night owl – Page 3

Bats here again, lilac flowers & other flowers, light summer nights, lovely scents all around…

We had one really rainy day, it was, like, more than 24 hours of rain here where we are living between Monday and Tuesday this week. Everything is so green and colourful out there now. And the scent of the summer is charming and fresh…

And the bats have been here again. – We have seen them here already three times now! 🙂 In the woods next to our garden and in our garden, and flying close above our heads. They were here for the third time last night. And we heard the cuckoo calling at the same time as well, the cuckoo’s been calling somewhere near here every day now, really around the clock. 😀

Lily of the Valley flowers now everywhere, in our garden as well. The scent of the flowers is one of my favourite scents in nature.

Lily of the Valley is the national flower of Finland. Lily of the Valley is called kielo in Finnish.

A week ago the lilac flowers were starting to open and the apple trees were still flowering…

Starry forest ground in the woods beside our garden after 23.45 PM a week ago. Chickweed wintergreen flowers or arctic starflower flowers. – The stars are not in the sky in Finland now, they are in forests, on the ground level, because of the light summer nights.

Today, here where I’m living, the sun rose at 3.53 AM, and the sun sets at 23.11 PM, the length of the day is 19 hours 18 minutes, and the darkest hours of the day are not that dark either… the special weeks up here… 🙂

I met this very busy friend at the fly honeysuckle tree in the back of our garden…

Our fly honeysuckle looks old, we’ve thought…

Lilac flowers! My darlings! 😀 Oh, the scent in the garden now… Okay, I’d better go outside, soon…

I took these pictures on Wednesday.

On our regular walk – in the raven forest near our home. A raven feather, one of them – there are always many of them there on the ground in the summertime. And the noble and funny ravens are croaking there… 🙂

And after the walk, more lilac flowers, in the evening light:

Under the lilac flowers, in the pictures above and below.

Lilac and the big Norway maple in our driveway.

Red campion or red catchfly flowers in the garden now as well.

These feet, duck feet, or what are they… Hmm, that’s tropaeolum majus or garden nasturtium or Indian cress growing. Something to admire and eat…

We’ve planted numerous seeds… flowers, food, everything. I’ll take pictures and write about everything here, when it’s the time… And if something doesn’t grow, I’ll think about it here as well. 🙂

-Leena

Bats seen here, new garden potato field, apple tree flower buds…

It’s been pretty summery now. But still no rain here where we are living – the rain that the garden and nature need now… They say that this afternoon it will rain here… *waiting*. 🙂 It’s now light green around out there everywhere as everything is growing, and in many places some bushes and trees are loaded with white flowers, for example bird cherry trees are in flower now, lovely scent…

This was my project on Thursday and Friday evenings last week; I made a new potato field in our garden. I dug it through the lawn, so to speak, using that garden hoe in the picture. The hoe is my favourite gardening tool, it’s so useful and comfortable to use! And I also used a shovel and, naturally, my bare hands – my bare hands are my other favourite gardening tools – I never use gardening gloves, they are only in the way, a disturbance, and I want to and need to feel the earth in my hands – I’ve gone crazy in that way… 😉 It’s earthing… Body, mind, spirit…

So I dug the new potato field all by myself, one part of the field was already ready; it was our strawberry field before – luckily, because it was hard work that digging. I also had some… theoretical help… ‘someman‘ was helping me to measure the size of the field and telling me where to put the seed potatoes. And when I was taking a short break, drinking some water inside the house, someone who had just gone outside offered me some practical help – this is what I found when I came back outside and to the potato field:

“No, you should do it like this!” – ‘somemeow‘ had moved some seed potatoes that were already placed on the soil, evenly spaced… 🙂

When the potato field was ready on Friday, late in the evening, it was time to go to sauna, with the first fresh birch leaves for this spring or summer… some more earthing… I wrote about sauna earthing already last year, here.
This year the birch leaves are still tiny, because the spring was so slow, but they are so wonderfully fresh and sticky, and naturally, the scent is heavenly. I took again a real bath with the birch leaves: I rubbed the leaves against my skin, buried my face into the leaves, hit myself with the twigs… Stay closer to nature, feel closer to nature, be a bit witchy! 😉

This year we seem to have only four narcissus or daffodil flowers – leaves of this plant we have in all the spots that we have narcissus plants in the garden, but only four flowers, two in one spot and two in another spot. They, too, are late, but they are here…

We’ve heard the calls of cuckoo bird somewhere near here every day now.

On Sunday, after 23.30 PM, when we were having a campfire in our garden, we had some visitors – bats! Three bats! It was a big surprise. We’ve seen bats before, but not here in our garden and not so close. It was the first warmer night with more mosquitoes here this year. All of a sudden the bats dashed and flapped into the woods beside our garden and into our garden as well, they flew all around here; into our garden, back into the woods, back into our garden… This continued for some time. And they flew also close above our heads every time they flapped into our garden. So close, and they were so cute! 🙂 I thought that bats avoid people, but no, they don’t… It was amazing! – I’ve hoped that we would see bats here in our land, and now we now that it can happen…

The apple trees have small flower buds now. They are late as well. A year ago the flowering had already ended!

-Leena

Snow & Vappu – the last day of April in Finland

It’s the last day of April and we are celebrating Vappu here in Finland. Vappu, May Day, First of May, May 1st… the main thing is to celebrate spring!

I wrote about Vappu already a year ago, here. 🙂 And this is just one example how the Vappu weather, actually the whole spring weather can vary here – the spring has been slow this year, as I wrote already in my previous blog post – we’ve been, like, at a standstill a bit, already for some time now. It truly can be seen in the garden and in nature…

I took the picture above and the next two pictures at around 21.30 PM yesterday. It was snowing again, and we had a garden campfire, too.

