useful plant – Page 2

Autumn leaves, new grounds, beetroot…

The autumn colours are particularly abundant and vibrant this year. We have our own word for the autumn leaf colour here in Finland – autumn leaf colour is called ruska in Finnish.

It’s exceptionally warm for October in many parts of Finland this weekend – over 15 degrees Celsius.

First just a few pictures that I took in our garden today:

We still have rose blooming in the garden, in front of the porch. We planted the plant in the summer this year.

October rose…

Okay, and what else am I doing…? 🙂 Hmm, for example, working by my computer for a bit again. And we, my boyfriend and I, we’ve been familiarizing ourselves with new grounds and exploring a new land – thanks to my boyfriend who had the chance to buy some land – forest and field, in the region of Etelä-Pohjanmaa – South Ostrobothnia, about 180 kilometres north from our home. So, that’s my boyfriend’s project, but there’s plenty of space also for me to learn new things and to help out, and in fact, we both already attended our first day-long course on how to take care of forest.

I already wrote earlier that we are growing beetroot for the first time ever, this year. Here’s now our pickled beetroot that we made yesterday:

I used water, vinegar, sugar, whole white peppercorns, cloves, a cinnamon stick and salt when I was cooking the pickling liquid. And I put also cloves of garlic into the jar. Should be nice. 🙂

-Leena

About some of the edibles in the garden II

Garlic! 🙂 This is the first time that garlic has grown in our garden. – We’ve tried to grow garlic once before, but nothing really happened then…

Now, all of a sudden, we have both smaller and bigger garlics. They are marvellous! I love the smell and taste of garlic and I eat small amounts of raw garlic, too.

We used some of our onions fresh from the garden, but the rest of the onions we dried, because they were pretty small. There are both yellow onions and red onions. Dried onions are delicious as well.

Here’s our fruit and vegetable dryer. A nice machine. The scent of onion, for example, was wonderful when the onions were drying in there.

This year we tried to grow zucchini for the first time ever. Well, actually, we weren’t trying that hard, we didn’t pay that much attention to this try. Here in the pic is our biggest oddball, our smaller zucchinis didn’t have the time to grow bigger before the weather got a bit colder.

And another try… My broad beans… In a raised garden bed with wooden frames these were.

I didn’t get that many broad beans, but some broad beans anyway, and I want to try growing them again next year! 🙂

About the sweet corn… We’ve got more sweet corn now than a year ago. 🙂

And we are drying some sweet corn, too, for seeds, hopefully.

I’ll write about a couple of edibles in the garden a bit later again.

-Leena

About some of the edibles in the garden

Today I’ll write a bit about some of the edibles in the garden right now. Here’s really only some of the edibles in the garden – about a few more a bit later…

This is the second time that we are growing sweet corn in our garden. Last summer our sweet corns grew from seedlings, these are grown from seed now. This summer has been very good for growing sweet corn here in Finland, it has been very warm and sunny.

The tallest plant is much taller than I am.

There are cobs growing in three plants or stalks, two cobs in each plant. We had several sweet corn stalks growing, but only three grew taller and are now growing cobs. Hmm, I’m still not sure how to talk about the different parts of the corn plants, how to call them, and not even in Finnish… :p But yeah, I’ll write about the harvest of our sweet corn then later. 🙂

Our potato patch this summer – new patch for potatoes this year again… We haven’t dug up any potatoes yet.

This is how our carrots grow this year; a raised garden bed with a wooden frame. Neat, no weeds.

Beetroot, parsnip and turnip. A raised bed with the frame as well. And we are growing all these three for the first time ever. We haven’t dug up beetroot and parsnips yet.

But we have dug up some carrots and turnips already. I used these in soup.

And we have only one tomato plant growing this year, we had more than one, but only this bears fruit. But yeah, the plant doesn’t look very good anymore. The nights can already be a bit colder, and a bit cold for tomato plants, but we still have warm days. The temperatures have been around 20 degrees Celsius in the daytime.

But there’s fruit turning red all the time now.

Our first ripe tomatoes this year. I will never stop wondering at the taste of home-grown tomatoes – they taste so sweet and amazing. 🙂

-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

More crocus flowers, onions growing, year-round composter…

Spring days… But it’s been a bit cooler now, but not cooler than normally in Finland this time of the year; the temperatures have been around 10 degrees Celsius in the daytime. – Some days it’s been more like 5 degrees, but some days it’s been 13 degrees. And in the nighttime the temperatures have been a bit above 0 degrees Celsius. It’s been a bit more cloudy now, but in the daytime there still has been more sunshine than rain altogether.

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

More crocus flowers. Now we already have crocuses growing in many places in the garden. We don’t even remember all the places we planted crocus bulbs last autumn, and I don’t even know all the places my boyfriend planted them. 🙂

That white stuff on the ground, by the way, is spring fertilizer for the cherry tree…

Charming surprises.

And more butterflies… I saw the first butterfly in our garden on Sunday the 15th, it was a brimstone butterfly, and I’ve seen brimstone butterflies here a few times more after that, too. A few bees have been buzzing as well, and we saw a tiny hedgehog in the woods next to our garden, too.

