It is a sign of spring! – We heard the blackbird sing for the first time this year here on Monday evening this week. It sounded like magic. 🙂
Swans, too, have been loud, by the lake, lately. We usually hear them in the evening and/or at night. Yesterday for example they were quiet in the evening, but at around 2 am then, they were very loud again.
The first five pics on Thursday:
Morning! It had been snowing / sleeting just a bit again…
That did not last long, it was +5 degrees Celsius again in the afternoon:
The little oak tree still has some of its leaves.
Yesterday, on Friday:
No snow good morning!
But it was windy again in the daytime.
Garden campfire in the evening. We have had campfires in the garden lately as we have been building the garden shed…
And late in the evening it suddenly started to snow when I was standing by the fire. It was Real cold winter snow, and for a while it came down like here in the pic above.
Today:
It´s still -1 degrees Celsius, and it´s (enough) windy again as well.
The shed. Plank by plank… We have been building this garden shed, now there´s the roof and the walls. This has been a lot of work and fun. 🙂
No permanent snow cover here in the southernmost part of Finland this winter – I guess it´s safe to say this now, at this point in time. Umm… so we already had ´the seventh snow´, ´the eighth snow´and ´the ninth snow´for this season here where I´m living. (At least these we´ve had, I may have forgotten ´one more snow´, but I can´t even count these anymore.) So a bit snow for a few days, a few centimetres of snow for two or three days, and so on… As it has been this winter. And then, again, fricking warm weather, temperatures above zero degrees Celsius, Rain… I am so fed up with this. And hey yes, it started to snow on Wednesday this week and now we have `the tenth snow´for this winter. A few centimetres of snow we Had. – It lasted until today, it´s Sunday today, and the snow is already melting.
The amount of snow in centimetres in Finland yesterday. Oh, the northern part of the country and Lapland…
The next four pics I took here in our home village on Friday evening when we were coming back from grocery store 🙂 :
By the lake Pyhäjärvi. Lit by our car, hmm… Some ice… an ice cover and snow on the lake for that time…
On the same spot, looking up… The moon was bright again!
Travelling in the woods… A bumpy road.
Ended up in an ice rink…
Yesterday, my morning coffee, snowman in the middle of the oak trees…
This was a week ago. We have not seen this before! The leaf buds have already begun to open in the bush, in late January!
And our small common hazel shrub has already begun to open its leaf buds….. This Picture I took yesterday.
Oh yes… This was on Wednesday late in the evening. This was my third time on skis this winter. Well, it took me a while, but I finally learned :-p that, this winter, whenever there´s enough snow, I gotta go cross-country skiing, immediately, in our yard. Just go!
Whoa! A eucalyptus sauna whisk, we had this for the first time last week. Usually we have Finnish birch sauna whisks, but now we wanted to try this eucalyptus (from Ukraine) whisk, because we found it for half the price in a local grocery store. And we loved it! The whisk was thick, the leaves were wonderfully long and they didn´t fall off. It was very good to hit yourself with it. And the scent when you split the leaves a bit and crush them in your hands is lovely. A nice and a rather exotic experience. 🙂
In these pictures… I believe this was our ´seventh´snow, in January this was. Well, this winter it does not matter what day it was or is now…
The last three pics I took today:
I started watching cross-country skiing again… Either watching cross-country skiing or dreaming of doing it…? :p
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 SunnyChernobyl: 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.
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, jamsugar, 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 Finnishcross-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.
It has been warm and it was very warm for a few days; it was between 25 and 27 degrees Celsius between Sunday and Tuesday. Today it’s 18 degrees Celsius and they say that we will get back to more normal – to around 15 degrees Celsius now…
The first seven pictures I took in our garden on Tuesday, yesterday and today:
Our second cherry tree survived its first winter. – Our first cherry tree didn’t survive winter and we had to plant a new tree a year ago. This new tree had 11 flowers this week.
Here’s our cherry bush today. We planted this bush cherry in September 2017 and it had many flowers already a year ago.
Our oak tree in the back of the garden. I love these small oak tree leaves… Oak tree is one of the last ones to grow leaves in the spring in Finland.
Our old apple tree is flowering. Oh, love…
And our little bird cherry tree is flowering, too, in the back of the garden.
A nice tulip in the back of the garden as well. – We have a few ‘surprise tulips’ there. 🙂
…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. 🙂
