It is a sign of spring! – We heard the blackbird sing for the first time this year here on Monday evening this week. It sounded like magic. 🙂
Swans, too, have been loud, by the lake, lately. We usually hear them in the evening and/or at night. Yesterday for example they were quiet in the evening, but at around 2 am then, they were very loud again.
The first five pics on Thursday:
Morning! It had been snowing / sleeting just a bit again…
That did not last long, it was +5 degrees Celsius again in the afternoon:
The little oak tree still has some of its leaves.
Yesterday, on Friday:
No snow good morning!
But it was windy again in the daytime.
Garden campfire in the evening. We have had campfires in the garden lately as we have been building the garden shed…
And late in the evening it suddenly started to snow when I was standing by the fire. It was Real cold winter snow, and for a while it came down like here in the pic above.
Today:
It´s still -1 degrees Celsius, and it´s (enough) windy again as well.
The shed. Plank by plank… We have been building this garden shed, now there´s the roof and the walls. This has been a lot of work and fun. 🙂
No permanent snow cover here in the southernmost part of Finland this winter – I guess it´s safe to say this now, at this point in time. Umm… so we already had ´the seventh snow´, ´the eighth snow´and ´the ninth snow´for this season here where I´m living. (At least these we´ve had, I may have forgotten ´one more snow´, but I can´t even count these anymore.) So a bit snow for a few days, a few centimetres of snow for two or three days, and so on… As it has been this winter. And then, again, fricking warm weather, temperatures above zero degrees Celsius, Rain… I am so fed up with this. And hey yes, it started to snow on Wednesday this week and now we have `the tenth snow´for this winter. A few centimetres of snow we Had. – It lasted until today, it´s Sunday today, and the snow is already melting.
The amount of snow in centimetres in Finland yesterday. Oh, the northern part of the country and Lapland…
The next four pics I took here in our home village on Friday evening when we were coming back from grocery store 🙂 :
By the lake Pyhäjärvi. Lit by our car, hmm… Some ice… an ice cover and snow on the lake for that time…
On the same spot, looking up… The moon was bright again!
Travelling in the woods… A bumpy road.
Ended up in an ice rink…
Yesterday, my morning coffee, snowman in the middle of the oak trees…
This was a week ago. We have not seen this before! The leaf buds have already begun to open in the bush, in late January!
And our small common hazel shrub has already begun to open its leaf buds….. This Picture I took yesterday.
Oh yes… This was on Wednesday late in the evening. This was my third time on skis this winter. Well, it took me a while, but I finally learned :-p that, this winter, whenever there´s enough snow, I gotta go cross-country skiing, immediately, in our yard. Just go!
Whoa! A eucalyptus sauna whisk, we had this for the first time last week. Usually we have Finnish birch sauna whisks, but now we wanted to try this eucalyptus (from Ukraine) whisk, because we found it for half the price in a local grocery store. And we loved it! The whisk was thick, the leaves were wonderfully long and they didn´t fall off. It was very good to hit yourself with it. And the scent when you split the leaves a bit and crush them in your hands is lovely. A nice and a rather exotic experience. 🙂
In these pictures… I believe this was our ´seventh´snow, in January this was. Well, this winter it does not matter what day it was or is now…
The last three pics I took today:
I started watching cross-country skiing again… Either watching cross-country skiing or dreaming of doing it…? :p
It snowed yesterday evening and at night. So this is ‘the second snow’ for this season here where I’m living. But they say that it will Rain tomorrow… and on Sunday… Well, because taking pics is a good and an efficient way to enjoy snow now, I took pics in our garden today:
Coffee and contemplation… (-I’m a big fan of Stranger Things, too…) I saw this pic and it made me wonder why our terrace fence is sh*tty… 🙂
Well, this was yesterday evening here in our home village, it had already been snowing a bit.
Snowed…
“Oh no, not again!” ? 🙂
Juhannusruusu – ‘Finnish Midsummer rose‘ bush.
And books I just started reading… The House at Pooh Corner and Visit SunnyChernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World’s Most Polluted Places. Interesting things…
Summer’s flowers, winter beauties…
Raspberry leaves.
‘The House at Pooh Corner‘ occurred to me because… We are building this garden shed in one corner of our garden, hmm…
Tiny oak trees… Now we can really see them. 🙂 They grew from acorns in the summer this year.
The first three pictures I took a bit over a week ago:
We found many acorns a year ago and we planted them in our garden. Now there are small oak trees growing. This was the last chance to get pics of these small trees with some leaves this year before all the rest of the leaves fell down the next day…
Two patches of oak trees we have now.
