ladybird – Owlnature

More flower pictures & my Instagram just still does not like me at all…

Accidentally climbed too high? – Hold on tight! I watched this ladybug climbing up and down the blades of grass yesterday. It was funny. 🙂

Good morning! Today, with our cherry tomato plants in the greenhouse. They are growing well and are sturdy. They are Tiny Tim tomato plants, nice. (I love A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.)

Okay, now that we have had some coffee, let us complain a bit… So in my previous blog post I grumbled that I cannot post pictures on my Instagram (“Kuvaa ei julkaistu” – “The picture was not published” it just says) and I cannot change my profile picture there… I forgot to mention that Instagram does store my pictures… I don´t know how to explain this, but I can see the pictures that I have tried to post there, on the spot where we first go to when we are selecting which picture to post, it´s like added to the gallery of my phone on Instagram, but the “filtered” (I usually use the ´normal´ filter) pictures are not in the actual gallery of my phone. (Oh man I´m good at explaining these things…) And I don´t usually have my Facebook app open on my phone, because I usually use my computer, but yesterday I had a good spot to try to post a picture on my Facebook from my phone and, well… yeah, I guessed it already beforehand – my Facebook worked as usual. Saatana.

Let us concentrate on the flowers… I took the following pictures yesterday.

The cherry tree is in bloom. We planted this tree two years ago, and a year ago it had 11 flowers. Now I can´t count the flowers, the tree is not completely full of flowers, but there many many flowers!

The cherry bush is as flowery as ever. We planted this bush cherry in September 2017, and this is the third year that it flowers like this.

Lily of the Valley amongst ferns.

Forget-me-not

Stars have started to come out in the woods and blue gold is ripening… Chickweed wintergreen or arctic starflower and bilberries. We had a tiny amount of rain yesterday evening, too tiny – everything´s so dry and we also want to collect rainwater… But they say that it should rain a bit more tomorrow.

Today´s pictures:

A pic of what I´m reading, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. I haven´t been reading much lately, but now I want books back into my life again.

Lilac flowers, most of the lilac flowers in our garden haven´t opened yet, only a few.

Oh, the scent…

Globeflower, always looking so nice in the middle of all the green.

Leena

The first butterflies and a ladybird in March (and other stories)

You just never hear the end of it.

So what it´s been for many weeks now: First everything was normal, and then… The shit and the fan and toilet paper, don´t-wanna-go-to-the-library, washing the skin off your hands, social distancing, self-isolation, sleet and hail, too much news, anxiety, sunshine and pretty warm weather, coltsfoot flowers, snow and sleet, too much news, plants growing, cold weather, snow, anxiety and fear, flies, must-go-to-the-grocery-store-anxiety, washing the skin off your hands, stress, butterflies, a ladybug and bumble bees, hope, snow and too much news, sleet, wind, hail, sunshine, hope, Very windy weather every day, pretty warm weather for two days, sunshine, hailing like crazy (every day), sunshine, The fear of False Hope…

So the crocus leaves, daffodil leaves and tulip leaves started to emerge in March, usually we see them later in April and in May. We did not have permanent snow cover this year…..

Crocus flower buds in April. By the way, I haven´t been taking too many pictures lately, but there´s at least some snapshots in this blog post now anyway.

And so, just for the record: I saw the first butterflies, brimstone butterflies, on March 25th, the first coltsfoot flowers on April 6th, the first hepatica flowers on April 17th and the first wood anemone flowers on April 28th.

April snows…

The first ladybird here this year, outside our greenhouse in late March when we had some warmer days. We usually see the first butterflies and bumble bees here later in April and ladybirds maybe in May.

A squirrel it was in April. We have seen the busy guy here many times. 🙂

´Gaining ground´… We both did this, and I couldn´t raise my hands for a while after using this machine. Those muscles. 😀 (And those solar panels work for the garden shed.)

I had sunglasses on me, it was nice and warm, it was not windy, it was pretty silent, only birds were singing, butterflies were flying in the woods – it looked like a fairy tale, I was sitting on the garden bench and I was leaning against the wall of our house, I felt like I was in another planet… And then it occurred to me: “This must be the feeling… So many people go to a foreign country… to feel this…” …

I started washing the greenhouse. It was great fun!