Despite the weather a robin bird was chirping beautifully, but only for a while – on previous nights it has been singing much longer. And a woodcock was on its regular flight as well: “orr, orr, orr, pist!” 🙂

The garden campfire… but what about the traditional homemade Vappu delicacies this year – I wrote about them last year, here. We do have sima fermenting, but those munkkis I bought at a grocery store, with a bit of discount. And, by the way, we have no balloons this year.

The picture above and the next five pictures I took this morning.

Christmas trees… 😮

What is that? – That’s the sky clearing up a bit.

And it should be clearing up… :p This in the picture above is the first part of our vegetable garden – there ought to be growing for example some early carrots, early peas and garlic in the summer…

It has been snowing again as I’ve been writing this blog post, but the sun has tried to shine as well, and it is 2 degrees Celsius at the moment…

Leena

Dried flowers, a campfire, one knitted owl…

It’s a sunny weekend! And now that the spring is just around the corner, it’s starting to get miscellaneous again… 😉

It was finally time to take these friends outside for a pic yesterday. My dried peonies from last summer… beauties… lovely memories…

My dried flower crown from the summer of 2015 is hanging on a door window in our hall. What actually dominates this picture, however, is an unfinished door window curtain project. 🙂

Our garden campfire last night. It was warming so nicely in the beautiful but cold darkness.

I started knitting again. I love knitting, but I’m not always doing it. 🙂 And… I always need some practice with it. This, for example, is my first ever owl!

-Leena

Dark & cold, cosy fires & lights, and creating dream home

The campfire owl here again… 🙂 We’ve had already many campfires in our garden this autumn, too, but I usually just relax and enjoy them without my camera or my phone, but on Friday, late in the evening, I had the inspiration for taking some pics, too. (A pic on my Instagram (owlnatureleena) as well.)

Campfires in the garden are a part of my, our, dream home…

So, we have lived in this house for almost two and a half years now. But I still had one part of my belongings in Turku – as I was going on and on here in my blog last summer. 🙂 But since the end of August it has been only this, our country home, for me… and I love it! But this has been quite far from my (or our) dream home; almost everything, every thing, is in the wrong place here inside our home, only like the bookshelf and drawers are in the right spots, there are many untidy and disorganized spots in our home, and partly, naturally, because I brought so many things and pieces of furniture from Turku as well, and so on, and so on… Creating our dream home here now is not about renovating (we have done that, too – more about it later, in some other blog posts, too) and creating our dream home is not, heaven forbid, about buying anything, oh dear… yes, maybe buying some new candles and even more houseplants, but nothing more now… Creating our dream home is now about organizing, tidying up and cleaning up our home – it’s “a bit” of chaos here now… and almost all of our large windows still are without curtains, just window blinds are there… But yes, the only way to start the project for me was, first emptying, then cleaning and organizing, our garage, which definitely is not a place for our car, but for other useful things. 😉

And when we had some room for big items in the garage after rearranging, we removed a big pile of long wooden boards from the middle of our kitchen – they were taking over one third of the floor space there, so we didn’t have a kitchen table and chairs there for a year and a half, or so. (We were renovating some ceilings and walls…)

I now have a tag creating dream home here in my blog, so I’ll be posting, with pics, too, about the project here and there…

Morning coffee yesterday. And a satsuma! It’s the season of Spanish satsumas again! So juicy and delicious, and cheap. 🙂

Under the oak tree…

The strawflowers again! 😀 And they are still opening and closing their rustling petals, with the days and nights…

Yesterday evening, now this was in my dream kitchen. 😉 – Finally the big pile of long wooden boards is out and the kitchen table and the chairs are there! And the table and the chairs are the ones I had already in Turku. 🙂 I’ve been dreaming of candlelights in the dark evenings in the kitchen… warm and cosy… And the light of the warm oven can be seen in the pic, too – I was waiting for home-made thin and crisp barley breads to become ready.

Living candlelights in lanterns outside in the dark… and this lantern can also be seen from the kitchen window when sitting at the table. 🙂

One more pic of the Friday evening’s campfire to end this blog post… and to celebrate the dark and cold, bewitching evenings and nights! 😉

-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

Some things to one’s heart’s content

I visited the city of Turku last week, and visited the garden store Plantagen in the town of Raisio on Friday, too. I met this wonderful plant there… just had to take a couple of pics of it. I like very much going to Plantagen – there are so many flowers, plants, bushes, trees… everywhere around there. It’s actually one of my favourite places in the Turku region. 🙂

A garden croton or variegated croton are the names I could find in English, in Finnish this plant is literally a wonder bush – ihmepensas. 🙂

Just for the colours…

On Saturday here in the region of Satakunta, my home region.

In the evening we stopped by the lake Pyhäjärvi, the lake that is our great pride and joy here in Satakunta. A lake large in size, a bit sealike. It was windy and the sound of the waves was so powerful and lovely. I like very much visiting the lake in any kind of weather.

On Saturday, a bit later, a campfire in our garden. We, me and my boyfriend, are real campfire people. 🙂 We build campfires here and there, all year round, and in our garden, too. I love the scent, the sound, the atmosphere…

The food… We have a wok pan for the campfire. We like campfire cooking very much, too – on a wok pan, on a grill grate, on a stick… all year round.

The first fully opened flower of the narcissus in our garden yesterday. It was a rainy day again. But this beauty dazzles!

And yesterday in our garden, nettles – food! Nettles have started to grow nicely, let us eat nettles and speak of them later on. 🙂

-Leena