This guy was inside our house next to the back door late in the evening. Really a lively creature it was!
Boo! Baaad. Well, The Pumpkin, the only one that we had in our greenhouse. We carved our first ever Jack-O’-Lantern a week ago. For Halloween and this late autumn.
And I made ketchup for the first time ever a week ago. I took this pic while I was still cooking the ketchup. I used our overripe greenhouse tomatoes, jamsugar, vinegar, salt, black pepper and cajun seasoning. The ketchup is delicious, both sweet and spicy.
On Monday morning this week:
October snow. – We had first snow here where I’m living. It was lovely. Last year we had first snow on October 23 and this year on October 28.
“Ugh!” ? 🙂
Just a bit dark here in our home village, yesterday evening I took this pic. No snow now, the first snow in October always comes and goes here in the southern part of Finland.
I heard whooper swans calling when I snapped this last night. I think they were by the lake.
Pictures today:
Books lately… I already read The Little Prince and 1984, they were great books. I’m still reading the second KonMari book, and I like it a lot, too.
Autumnal at our terrace:
And more hobbies… what’s been happening yesterday and today as well. The Finnishcross-country skiing races for this season started, and I’ve been watching, of course. 🙂 They have some snow there in the region of Kainuu, it’s that much north.
An autumnal sunflower bowing beside our porch. Dignified, charming…
A bit bleak today.
There are still a few small marigold flowers in the summer flower bed.
Harvestman…? That’s funny. 🙂 This guy was waiting for us beside our front door when we came back from grocery store yesterday.
This picture I took today. I emptied our greenhouse yesterday evening. The things we can eat… Tomatoes, tomatoes, and some of them are still ripening here in our kitchen now. When we planted the tomato plants we used seeds from Finnish greenhouse tomatoes that we bought in grocery store last winter. And The Pumpkin, our only pumpkin this year. I already had a picture of it on my Instagram (owlnatureleena)…
This was a bit over two weeks ago. We harvested our sweet corn. Well, we get some seeds for next year again. 🙂 We also ate a good amount of ‘baby corns’ raw out there while harvesting, they tasted so… sweet!
The next two pics I took today:
Some sweet corn plant decoration in the garden now.
Purple coneflower in October… I love this colour, too!
This was last week. We are building a garden shed.
The rest of the pics I took today:
I love painting! This is the floor of the shed.
I honestly still don’t know what this bush is called…
So KonMari, the method of tidying up. Up! I read the book (had already a pic of the book here in my blog…) and I watched the Netflix series, and I liked them both a lot, and I like her. So it was time to start organizing The Mess. 😀 Here in our house. We just finally need to organize and tidy our home up, also for some empty spaces, and some places here need to be more reachable, so to speak, and so on. And just simply… for cleaning up. Now I’ve already done my clothes and our bookshelf. I find the KonMari method very helpful and inspiring. 🙂
A bit of our bookshelf now… Finally it’s presentable! More pics later…? ;D
It’s our big Norway Maple…
Who’s raking?
Things and stuff to do, these among other things. What’s enough? Hmm…
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…
The stars are on the ground again this time of year in Finland. 🙂 – Arcticstarflower 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.
On Saturday, yesterday, I took part in the national birdwatch again, the national birdwatch 2019, Pihabongaus 2019, organized by BirdLifeSuomi here in Finland. It was my fourth time now and I was standing and walking in our garden again. As usual, I had a good time and I was freezing at the end of the event even though I had warm clothes on. 🙂 But it was only -9 degrees Celsius, they said that it felt like -14 degrees, during my birdwatch hour.
So, I saw… a lot of snow and it was snowing a bit, too. Well, as always, I heard many little birds singing, singing in the trees, but I didn’t see that many birds. I recognized the voices of great tits and blue tits and crows. And I saw a magpie, a great spotted woodpecker, a few great tits and I heard and saw a flock of tree sparrows as well. The great spotted woodpecker was pecking at a pine tree and it was nice to watch it with binoculars. One great tit came to perform a solo in front of me, that was funny.
So that was what happened. 🙂
And just a few pictures that I took in our garden today:
We have around 30 centimetres of snow here where I’m living. I suspect that we have more than 30 centimetres… It’s been snowing like every day now – sometimes more, sometimes just a little bit. And they say that it will still be snowing.
The sky is blue!
…and at night the snow is still blue, too. 😉 This was bad after 1.30 am today.
