outdoors – Page 14

The first green in the garden (& the first vid)

We’ve had sunny days, but still waiting for some crazy winds to calm down. But the sunshine warms…

…and the colour yellow is taking over, gradually.

Juniper berries in our garden. Juniper berries are cones, berry-like cones, not real berries.

The first green in our garden for this spring is leopard’s bane or doronicum, its small leaves. I already had a picture of these on my Instagram, a week ago. 🙂

Still so tiny… the leaf…

And some new dimensions to Owlnature. I created a YouTube channel, not actually to have a channel, but to have a super easy way to add videos, my own videos, to my website. I’m not saying that I’m necessarily adding quality (high definition videos), but I hope that I can add… some new dimensions; some feeling, some sound… things like that. I’ve never uploaded videos to YouTube before, but I’m not afraid to start now. 🙂 Perhaps I’ll try my phone, too, but this video is taken from my camera. So, this is my first ever YouTube video, raw and rough. 😉 (But at least one can hear some sounds of birds, too, in the video). But just to get started… I was sitting on the garden bench at about 18.30 PM yesterday as I was filming this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIEtu5vMmPA

-Leena

Hoot… no, tweet… maybe :)

Today a few pictures from sunny yesterday. We’ve had some sunshine already today as well, but some hailing, too. – Spring is definitely coming. 🙂 Now just waiting for it to become warmer – the wind and the air have been cold. But fortunately, it’s been ever so warm in the sunshine…

The Ibiza lizard in our garden…

The garden bunny and Ibiza lizard…

Okay, I had been thinking about joining Twitter already for some time… and now I’ve done it; my username on Twitter: leenannik. It’s a bit weird place to be, when one doesn’t actually know anybody there, but I think I have my spot there… every once in a while. – I think it’s safe to say that I surely will use my Instagram (owlnatureleena) way more often than my Twitter. Hoot! 😀

A morning owl… garden me…

Siberian iris in March.

-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

Hear the blackbird sing – spring-like days

On Monday the sun was shining delightfully, it was warm. On Tuesday it was cloudy. And it was already very windy when we were taking our regular walk in the forest trail in the evening. The darkness fell and it started to sleet heavily when we were in the forest. And we naturally couldn’t feel the wind that hard there in the shelter of the forest, but when we came out of the forest, by the lake Pyhäjärvi, the wind felt already so fierce that it was almost incredible. It was a blast! ;D And the wet snow flakes were so huge for a while… Yesterday and today the sun’s been shining again, but it has been windy.

The pictures here I took today in our garden.

I noticed on Monday that one strawflower flower still opens its petals on a sunny day! 🙂 And closes them in the evening. I took this pic at around 8.15am today. And at 10.00 the petals were opening…

After I had taken the pic above, I started to really listen to the singing of birds, they were singing everywhere… Suddenly I recognized the distinctive voice of the blackbird! It is an enchanting sound of spring here in Finland!

Hmm…

The strawflower flower opened by 12.30pm. How beautiful! 🙂

The snow’s been melting all the time now…

Under our biggest pine tree.

It’s 4 degrees Celsius in the shade, but they say that it feels like -2, and it does – the wind is cold. But in the sunshine, it’s wonderfully warm there…

-Leena

It is coming! – Spring is almost here…

It’s March… quite nice, almost incredible! Lately we’ve had snow and sunshine, grey days, temperatures below freezing and wet snow… everything. And we just may have been hit by the biggest snowfall for this winter earlier this week as well – here in southern Finland we sometimes have this too-much-snow-too-late-it-should-have-been-at-Christmas -thing… But yes, this week’s snow, too, has already been melting. No one’s stopping spring! 🙂

The first 13 pictures I took today, the last two are from last night.

Moss magic at the summer flower bed…

Backyard pine trees.

A clover flower…

A strawflower flower… power. 😉

An annual mallow flower…

…and another…

…a few more…

Perhaps I should plant annual mallow seeds, too, in many places in the garden this spring – then there would be some lace all around the garden in wintertime, how nice would that be? 😀

Double sun… 😉

An Egyptian friend…

At the potato field…

Even though the days may be warm, the nights can be a bit cold:

“I adjusted the thermostat so that it will be a bit warmer in here… is that okay…?”

“Purr… nice! I’m telling you…”
Our radiator tiger. 🙂

-Leena

Sauna & snow

Just a brief thought on the traditional combination of sauna and snow. It’s nice to take some snow with you when you are taking a sauna bath. I did it yesterday evening, for example. And as with the birch leaves in summertime, I like rubbing it, the snow, against my skin and my face, too, taking a bath with it. It’s cool and very nice indeed! Relaxing and healthy! Sauna earthing… And, naturally, it’s nice to walk from the sauna barefoot, on the snow outside, cool down a bit, and then go back to the warmth of the sauna again – just lovely! Good for your blood circulation. 😉

Of course you can roll naked in the snow. It, too, actually feels nice, but it takes some courage to start doing it. I haven’t done it this winter. Okay, perhaps I should now challenge myself to do it, there might still be time to do it this week… I dare myself to… (?) 😀

As to “there might still be time”; it is happening again, out there… the snow is melting a bit again… But at least spring is just around the corner, soon. 🙂

-Leena

Snowy, snowy – a wintry month…

It’s already March next week! But, there’s still some time to enjoy snow and… ahem, some winter pics. 🙂

The first five pics I took yesterday.

It’s been a nice winter week. First we had one night of raining… WATER, but it didn’t melt all the snow, and after that night it started to snow, and now it’s been snowing with the temperatures being moderate and nice winter temperatures; between 0 and about -10 degrees Celsius, and some days the sun has been shining delightfully as well. And the sun is warming a bit, loving us…

But no, we haven’t had, like, heaps of snow this winter – we’ve just had freaking cold weather at times. So, in these pics here now is to be seen our snow record for this winter… Yeah well, it’s been snowing a bit today as well, but… you get the picture, I believe. 🙂

Okay, still some time to take winter coffee pics…

The sturdy clarkia or godetia flowers, too, still standing. I’ll plant clarkia seeds this spring as well, but this time, in many places in the garden.

Blue sky, love…

The next two pics I took on the day before yesterday.

One of those snowfalls it was. And this was at 17:45 PM – a huge increase in the number of daylight hours: on the 16th of December I wrote that the sunset was at 15:12 PM here where I’m living, and the length of the day was 5 hours 31 minutes. Today the sun sets at 17:47 PM and the length of the day is 10 hours 5 minutes – twice the energy already! 🙂

And the rest of the pics are again from yesterday.

Taller than the trees…? 😉

At the strawflowers again…

And this pic I took through a car window as we were travelling to Turku. This was at about 16:30 PM – not long ago it was completely dark at that hour! 🙂

-Leena