owlnature – Page 3

Snow again

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 Sunny Chernobyl: 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.

Leena

Boo! Hello November

Time flies! But so do I. Try to. 🙂

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, jam sugar, 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 Finnish cross-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.

Almost some sunlight… 😀

Leena

Tomatoes, a pumpkin, sweet corn, building a garden shed, KonMari (don’t ask…;))

The first four pics I took today:

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…

Things and stuff to do, these among other things. What’s enough? Hmm…

Leena

Autumn? And pears, grapes, flowers…

So it’s officially autumn in Finland. I can’t believe I just wrote that.

I was travelling in Eastern Finland with my boyfriend for two weeks, and I will have some pics from there here in my blog a bit later. I have most of the pics on my phone (and there are for example pics of our plums on my phone, too) and I have to find a way to get all the pics to my computer (I have no idea what I’m doing… ;D ) But I did post a few pictures on my Instagram (owlnatureleena). We even saw a tiny bit of Russia. 😀 – Where the country begins, so to speak.

hill Kipari, lake Keyritty, Rautavaara, Northern Savonia, Finland

So now only one pic from the trip. This was on a hill Kipari in the municipality of Rautavaara, in the region of Northern Savonia – Pohjois-Savo. The name of the lake is Keyritty. We stayed in Rautavaara. Such a lovely place.

The first ever pears from our garden! I didn’t have time to take pics of our small pear tree when it had all the pears, but I took a pic of the pears on a plate – all the pears had fallen down from the tree during our trip, they were ripe, and I just picked them from the ground. They were delicious! I made jam.

This year we have grapes, too! I took all these pictures of our grapes yesterday. We had a very little amount of grapes two years ago, but now we have quite a lot, well, relatively lot. They, too, taste so sweet…

The grape vine itself.

The rest of the pictures I took today:

I’m still very much immersed in my reading hobby. Now I’m even reading how to get organized, so this is getting pretty serious. ;p

We have a small patch of lovely little sunflowers. They are grown from our last winter’s bird seeds.

And echinacea purpurea or purple coneflower charm…

This is my “I’m about to finish this blog post” coffee in our greenhouse, with some tomatoes. 🙂

Hmm, in general, I feel like I have tons of things to do now, but it’s just nice, I guess… 😀

The summer flower bed…

Leena

Cherries, cucumbers, one bat, flowers (& friends)…

Just making some lists… :p

Okay, this is the first time ever that we have cherries in our garden.

The small cherry tree had 11 flowers and a few cherries. That was so nice!

The young bush cherry had many many flowers, and many cherries, too. And there are still fruits ripening in the bush. I didn’t know what to expect. 😀 Love them!

The first ever ‘open-field’ cucumbers from our garden.

And there’s more growing, this was yesterday. I planted only one plant, one stem, this stem in the pic. Just a delicious experiment…

Cucumbers in our greenhouse. Greenhouse cucumbers grow really well and are so delicious! We’ve already had several.

Two pics that I took yesterday evening when I closed the windows and the door in the greenhouse:

More cucumbers growing…

I wonder if these tiny ones will still grow…

We saw a bat, the first bat here for this year, on 30th July late in the evening. It was flying, flapping in our garden and in the woods.

Some flower pics that I took in our garden yesterday:

Clematis, by the oak tree.

Tricolor daisy and a friend.

Garden rose and a friend.

Red flax and a friend. Friends everywhere in the garden in August. 🙂

Lily

Sunflower

They come in August.

Good morning today:

With clarkia amoena or godetia flowers…

And a busy friend here as well. 🙂

A little bit of rain and then sunshine again. It’s nice when it rains a bit, it has been rather dry all summer again.

I Have to go to the library today and I should wash the car…

Leena

“Marco!” – “Polo!”

The summer is moving on… This summer hasn’t been as hot as last summer here in Finland, but we’ve had a few fairly short hot periods this year, too. This week it was hotter than ever in many places in Europe and in a few places in Finland as well. Here where I’m living it was 32 degrees Celsius on Sunday. Yesterday it was only 23 degrees Celsius and today 16 degrees, in the daytime – last night it was around 11 degrees Celsius. That was fast.

This summer, thus far, I have been enjoying nature and gardening, naturally. 🙂 And I have been using my Instagram (owlnatureleena) a bit. I have been reading a lot. During June and July I have read 14 books and finished reading two books (I had read half of both of them earlier) and I’m about to finish reading yet another book, so this has definitely been a lot for me. And, naturally, I have a Goodreads account (leenannih) to keep track of books. 😀

Now some summer snapshots:

A young hare in the forest. I love hares and rabbits. I had a rabbit when I was a child.

Sheep here in our home village. They were baaing so much, they were just funny and adorable.

We found some cloudberries in a forest we had never been before, about 20 kilometres from our home. The berries were so delicious. And we can’t remember finding this gold here in the southern part of Finland before!

And there were quite many small blue butterflies flying in the forest, pretty magical… These two were on a rock by a small lake there.

A spider on our terrace. There were a few of these guys there one evening. They, too, are just lovely.

I’ve tried to take pics of our summer flower bed. Last year we didn’t plant any seeds here, so there was only weed here a year ago. And this year we finally had the possibility to add a lot of compost to the soil thanks to the year-round composter we have.

The last three pics I took today:

The summer hasn’t ended yet…

And now just one picture that I took in our greenhouse today as well:

Leena

Greenhouse, hot, light, bright…

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 — Stars on the ground…

The stars are on the ground again this time of year in Finland. 🙂 – Arctic starflower 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.

Leena