luonto – Page 17 – Owlnature

Mushrooms

I absolutely love mushrooms! And mushroom hunting. Self-picked mushrooms and self-prepared food with them are something totally different from the canned mushrooms that we meet on pizzas, for example… – No wonder many people believe that they don’t like mushrooms at all… 🙂

And probably we all know how dangerous mushrooms can be – that is a fact indeed! We, me and my boyfriend, got our first facts on mushroom hunting, and bolete mushrooms or porcini mushrooms in particular, when we were mushroom hunting for the first time, with my boyfriend’s father in Eastern Finland. After that we have used a mushroom guide book and the internet, both. 🙂

This blog post of mine is not a proper guide to these two types of mushrooms that I have in the pics below, so don’t eat mushrooms based only on knowledge you get from here! – I’m just having a bit of fun with mushrooms here in this blog post, with a little bit of information! 🙂

The first five pics I took on our front yard on Friday.

We have numerous shaggy ink caps on our front yard every year. They have their own special place there. 🙂 Shaggy ink caps are quite charming and funny mushrooms; they have many phases when it comes to their appearance.

First they are just white, short and chubby ‘trunks’. Then they grow to be tall and thin mushrooms with a proper cap, which then starts to melt away, to dissolve, to drip down, as black liquid or ‘ink’.

These mushrooms are edible when they are very young and white, that mushroom in the pic above is already too old. We have never eaten these, but they say, these are quite good edible mushrooms when they are young.

This ‘ink’ of shaggy ink caps actually was used as ink in days of old. 🙂

Ink dried up?

The rest of the pics I took on Saturday night, after a walk in the forest. – We came out of the forest with our hands full of woolly milkcaps.

Fluffy mushrooms! Cute and delightful! 🙂

Woolly milkcaps are fully edible, but they must be boiled, and they must be boiled longer than some other mushrooms. Woolly milkcaps must be boiled about 20-30 minutes. The taste of raw woolly milkcaps is strongly bitter and raw woolly milkcaps don’t agree with one’s stomach, at all. Cooking, boiling and rinsing the mushrooms removes the poison from them. The taste of woolly milkcaps after boiling them is very delicious! We cooked a creamy sauce with these.

Mushrooms always have funny and cunning names. In Finnish, for example, this woolly milkcap has two names – other one of them is karvalaukku – fur bag, literally. 🙂

-Leena

The last pictures from August

Now the ones from August I talked about yesterday…

The first two pics I took at the lake Pyhäjärvi, on a dock, 8th August. At the end of the dock.

The next five pics are peony poppies, 9th August. I thought I already had seen all my peony poppies this year, but all of a sudden there were two more – with colours totally different from my previous poppies this year. 🙂

Two pics of the first one…

And three of the other:

Nice surprises they were… 🙂

On August 21st we visited for the first time a bird watching tower quite near our home. It’s called Kauklaisten lintutorni in Finnish, Kauklainen bird watching tower in English. 🙂 It’s located in Rauma.

A beautiful, soft, quite harmonious view it was from the tower…

There’s also a walking trail there, but we visited only the tower – have to go back someday.

So, this was the last from August here in Owlnature. From now on it’s all about September, mushroom hunting, and so on… 🙂

-Leena

Holistic wellness from nature, me -10 kg (!), annual mallow flowers…

It’s getting miscellaneous again. And I’m visiting Turku again, clarifications about my Turku here. 🙂

Morning coffee pic this morning, on my second floor here…

These two pics I took on Thursday at 23.30 PM (still lightly light in Finland) in the garden of our country home, after we had come back from Nordic walking and eating blueberries in the raven forest. 🙂 And after these pics, when I went inside the house, something bizarre happened…

I hadn’t weighed myself for a long time, but after taking the pics above, I DID, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing… I have lost 10 kilograms without trying! – I have only moved from the block of flats to a country home. 😀 Yes, I’ve noticed that my face, for example, looks thinner now, compared to pics of me a bit over two years ago, but still, my focus has been my mental health – I mean, really, my peace of mind and all… And I know that 10 kilos in two years may not be that much to some people, but for me, that’s a huge accomplishment! In my case, an accomplishment without even trying – just happening naturally – literally. OK, so, no wonder I’ve been feeling that light, the light and the bright at times. 😉

It was just that living in a city and in a block of flats… it just wasn’t for me, I didn’t know what to do with myself there in the end. I started to feel uneasy and even crazy at times, in a bad way, and I know what panic attacks are. In a way, I lost myself, but yes, I gained WEIGHT. 🙂 But I felt at home spending some time in the bushes of northern and eastern Finland. And yes, I’m not alone in this, my boyfriend had the same problems and he has already lost 20 kilos – he already took everything as a physical project since almost a year ago. And we’ve been eating normal (Finnish) food. But my boyfriend hasn’t eaten any wheat for almost a year now. So, we have never been obese, just easy to see.

