spruce cones – Owlnature

´Snowflash´ and stuff

March came and so did snow. So let´s feast our eyes on that white for a bit again (or still?)… :p (Too many pictures in this blog post, but this is ´for the record´and spring is already in the air…)

Well, this was on Friday a week ago… The greenest guy in the house! A green huntsman spider.

And by the lake Pyhäjärvi here in our home village, a week ago as well…

In the woods travelling away from the lake…

One of the campfires that we have had in our garden lately.

And then came March, the first four pictures on Sunday:

G`morning!

We still have the upper part of our Christmas tree on the terrace…

The next eight pictures on Wednesday:

I still found a cone in the Christmas tree. 🙂 (I found 41 cones when it was time to take the tree to pieces in January.)

Hmm… Christmas? No…..

It was windy, as it has been many a time this winter, no permanent snow cover here in the southernmost part of Finland, but windy Yes…

On Thursday:

The amount of snow varies, the snow melted a bit again…

The next nine pictures I took yesterday, on Friday:

Mooorning! It had been snowing a bit again…

It´s very nice that there has still been snow, because ´the spring in the air´feels more like a real spring when there´s some snow melting. 😀

Small rose flowers in our living room.

Sunshine & blue…

Solar power.

Hmm… And in the sky, the moon…

Garden campfire yesterday. The sky was clear at night, the moon, stars…

But this morning:

Well, grey morning!

My morning coffee ideas in the living room…

In the afternoon, just for the record…

Leena

A weather report, maybe^

A broken record here. Umm… so we already had some snow again. It was ´the sixth snow´for this season here where I´m living – a few centimetres of snow for one day, just for one day. And then the snow melted. So no snow now, again…

The next three pictures I took yesterday:

Well, this was kinda white in colour here yesterday morning. Frost all over, and the sun was shining, too. This mug is my new mug that I found on Friday, in a second hand shop, on the spot where they give their remaining stuff for free there. This mug is like new and just what I need this winter.

So the temperature went up again during the daytime yesterday, and in the evening it started to sleet a lot. Hmm…

And it was Raining at night.

This was on Friday, the first full moon of 2020:

And with a penumbral lunar eclipse it came. I took this pic a bit after 9 pm when the eclipse was on. Of course I knew I would not be able to ´catch the eclipse with my camera´, but I wanted to take pics of the full moon because the sky was all clear and the moon was so bright. And we saw the eclipse clearly. It was just nice. 🙂

And this was at around 0.30 am, I was still ´mooning´out there… I was awed by the brightness of the moon and by the landscape that the moonlight created there in the dark. And I was even able to catch three stars with my camera. 😀

On Wednesday it was time to take the Christmas tree to pieces… I found 41 cones in the tree! And some seeds fell from the cones as well. Hopefully at least one black spruce will grow from these.

The rest of the pictures I took today:

My morning coffee. I do need this mug…

No snow… But at least the sun is shining again – there´s the difference between November and January – sunshine in January.

I watched biathlon and cross-country skiing today. What to watch next…? Something short perhaps. ~Oh, things to do… well, maybe tomorrow…

Leena

Christmas lights~

Black Christmas – musta joulu. – No snow here in the southernmost part of Finland. Until yesterday – a tiny amount of snow here where I´m living. Very tiny. So it has been this “it´s what´s inside that counts” thing at Christmas this year. Yeah, well, we already did have our ´fourth snow´, too, for this season, here where I´m living, after the third one melted, a bit more snow for some days there was again, but it all melted just before Christmas…

Now some pictures:

These first two pictures I took on Monday. We have our first ever Christmas tree in this house. Love the atmosphere and the scent!

~Christmas tree and Christmas food, chocolate, coffee, glögi and watching television, Netflix, Finnish Yle Areena, etc. and enjoying the outdoors a bit and reading, thinking… Mostly. Between Christmas and New Year as well.

And the tree even has cones! It´s black spruce.

I´m not usually on the track, but when it´s Christmas Day, I am. There is a bit longer uphill part there on the track, not a steep one, but you can really feel that you go uphill, and I was just thinking “What the hell am I doing here Now?” But at the end of the track, it all started to feel just nice. 🙂

Two more on Christmas Day,, at night:

White Christmas… lights, on the lilac bush in our front yard.

Outside our living room.

And the snow then finally:

Yesterday morning. A pleasant surprise and this really makes a big difference! Our ´fifth snow´ for this season is this…

In the daytime, still no natural light yesterday.

Coffee pic yesterday.

Hyacinth, the scent…

Yesterday evening, here in our home village.

Pictures today:

Coffee pic by the rose bush Rosa Splendens, Valamonruusu.

It´s a colder day today, it´s -5 degrees Celsius, but they say that it feels like -11 degrees Celsius, now, around 11 am.

There was some natural light coming my way! 😀

Sunshine!

The days are already getting longer. The length of the day today, here where I´m living, is 5 h 32 min.

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