luomu – Owlnature

Warming up

My hoe… I decided to plant potatoes late in the evening on Monday. A garden hoe is one of my favourite garden tools, I just always get out of breath when I´m like really using it…

I actually planted the potatoes quite deep, the pic doesn´t show it perfectly right. I scattered some chicken manure pellets there, too.

The first ever snakeshead lily flower in our garden. This flower has many names, for example: snakeshead lily, snakeshead fritillary, chess flower, chequered lily, leper lily… Another new favourite!

Just for the record about some animals… A woodcock started its regular flights here already in late March. Usually it starts the evening flights in late April. “Orr, orr, orr, pist!”

We saw a deer walking in our garden and in the woods on Tuesday evening. And I saw a deer leaping through the garden last week, and when we were on a car ride at night, we were there with deer and hares… We saw around four times deer (one or more at once) and almost 10 hares (only one at a time).

By the lake Pyhäjärvi here in our home village late in the evening on Wednesday.

Wood sorrel, I ate some.

So yesterday, on Thursday, it was already a bit warmer – the butterflies returned! Today it was 17 degrees Celsius in the daytime and it was the warmest day of the year this far. Usually we have some days of 20 degrees Celsius, or warmer than that, already in early May or even in April.

Pictures that I took today:

That big… bushy thing is of course rhubarb, and under it in the pic is ramsons, allium ursinum, that has many other names, too, for example: wild garlic, bear´s garlic, wood garlic… We´ve never had this bear´s garlic before (credit goes to my boyfriend who came up with the idea), now we have it on two different spots and hope that it will start spreading.

The other bear´s garlic spot.

Cabbage growing in the greenhouse. This is the first time ever that we are trying to grow cabbage. We have some cabbage (normal cabbage? 😀 ) and Brussels sprout growing, but we can´t tell which is which anymore here…

The cabbage plants are still growing in the pots, the cherry tomato plants are planted inside the greenhouse.

I think that this is a green hairstreak butterfly.

Praestans shogun tulips have opened now.

Lilac flower buds are emerging.

One of my evening tasks today was painting which I love doing. Actually we both are making this small garden table and I have been the one filling small holes in it and sanding and painting it.

Leena

May may

What´s around the corner? – Be careful!

Well, the crocuses are nice…

It is May now. It has been a pretty sunny week. We had some rain last weekend and after that there has been the scent of green grass in the air! The first dandelion flowers have come out as well.

Glory of the snow flowers. Aaand, but it has not snowed in May, yet. 😀

It was the warmest day of the year so far on Tuesday. It was 16 degrees Celsius in the daytime and it was not windy. I was sitting on the grass in our garden, by the woods. It was wonderful…

Solar power in our greenhouse as well.

Night owls´garden light the other night…

And yesterday I saw a hedgehog for the first time this year late in the evening. It was getting pretty dark and we came across each other by a tub/container where we collect rainwater so suddenly that I frightened him and he frightened me. 🙂

Full moon was coming my way, too…

The first thing today… I went to the greenhouse to open the windows. The greenhouse was heated up to 10 degrees Celsius at night, because it was too cold in the nighttime. It was a bit over 30 degrees Celsius inside the greenhouse with the sunlight in the morning, as seen in the pic above.

I had to water our cherry tomato plants, they already were all too dry…

Outside, garlic has been growing since March.

Those grapes… The first small grape hyacinths this year.

It is 13 degrees Celsius, nicely a bit warmer again today.

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

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

Autumn colours, by the lake, parsnips…

The first six pictures I took in our garden yesterday.

Our red oak is red, strikingly red, this autumn. 🙂

Birch tree & maple tree, again… I got a bit carried away with these two, they are both fabulously yellow, golden, this autumn.

Two pictures that I took by the lake today:

By the lake Pyhäjärvi here in our home village.

And I already wrote earlier that we are growing parsnips, too, for the first time ever, this year. I’ve made roasted parsnips twice, this was last night:

I used only salt and pepper and olive oil. And I don’t peel the parsnips.

Parsnip has a lovely nutty and aromatic flavour, it’s one of my favourite vegetables, best from the oven. 🙂

-Leena

Autumn leaves, new grounds, beetroot…

The autumn colours are particularly abundant and vibrant this year. We have our own word for the autumn leaf colour here in Finland – autumn leaf colour is called ruska in Finnish.

It’s exceptionally warm for October in many parts of Finland this weekend – over 15 degrees Celsius.

First just a few pictures that I took in our garden today:

We still have rose blooming in the garden, in front of the porch. We planted the plant in the summer this year.

October rose…

Okay, and what else am I doing…? 🙂 Hmm, for example, working by my computer for a bit again. And we, my boyfriend and I, we’ve been familiarizing ourselves with new grounds and exploring a new land – thanks to my boyfriend who had the chance to buy some land – forest and field, in the region of Etelä-Pohjanmaa – South Ostrobothnia, about 180 kilometres north from our home. So, that’s my boyfriend’s project, but there’s plenty of space also for me to learn new things and to help out, and in fact, we both already attended our first day-long course on how to take care of forest.

I already wrote earlier that we are growing beetroot for the first time ever, this year. Here’s now our pickled beetroot that we made yesterday:

I used water, vinegar, sugar, whole white peppercorns, cloves, a cinnamon stick and salt when I was cooking the pickling liquid. And I put also cloves of garlic into the jar. Should be nice. 🙂

-Leena

About some of the edibles in the garden II

Garlic! 🙂 This is the first time that garlic has grown in our garden. – We’ve tried to grow garlic once before, but nothing really happened then…

Now, all of a sudden, we have both smaller and bigger garlics. They are marvellous! I love the smell and taste of garlic and I eat small amounts of raw garlic, too.

We used some of our onions fresh from the garden, but the rest of the onions we dried, because they were pretty small. There are both yellow onions and red onions. Dried onions are delicious as well.

Here’s our fruit and vegetable dryer. A nice machine. The scent of onion, for example, was wonderful when the onions were drying in there.

This year we tried to grow zucchini for the first time ever. Well, actually, we weren’t trying that hard, we didn’t pay that much attention to this try. Here in the pic is our biggest oddball, our smaller zucchinis didn’t have the time to grow bigger before the weather got a bit colder.

And another try… My broad beans… In a raised garden bed with wooden frames these were.

I didn’t get that many broad beans, but some broad beans anyway, and I want to try growing them again next year! 🙂

About the sweet corn… We’ve got more sweet corn now than a year ago. 🙂

And we are drying some sweet corn, too, for seeds, hopefully.

I’ll write about a couple of edibles in the garden a bit later again.

-Leena