But enough of this for now, I must just say that one has to give the good time to grow… So, this whole blog of mine is an ode to nature, I share pics and thoughts and the LOVE here, and I’m witnessing the holistic benefits of living close to nature every day in reality, in my own life, and this does not mean I would not love to visit cities, too, and cities, too, have some nature in them. This is just becoming myself, finding my place…

So, let’s continue the holistic struggle! – This I really mean, and this I say with love. 🙂

And with mallow flowers:

More annual mallow flowers in our garden. I took these pics, too, on Thursday.

-Leena

Flowers in the morning

A nice and sunny morning today was. And so much inspiration while having my morning coffee. I’m not sure if I should warn somebody of… something… but here comes 18 pics of which 17 are flower pics. So, here’s some FLOWER POWER. 🙂

I took today’s pics before and after 9 AM, a few pics are from Friday and Saturday. First peony poppies this morning:

The first peony poppy grown from the seeds that I planted this summer. Five pics of it here… 🙂

It has grown tall.

Marvelous, colourful peony poppies…

And my ‘wild’ poppies, two more of them.

Annual mallow grown from seed. The first opened mallow flower this summer, I planted them last summer, too. Mallows are lovely. Other names for this annual mallow: rose mallow, royal mallow, regal mallow.

A Strawflower bud opening on Friday.

More strawflowers on Saturday.

Nicely rustling flowers, when you touch them. 🙂

Strawflowers this morning:

I took this pic while I was taking a break from taking pics of flowers this morning. 🙂 I was sitting on a bench, eating a banana and redcurrants freshly picked from the bush. Having some more coffee.

And more flowers this morning:

And I planted cornflower seeds, too, this summer. The first flowers are emerging from buds.

Butterfly flower, Schizanthus. Or poor man’s orchid. 🙂 Grown from seed. A tiny and an exotic looking flower.

A choker… And the flower is called red flax. It’s grown from seed in the geometric flower plantation made by a man. 🙂

-Leena

Blueberry gold, the next peony poppy, the very last peony flower

We’ve been doing quite a lot of Nordic walking, but I don’t always take pics of it… On Thursday I took a pic – I tried to demonstrate what we’ve been doing quite a lot lately; Nordic walking and during that activity picking and eating blueberries, too (isn’t that a healthy and pleasant combination 😉 ) in the forest where one of our favourite walking trails goes.

The starting and ending point of the trail is by the lake Pyhäjärvi, I took this pic after our walk – trying to get some of my blueberry fingers, too, in the pic. 😀 This previous blog post about Nordic walking was from the same forest, our raven forest near our home. We just love it! – There’s always a raven or many ravens croaking. Once we heard, and saw, many many ravens. We tried to count them; there was at least 15 if not over 20 ravens dashing, flying and croaking. Amazing it was. Ravens are both funny and noble birds. 🙂

A muffin again yesterday evening… We’re lucky enough to have a lot of wild blueberries in our back garden, too. Yesterday evening we made some blueberry muffins. Muffins of gluten free flour; whole grain oat flour. Oat is the best! 🙂 So delicious and healthy. And traditionally Finnish!

Two pics of the next peony poppy flower today. This, too, is one of my ‘wild poppies’. This was hit with rain – yesterday, heavily…

And the very last peony flower – just had to take pics today… Yesterday I was hoping that this would survive the rain and grow bigger…

…so that I could cut it for drying today. And that was what I already did, because I thought the flower is big enough to cut, to save, now. The other peonies that I cut for drying earlier, are still doing (drying) just fine. 🙂

-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

Coffee, starflowers, forget-me-nots

Coffee along with some charming tiny flowers today…

…and another one of our many Ibiza lizards… 😀 This one left with us from the Hippy Market Punta Arabí in May 2014.

Stars in the woods beside our garden. Arctic starflower or chickweed wintergreen. There really was a starry ground in the woods, now many of the flowers have already started to fade away… There are also lingonberry flowers in the pic above.

Such a beautiful forest flower the starflower…

And another one of my favourites, wood forget-me-not. We have a bed of forget-me-nots at the back of our garden. Precious. 🙂 I hope they still bloom for some time…

-Leena