plant – Page 21 – Owlnature

At the Botanic Garden II

The second blog post about my visit to the Botanic Garden in Turku. The first one: here.

More photos… 🙂

Mandarin. It’s nice to take pics of the fruits at the botanic garden…

A banana plant.

Under the banana leaves…

Grapefruit.

Oh lovely… 🙂

A lime fruit. The scent of the flowers was so strong and stunning – loved it!

A casuarina tree.

Some other lovely citrus fruit… I can’t remember the name right now. 🙂

The Ruissalo island, on which the botanic garden is located, is an island of oak trees – a very special island in whole Finland.

In the outside garden of the botanic garden there were lots of blooming crocuses. I took just a couple of pics of them – but had to take the pics, because we don’t have crocuses in our garden here at home – yet! 🙂

A marvelous springtime…

-Leena

At the Botanic Garden

Today it was mostly sunny, but it was a bit cold and even hailing a bit – the perfect spring weather to visit a botanic garden. My favourite place in the city of Turku: The Botanic Garden of the University of Turku, in the Ruissalo island. It’s lovely to visit the botanic garden in wintertime or when it’s not an actual summertime in Finland. A tropic near us! 🙂 I have photos for two blog posts, here’s the first one.

Welcome to the jungle!

Epipremnum aureum, golden pothos, devil’s ivy… We have many of these – the house plants, at home… I should count our house plants, I don’t know how many we have… 😉

I’m gonna need some more coffee…

A bird of paradise.

A taro leaf.

A trunk with attitude. A kapok tree.

Beauties… an orchid…? 🙂

A red-eared slider, and she came to pose to her name tag! She has a beautiful name: Alma, and she is as old as I am…

Aaand… in the second post will be different kinds of citrus fruits and some other things, too. 🙂

-Leena

Some things to one’s heart’s content

I visited the city of Turku last week, and visited the garden store Plantagen in the town of Raisio on Friday, too. I met this wonderful plant there… just had to take a couple of pics of it. I like very much going to Plantagen – there are so many flowers, plants, bushes, trees… everywhere around there. It’s actually one of my favourite places in the Turku region. 🙂

A garden croton or variegated croton are the names I could find in English, in Finnish this plant is literally a wonder bush – ihmepensas. 🙂

Just for the colours…

On Saturday here in the region of Satakunta, my home region.

In the evening we stopped by the lake Pyhäjärvi, the lake that is our great pride and joy here in Satakunta. A lake large in size, a bit sealike. It was windy and the sound of the waves was so powerful and lovely. I like very much visiting the lake in any kind of weather.

On Saturday, a bit later, a campfire in our garden. We, me and my boyfriend, are real campfire people. 🙂 We build campfires here and there, all year round, and in our garden, too. I love the scent, the sound, the atmosphere…

The food… We have a wok pan for the campfire. We like campfire cooking very much, too – on a wok pan, on a grill grate, on a stick… all year round.

The first fully opened flower of the narcissus in our garden yesterday. It was a rainy day again. But this beauty dazzles!

And yesterday in our garden, nettles – food! Nettles have started to grow nicely, let us eat nettles and speak of them later on. 🙂

-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