organic – Page 4 – Owlnature

Harvesting here, harvesting there…

Hello from Turku! It’s this moving in and out project again that I’ve been at… and now I’m saying hello from here, with a couple of pics.

My morning coffee here today. This is the last coffee pic that I post from here… so, that is why I’m so eager to say hello to the world, from here, now. 🙂

I just say that it’s truly interesting, enlightening and… educational to go through your belongings and your… rubbish, when you have lived in the same apartment for years, and if the place has been your student apartment… whoa! 😀

This was yesterday afternoon in our country home before heading for Turku. Strawberry ice cream and berries – raspberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants and gooseberries fresh from our garden, and blueberries fresh from the woods next to our garden.

And we’ve started digging up, harvesting, our potatoes. Home-grown potatoes look always so sweet and hilarious. 🙂 And they taste so delicious! Oh, and that lovely soil, too, like in this pic that I took here in my apartment in Turku today, before I started washing the potatoes a bit.

-Leena

About the plum tree and taking care of it

Our plum tree today. My first blog post about the tree here.

The flowers disappeared quickly and our tiny tree really started to grow some fruits! At least started, and some of the diminutive green fruits have already grown bigger. But still a lot of waiting, though… The plums in this tree should not be that big when they are ripe, but they should be very blue.

So, still hoping to get the two plum fruits that I’m dreaming of this year… 😉

And about taking care of this tree:

The net is keeping our forest rabbit away, although we have our lettuces growing in open ground, and the bunny hasn’t eaten them, but still… And we had a tar moat made out of a plastic container around the trunk of the tree, on the ground, to keep the ants away. That was really necessary and worked very well!

And the aphids, we keep them away with the mixture of water and the traditional Finnish washing liquid, pine soap, called Mäntysuopa – works like a charm! 🙂

Now just waiting what happens to the tiny green fruits…

The next blog post about the tree here.

-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

First red chili pepper and about pollinating the plants

We have our first red chili pepper. The pepper changed colour from green to red very quickly once it had started to do it. My first blog post about growing chilies can be found here.

Just nice. And underneath the pepper can be seen our growing lettuces.

We pollinate the plants ourselves to, perhaps, get more fruits. And we do it with the help of this monster here. Gently rolling a cotton stick in the fully opened flowers, every flower after the other and crisscross… It has done the trick nicely.

After the flower is successfully pollinated, the fruit starts to appear. And finally the fruit has this kind of a hula hula skirt made of the petals of the flower. 😉

Our simple growing lamp can be seen in this pic… and some of our houseplants are here, too. 🙂

-Leena

Growing chilies

I had a sudden inspiration to start taking photos of our chili plants last night. With an inspiration like that, a tiny blog post is sure to come out the next thing…

chili

There are flowers…

This is actually my boyfriend’s project; he’s the one who first came up with the idea of growing chilies and he’s the one who planted the seeds, and so on.

chili

There are chili peppers growing nicely…

Ok, so we don’t know (I don’t know and my boyfriend doesn’t remember) the variety of these chilies, what kind of chilies they actually are and everything, so we’re just waiting… 🙂

chili

…and hoping they’ll grow… That chili pepper over there is the biggest of the peppers so far.

chili

We have two chili plants, both of them are of the same size. They are in a spot that is a bit difficult spot to take photos in – there’s no space to move the plants around, but I don’t even want to move them around anyway, just let them grow in peace there.

chili

This last photo is taken today, I still tried to take a better pic of the biggest one… 🙂

More about growing chilies here.

-Leena