pear tree – Owlnature

Summer, everything is in bloom, bats, cuckoo, I do not know why I cannot post pictures on my Instagram…

On Monday a week ago, May 25th. I went outside, there was a pretty gentle breeze, it was fairly quiet, only birds were singing, butterflies were flying here and there around me… It was nothing new, but something felt strange, wonderful… Everything was so green around me, grass and leaves had grown fast. It was warm, it was 21 degrees Celsius – the first time that it was 20 degrees Celsius or more this year. – It was the first day of summer!

And my first parrot tulip had opened. This is the first time that I have parrot tulips in the garden.

It was, again, around 15 degrees Celsius on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday last week, but over the weekend it was again around 20 degrees Celsius in the daytime. On Monday this week, June 1st, it was already 24 degrees Celsius. And around 21 degrees Celsius in the daytime it has now been yesterday and today. But at night the coldest temperature was again a bit over 5 degrees Celsius here.

All the parrot tulips opened.

We have seen the first bats for this year here. On Saturday a week ago and last Saturday as well. – Saturday may be the best day of the week. 🙂 It may be just one bat that we have seen, though, because we have seen only one at a time. Anyway, lovely creatures!

Okay so I cannot post pictures on my Instagram, and I do not know why. I have already tried to do everything… I have been restarting, checking, uninstalling, reinstalling… trust it, use it, prove it, groove it like Spice Girls… I even changed my username just for the heck of it, and changed it back again, just because I could do it… But I cannot change my profile picture or post pictures. I can like other people´s pictures and use Instagram in every other way, but my own pictures are doomed…

There has of course never been anything shady about my Instagram or about my actions, the last time that I posted something on my Instagram was on December, but come on, that cannot be the reason! 😮 Can it? And my boyfriend has tried everything and more, and he is a professional software person. I don´t know what I´m gonna do… I can always follow other people and like their pictures, but if I do those things and I am not posting anything, then I´m just weird, a stalker, a creeper… And I still want to post pictures on my Instagram! Perkele.

Grumbling followed by gorgeous flowers…

This is a pic from my phone, the pic that I was kinda trying to post on my Instagram.

Hyacinths, a lovely scent…

The pear tree is in bloom. It´s not as flowery as it was a year ago, but there are flowers, on four spots, as seen on the pic below. And the tree has grown!

In the back of our garden, I think that this is peony tulip. 🙂 It has a wonderful scent.

Forget me not, forget-me-nots… In the back of the garden, and near them…

…our small bird cherry tree is flowering, too.

I had already waited for it… “Cuck-koo!” – Cuckoo bird came back and started calling cuckoo on Sunday evening, and after that it has done it both in the daytime and evenings.

Tulips by my dwarf spruce…

My spruce is growing every year! 🙂

Parrot tulip break ~

I love parrot tulips, they just get better as they get older…

Random 🙂 Viola

The apple tree is in bloom. As marvellous as ever…

Our plum tree already bloomed. – Whoa! We´re just hoping that it had the time to get pollinated… Yesterday when I took this picture there was only a few flowers left to be seen.

Lily of the Valley flowers are here! Love the scent, love them.

Lily of the Valley is the national flower of Finland.

The first lilac flowers have begun to open.

Also our cherry bush and cherry tree are in bloom, hopefully I still have time to take pictures of cherry flowers tomorrow… I have been sitting at this desk for too long today and I have already seen too many pics today as well, phew…

Peonies have grown! I should like clean this spot up a bit…

Leena

Snow, thunder, hail May

But first… A bit over a week ago on Saturday. This was the first time that I have seen a great spotted woodpecker on a bird feeder here. They have usually been only in the woods, in the pine trees and in the big maple tree beside our driveway. The greenhouse is about to fly, because my only ´concern´was the bird as I took this pic with zoom, in our living room, through the Venetian blinds. 🙂

And then… May snow. On Monday morning a week ago in the pic above. Well, it´s not unusual that it snows in May in the southern part of Finland, but it´s not very very common either – it does not happen every year. And the snow had already melted a lot when I took the pic, because I could not get out fast enough. 😀

The next four pictures I took on Friday morning:

The second snow for May, it had already melted a bit when I took these pics. Well, for example two years ago, on this day, it was around 28 degrees Celsius… 😀

Already small blackcurrant leaves! They are the biggest bush/tree leaves in our garden now.

Glory of the snow flowers…

Hyacinth flowers are emerging.

On Sunday, yesterday:

In the afternoon yesterday it was not warm, but cold, and it was thundering! It was the first time that I heard thunder in cold weather (4 degrees Celsius). And then it started to hail some bigger hailstones, well I know they can be a Lot bigger, but the very big hailstones do not usually never happen in our relatively pretty gentle Finland (and we just keep on complaining here :p ), so these were the biggest hailstones that I have ever seen, the pictures actually do not quite do justice to them, and when the hailing first started there was an interesting polka dot pattern for a while in the garden. By the way, this far we have planted onion, carrot and parsnip in this patch in the pic, but there´s still a lot of free space there.

In the afternoon we saw two black woodpeckers in the woods. They were loud. We heard them somewhere near already earlier last week.

Summer flower bed, I have cleared it of everything and left these that may have grown from last year´s seeds, we don´t know what they are, just want to see what comes out of them. My boyfriend took this pic with his phone without my knowing when I was scattering summer flower seeds.

It is here! The grass mowing season, we started it in our garden yesterday. Our lawnmower is a bit broken, a cord there is broken after the winter now (I don´t know how to explain this…) and the machine does not pull, like move itself and drag us along, so we have to push it, and it´s too heavy for it, and pushing a lawnmower is a bit hard work in a yard like ours anyway.

