plant – Page 5 – Owlnature

Snowy

It snowed quite a lot in the evening on Tuesday and at night between Tuesday and yesterday. And it was very windy. The storm had been even record-breaking for a while at the sea. It was windy yesterday, too, but the sun was shining. Well, about the snow… must always say this, but this is quite a lot snow for us here in southern Finland – in eastern Finland and northern Finland, for example, they always have a lot more, that’s only natural. 🙂

The first pictures I took in the morning yesterday:

My dwarf spruce. Hopefully it survives the winter…

Hmm… Our car.

The wind made it look a bit different…

…but beautiful.

By the lake Pyhäjärvi near our home at noon yesterday. There was a chilly wind…

And in our garden in the afternoon.

And today:

composter, temperature — Year-round composter

It’s warm inside the composter in our garden.

It’s -11 degrees Celsius outside now at around 11.30 am. But they say that it “feels like -16 degrees Celsius”. Yes, it does feel a bit like that, but it’s not windy anymore and the sun is shining.

Leena

Holidays, holidays…

…continue, here at home. Now pictures from Thursday and today. Just relaxing…

I love the novel, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens! I read it, in English, for the first time 16 or 17 years ago. I’ve watched the film by Disney from the year 2009 many many times – I love the film as well. But I watched the film from the year 1984 for the first time on Thursday, and, well, I loved that, too. Spirit!

I’ve watched some other films, too, during these holidays, some of them are traditional Christmas films, for example; Home Alone, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, The Snowman (1982), Krampus (2015), The Christmas Chronicles (2018 Netflix), Hocus Pocus (1993) [- was it Christmas or Halloween we just had…? 🙂 ]. And I’ve also watched some nature programmes and Finnish comedy Uuno Turhapuro on tv, for example. 🙂

Harry Potter. – First the book, then the film. 🙂 My next film is Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which will be one of my New Year’s films, (I finished reading the book a bit over a week ago), and the next book is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (haven’t started it yet). I’m reading Harry Potter in Finnish now first, because the translation by Jaana Kapari is extraordinary!

This, too, is from where I watch television… The plant, the tree in the pic is weeping fig or ficus tree.

Some sunshine again today, but after Christmas it’s been warmer especially in the daytime. It hasn’t been raining, but the snow has been melting a bit and it’s been a bit… blurry out there.

Water was dripping from a bigger tree on me and on my camera as I took pics of my dwarf spruce and the winter lights…

Leena

Christmas, lights, flowers…

Now just pictures from Sunday, Tuesday and yesterday.

They were giving away these ‘bushes’, autumn plants with different colours, at a store, and I chose these three. The Ibiza lizard is covered in snow a bit.

From where I watch television and eat and drink coffee…

We made two ice lanterns for Christmas. I named this one a ‘Red-letter day’…

I was taking a picture of the sun yesterday. It’s was down there hiding behind the trees…

“Well, move!”, I said to myself. “It’s up to you, you know…” ;D

This year I have a pink poinsettia, not a red one. – It was a plan… 😉 I was waiting for some ‘direct sunlight’ to get the poinsettia look natural in a picture… the colours.

Well, hashtag nofilterneeded… Hyacinth. This year one of my hyacinths is a bit different, too. – It’s dark pink, not light pink.

I planted this dwarf spruce in the autumn. And I already have a picture of it on my Instagram without and with these Christmas or winter lights. Here it is in the dark, with the blue Christmas lights. – Blue winter lights, my dream…

And here’s another video from our trail camera, or animal camera that we had in my boyfriend’s forest. Night-time wanderers, moose! :

Leena

Christmas time

Many things to do… I had some interesting new working experiences – it had something to do with getting some traditional Finnish Christmas food into stores, and now it’s Christmas time… Hmm, we’re cleaning our home now, and so on…

My morning coffee today. So, the house is a bit of a mess. That cloth… back there in the picture, for example, is a curtain from our living room. The curtain has fallen down because its handle got loose. And our couch ‘fell down’, too, so we’re basically sitting on the floor now. And we must clean the tables and take the carpets outside and hoover the house, and… But hey, it’s the shortest day of the year today! 🙂

The next three pictures I took in our garden today:

December echinacea purpurea and peony — **Echinacea purpurea** or **purple coneflower** and **peony**…

We’ve had snow on the ground for many days now. And it’s snowing right now as well, and it’s -8 degrees Celsius, so we’ll have a white Christmas this year, too!

And here’s a video from our trail camera or game camera – I just call it an animal camera. We had the animal camera in my boyfriend’s land in the region of Etelä-Pohjanmaa – South Ostrobothnia. We brought the camera home for the winter. And here at home it was possible to get the videos to computer. We got some interesting and delightful videos. There were night-time wanderers… I’ll have a few videos here in my blog, too, so here’s the first one, a hare. 🙂 :

Leena

Pictures yesterday & today

The first two pictures I took in our garden yesterday.

In the November sunshine…

The Finnish autumn came for the bougainvillea – for my ‘mini Spain’ long ago…

The next five pictures I took in our garden today.

It has been snowing a bit, just a little bit.

A common poppy pod.

So this is ‘the second snow’ for this season…

Leaves of a rose bush.

It’s -3 degrees Celsius right now, at around 14.15 pm.

And these last two pictures I took today as well. I’ve been watching cross-country skiing again. The Cross Country World Cup has began in Ruka, Kuusamo, here in Finland this weekend.

And I’ve been watching this competition and making this blog post at the same time – combining two hobbies. 🙂

-Leena

Collecting stuff

We collected acorns in October.

First these…

…and then these – about 300 acorns in total. Some of the acorns were already sprouting, lovely. 🙂 We collected them from the ground, under big oak trees, here in our home village.

The first two pictures I took in October, the rest of the pictures in this blog post I took today.

So, we planted the acorns in our garden, here…

…and here.

And we also collected some acorns for the land that my boyfriend now has in the region of Etelä-Pohjanmaa – South Ostrobothnia, about 180 kilometres north from our home, that is to say, we already planted the acorns there, into the forest ground. There’s a certain spot or place, an island actually, where broad-leaved trees are growing in the forest, but there are no oak trees, not yet…

So, this is all an experiment, with these acorns, just nice and interesting.

I collected spruce cones, too. These were on the ground in our yard, on the driveway. We don’t have big spruce trees, but there are spruces just outside our yard. I started to collect these just because I think that they are lovely, but my boyfriend said that we could try to get seeds from these as well. Well, that’s a good idea, an interesting experiment, too. The cones have been drying inside the house now.

And I was shoveling compost, emptying a compost bin a bit today. We have this year-round composter for kitchen (and garden) waste.

We shovel the compost into this container, where the process continues, and in the end, it all goes back to nature again. 🙂

-Leena

Snow

It snowed last night here where I’m living. And it was a surprise – there was no forecast for snow earlier.

The first five pictures I took in our yard.

This was last night.

The next two pictures I took at around 9 am today:

The snow had melted a bit, but there still was snow cover on the ground and on rooftops everywhere.

Sudden winter came for the rose.

But this snow will melt.

…But at around 13.30 pm, still…

October snow came for the viola flowers, too.

The last two pictures I took last Friday, in Etelä-Pohjanmaa – South Ostrobothnia, on the land, on my boyfriend’s new land, about which I wrote earlier, here.

I found red moss in the forest. Red moss is one of my favourites…

And I love campfire coffee. 🙂

-Leena