finland. They say that the white spots look like unhealthy lungs and the scientific name Pulmonaria officinalis comes from that. Well, I couldn’t see that in particular, but they do look dangerous to me. 🙂 They say this actually is a herbal medicine for lungs.

I already earlier had browsed through a couple of plant and flower books we have, but couldn’t find this flower in them. Last night I finally started to browse through a book that I bought from a flea market some weeks ago. And I found this plant very fast from the book. The book’s original (=English) title is The Complete Book of Herbs and it’s from the year 1988. This book is fairly big and it cost me 50 Euro cents. Sometimes it’s just the books, not the Internet, and the older the book, the better! 🙂

On the vappu weekend we planted sunflower seedlings outside. They were raised from the seed inside the house. We planted these on four different spots in our garden. Hopefully we’ll have at least one fully grown sunflower. That would be great. Last year the seeds were planted straight into soil, and nothing grew. This time we did it properly and in the right way. So, now just hoping… This one in the pic for example has already grown stronger. 🙂

-Leena

Narcissus flowers, small grape hyacinth, Norway Maple in flower…

One positively overwhelmed nature and garden blogger here again, hi! 🙂

Yesterday we stopped by the lake Pyhäjärvi…

And yesterday the first narcissus or daffodil flowers opened. The narcissus blooming with pure yellow flowers is lovely, but these different shades are so welcomed… The previous owners of this house have planted these next to the woods.