So the sun was already shining a bit again in the afternoon and in the evening yesterday. And a bit later in the evening it was raining, sleeting and hailing (in that order) again and the sun was shining at the same time, too, for some time, but I was not interested anymore, and I went to sauna.

Pictures I took today:

Peonies! They, too, started to emerge earlier than usual this year… These are the tallest stems now.

The sun is shining again today.

Praestans shogun tulip flower, the first tulip flower that has opened.

A sight for sore eyes – there are flower buds emerging in the pear tree!

Our biggest Norway maple tree in bloom.

We visited the town of Rauma today, I just took these snaps when travelling in the car.

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

Flowers flow

There’s a wonderful scent in the air everywhere outside. It’s a combination, a mixture of everything; earth, grass, flowers… Trees are blooming, too. Our plum tree is blooming and our pear tree is blooming, bird cherry trees are blooming outside our yard…

And yesterday evening I finally heard the “cuck-koo” – I think I heard the call of the cuckoo bird already before, but yesterday I heard it clearly.

Our plum tree is full of flowers. We planted this tree four years ago, it has been flowering every year now.

Our pear tree is full of flowers, too. This is the first time that this tree is full of flowers. – We planted it in September 2017. Oh, the scent… 🙂

Hyacinths are blooming in the garden as well.

And tulips…

Oh, colours…

Leena

Maytime

Everything is growing, everything is green, and there are flowers, too, everywhere! Well, we already had a cold period again, it was a short one, but it was hailing and snowing. Nothing stayed on the ground though, it was just snowing and hailing and the sun was shining as well, at the same time, too, again. – Business as usual.

And now we’ve had warm days again – around 15 degrees Celsius and around 20 degrees Celsius it has been, yesterday it was a bit above 20 degrees Celsius and today it’s already 23 degrees Celsius. Feels like summer for us! 🙂

A pic today. There suddenly was a random tulip bulb in my hands last autumn, and I planted it here thinking that it might be nice to have a single tulip blooming beside my dwarf spruce. Well, it is! And the tulip is taller than my tree. 🙂

May — ~Hiding… someone’s always hiding…? 😀

A ladybug or ladybird was hiding in our pear tree yesterday, I saw her (?) again today, in the pear tree, she had come out from her hiding place…

A dandelion in our garden, it is like… two dandelions in one – a broad stem and two different flowers, hmm…

We went for a walk by the lake Pyhäjärvi here in our home village yesterday.

In the woods there… This doesn’t look bad in pictures, but it looks more impressive in nature, the tree really is bigger in nature, and I always am strangely awed by this big tree that has come down…

Another big tree, a very old birch tree…

We already have the smaller greenhouse in the corner of our terrace. We will have another greenhouse in our garden, a bigger one. This is what we have there now; the ground (foundation not quite ready yet) for the greenhouse and marigold flowers (as a symbol of hope ;D ) – we still have to build, assemble the greenhouse as well…

Leena

Summer in full swing already

It’s been summer here in Finland all the time now… The temperatures have been between 20 and 25 degrees Celsius during the day, and some days it’s been even warmer than that, too… And when we’ve had like “a bit cooler weather”, the temperatures have been between 18 and 20 degrees. So, it’s been quite incredible to experience this here now… But one morning was cold this week – it was 4 degrees Celsius, whoa! But it’s been all sunshine, sunshine, and very dry everywhere…

And about myself… and my blog now. I’ve been working outside the home, so to speak, now, it has something to do with gardening (would you believe it? 😉 ) aaand not working at home with my computer means that I don’t sit by my computer that often now, because I wake up very early in the morning, and I drive to work very early in the morning – I’m some sort of an early owl altogether now, and I don’t have that much time or energy for this dear blog of mine. Well, I don’t mean that I was super blogger before, but I mean, for example, that some of the content of my blog will now be only on my Instagram (owlnatureleena), like most of the flower pictures, and so on. Well, let’s see how everything happens, just thought I’d mention that even if it looks like I’m doing nothing here in my blog, I’m actually doing many things out here and there and preparing myself for many things all the time. 😀 And yes, I still have some planting to do here at home, seeds, seedlings… Oh dear, oh dear…

I took all the pictures in this blog post in our garden today.

Oookay, to begin with, our cherry tree didn’t survive the winter, it didn’t grow any leaves – it just stood there, all bare and dry…

So, this is our new cherry tree now. The dead cherry tree was by the woods, this is by the terrace of our house.

We actually thought that our cherry bush wouldn’t survive the winter, but here it still is. And it is flowering!

It still has many flower buds, too.

The pear tree is flowering as well. The flowers are… down there, all on the same spot… There’s been like five or six of them.

About some animals… Cuckoo bird has been calling here every day now – the delightful voice of the early summer! And my boyfriend has seen bats in our garden again. I haven’t seen them – I’ve already been sleeping…

The plum tree already flowered, it had perhaps around 100 flowers. And the apple tree already flowered, too.

Lilacs, common lilacs are blooming now. Oh, the lovely scent…

“Oh, summer, the light, the dazzle, oh, that shi…itake…!”:

-A bit of a night owl…? 🙂

-Leena

October colours and some of the flowers in the garden

Last year it was like we didn’t actually have Virginia creeper at all – but we did have it a year ago as well. It was the second year for this creeper in our garden last year, and it didn’t grow that much, and it had no autumn colour whatsoever then.