We’ve been working in the garden for some time now, turning the garden into our outdoor living room again, clearing it up and so on. And raking, raking again – how come we have so, so many fallen leaves on the ground now in April even though we raked, like everything, last autumn…?

Onions, red onions are already growing, from onion sets, in these pots in our garden. Planted about two weeks ago.

A composter with a crown on the top. 🙂 We have been using this composter for fruit and vegetable peels, coffee grounds, used tea bags, and so on… for over a week now. This is our first composter for kitchen waste, Biolan pikakompostori – quick composter 220eco, a year-round composter. So simple, useful and nice. And the crown is a container that we use for collecting the fruit peels, coffee grounds, et cetera, in the kitchen.

-Leena

Growing tomatoes this year & some bird related things

The story about growing tomatoes this year… It is a short story, very short… so short, that I already wrote it on my Instagram (owlnatureleena) a while ago.

My precious… The summer this year was not very good for growing tomatoes outside in the garden here in Finland. But some tomatoes did grow! We can still, in November, eat tomatoes that have grown in our garden. So… it’s not that bad after all. 🙂

We had only few bigger tomatoes, but many smaller ones. And again, they had to be taken inside the house for ripening. They were ripening on a plate in the kitchen, for weeks. Home-grown tomatoes always taste so incredibly sweet! They are just perfect.

And some bird related things… I found something that is over 20 years old, something that I missed – something that I thought I had lost forever…

My pendant, my bird! 🙂 I did not believe that this still was somewhere, somewhere safe… but yes, I found this at my childhood home, (where else!). A bronze pendant necklace called Tintti, made in Finland by Kalevala Jewelry. The stone is hand-painted ceramic.

Okay, I found these; my Tintti with its original box and another bronze pendant necklace by Kalevala Jewelry as well. Another bird! A bird called Tampereen seudun lintu, as old as my Tintti, but I didn’t remember that I even had it.

So, I had these in my childhood. I am so happy to have found them! My treasures… I think that these, too, will be in my pictures every once in a while. 🙂 I love jewelry and it can be seen in my blog…

And something I made over the weekend… I was knitting a bit, testing this rainbow yarn that I have. 🙂 At this point in time, another owl. My design – my problems – more fun in the end. I think he needs some fur around his beak…

-Leena

Sweet corn, grape vine, purple coneflower – the strangers in our garden

Now some more adventures in the garden. This year I grew sweet corn for the first time. It was a quite fascinating experience! An experiment. 😀 For a Finn corn plants are rather exotic plants, they are not like potatoes and carrots that are popular and are grown everywhere (and grow everywhere, too). Usually the growing of corn plants succeeds only in southern Finland, and even here the summer generally has to be very good, favourable.

This is how big my sweet corn plants grew, they were grown from seedlings. I took this pic a bit over a week ago when I harvested my sweet corns.

And something about my adventure… I wasn’t at all familiar with the growing of the corn plant, or… with the corn plant itself. – I didn’t know what to expect and what there should, like, be in the plant so that it would be able to be pollinated, and… what the plant should look like – where the different parts of the plant should grow… OK, so I was a bit puzzled with all the stages of the growing of the corn plant.

The only thing I knew was that corn plants need rich, fertile soil, and that I had to put some frost protection fabric on them when it was cold in May. And about the summer… the summer in Finland this year of course was not very good for the growing of corn plants.

Here were the results. Not so much corn… but wow, the plants had so much growing to do! And they did grow some small miracles and even one bigger with actual kernels on the cob. (In addition to these in the pic, there were also three more small miracles and one bigger with a few kernels, but they were already a bit mouldy.) I cooked these corns in the pic in water and we ate these ‘baby corns’ and these real kernels in the bigger corn. They were just delicious!

OK, so, now I know how to actually grow corn plants and what kind of plants they are in the first place. 🙂 And I would definitely grow sweet corn plants again! And I would write about it, from the very beginning… now that I know what to write. ;D

We’ve had this grape vine plant growing in our garden for three summers now. In spring this year we were just looking at the spot where this had grown in previous summers like “will it even grow this year… or ever again…” But it did grow this summer, too, and never before it has grown this big. And what’s more…

…this year our grape vine started to even grow some grapes! Quite amazing, a bit unbelievable. – I have not expected that our plant would actually grow fruits. Now it has two bunches of grapes growing, this bunch in the picture has the bigger fruits. OK, they won’t grow more now in autumn… A bit of grape tasting next, no matter how small or unripe these are. 🙂

My echinacea purpurea or purple coneflower flower for this year in the garden now. I planted my first ever echinacea plants in May, three seedlings in total. I wasn’t sure if I should see flowers this year or not, or perhaps next year, this should be perennial… Well, this is not a perfect echinacea flower, but a pretty autumn flower anyway! 🙂

The other two seedlings didn’t grow that much, the one on the right can hardly be seen in the pic.

But this is tall…

Echinacea was, and still is, one of my dream plants or flowers for my garden, now I would like to plant a few seedlings more of this. 🙂

-Leena