Well, lots of things to do at home, Everything in the house and outside, in the garden, in the greenhouse, the yard, the garden shed… By the way, the last time I posted something on my Instagram was on December 6th, I think. – Just saying this to myself…

The greenest guy in the house, the green huntsman spider again, this was in our living room in late March. We saw him often!

Pics today:

We have and have had pretty many crocus flowers this year, a bit hear and there in the garden, it was so cold that these were not open yet at the time of my morning coffee in the middle of the day. It was sleeting a bit again yesterday.

Okay, my boyfriend just said: “It just sleeted again, but now the sun is shining.” So it sleeted today again, I didn´t notice, I don´t have time for everything. 😀 Wait… now I see it… or something – it´s hailing, and the sun is shining at the same time. Springy!

The first daffodil flowers…

by the woods… 🙂

And of course we have these glory of the snow… flowers.

Leena

Maytime

Everything is growing, everything is green, and there are flowers, too, everywhere! Well, we already had a cold period again, it was a short one, but it was hailing and snowing. Nothing stayed on the ground though, it was just snowing and hailing and the sun was shining as well, at the same time, too, again. – Business as usual.

And now we’ve had warm days again – around 15 degrees Celsius and around 20 degrees Celsius it has been, yesterday it was a bit above 20 degrees Celsius and today it’s already 23 degrees Celsius. Feels like summer for us! 🙂

A pic today. There suddenly was a random tulip bulb in my hands last autumn, and I planted it here thinking that it might be nice to have a single tulip blooming beside my dwarf spruce. Well, it is! And the tulip is taller than my tree. 🙂

May — ~Hiding… someone’s always hiding…? 😀

A ladybug or ladybird was hiding in our pear tree yesterday, I saw her (?) again today, in the pear tree, she had come out from her hiding place…

A dandelion in our garden, it is like… two dandelions in one – a broad stem and two different flowers, hmm…

We went for a walk by the lake Pyhäjärvi here in our home village yesterday.

In the woods there… This doesn’t look bad in pictures, but it looks more impressive in nature, the tree really is bigger in nature, and I always am strangely awed by this big tree that has come down…

Another big tree, a very old birch tree…

We already have the smaller greenhouse in the corner of our terrace. We will have another greenhouse in our garden, a bigger one. This is what we have there now; the ground (foundation not quite ready yet) for the greenhouse and marigold flowers (as a symbol of hope ;D ) – we still have to build, assemble the greenhouse as well…

Leena

Summer flowers, little friends, eating brain mushrooms…

Finally we have had the rain that the garden, nature and we people needed… now we have had two rainy days, the first one last week after that blog post of mine, and today is the second rainy day. The cooler air also returned for a day or two last week – especially Friday was a ridiculously cold day… Now it’s been all summery again.

One narcissus or daffodil flower was a home for this little guy for two days. This spider really stayed here for two days, but when the cold Friday came, he was presumably off to some warmer place. 🙂

Some rockfoil flowers in our garden, not many, but they are beauties.

Our plum tree has been blooming, now the flowers have already started to disappear. Last year the tree was in bloom already on May 23rd, and there was well over a hundred flowers, but this year… I actually didn’t count them, but I think 20 flowers (or fewer?), definitely not many more than 20… so let’s see what happens… 🙂

High up…

These brainy friends… highly toxic friends… We got some brain mushrooms from Eastern Finland. Brain mushroom, gyromitra esculenta, false morel… These are real delicacies in Finland. Quite unique taste! But very dangerous, deadly, before boiling them at least two times. And most of the poison disappears during the boiling – up in the air, so one has to make sure that the house is ventilated well – we, for example, opened a door and two windows. We ate the first part of our brain mushrooms – cooked them with just cream and a bit of salt, and ate them with potatoes. Excellent food! We still have those mushrooms for two meals in the freezer. In Finnish this brain mushroom is called korvasieni – ear mushroom. 🙂

Okay, I never knew until now that we have this fairly tiny bird cherry tree in the back of our garden. I just found it. And I found it blooming! It’s in a spot where, umm… many different things grow. So, yeah, we still have that sort of spots in our garden. 😀

Good morning! Forget-me-nots in the back of our garden again, by the ditch… My favourite small flowers!

In German, Spanish and English the name of the flower means the same: Vergissmeinnicht – nomeolvides – forget-me-not. But in Finnish the name is lemmikki, literally pet or darling, and the name can also be understood: “a flower of love“. 🙂