useful plant – Page 4

Growing tomatoes

This is what’s been happening this year: we have grown tomatoes for the first time, we started the pre-growing too late, but we’ve got some delicious red tomatoes to eat. The pre-growing should have started already in March or at the beginning of April. I don’t remember when exactly our tomato seeds were planted, but it was like May already… 🙂

The pre-growing happened in small containers inside our house and the pre-grown tiny plants, seedlings, were then planted outside, in buckets with drainage holes in the bottom. The buckets were placed to our vegetable garden – the all day sunny spot between our house and the woods. The wall of our home was sheltering the plants a bit. When it was sometimes raining too much, we carried the plant buckets inside our house. Everything went fine – the plants or their soil didn’t get any mold. – One just has to carefully keep an eye on the plants – when to water them, and how much. And tomatoes like fertilizing, we always use organic fertilizers.

And oh yes, I just love the scent of tomato plants! 🙂

I took this pic on October 3rd. This was the last day our tomatoes were outside – the upper parts of the plants had finally been frozen at night (and the plants were like all gone, the next day, October 4th). We noticed that our tomatoes actually did like a bit cooler air – they were ripening so well in autumn – they started ripening with the combination of cool air and warm sunlight. And it really was so wonderful that we had so summery September for our tomatoes… because we were so late with the planting. 😀 But oh yes, these home-grown ripe tomatoes that we now have had – they’ve tasted so delicious, sweet… they are miraculous! 🙂

Tomatoes do turn red and fully ripen without the main body of the plant, inside the house (and tomatoes do ripen without apples, and so on… 😉 ). The already red tomatoes, that are ripening to be eaten, we have kept on a table in kitchen.

But the first ripening of our tomatoes – the green tomatoes turning red, happens in the cool and dark sauna in our home. And when the sauna is heated, we take the tomatoes to kitchen.

Our biggest tomato for this year, I took it outside for pics… 🙂

So, now we know what to do in March next year!

-Leena

More October

Just some more October pics, from last weekend and past few days, in our garden…

In the backyard again…

October strawberry… In a pot. We thought this plant already died in the summer, but it started to grow again… but still ripe strawberries for this year…? – Not gonna happen. 🙂

One tough cornflower. I’ve been visiting this flower regularly during this autumn – and it’s just always there! It’s been facing downwards already for a while. But it’s still there. 🙂

Backyard trees again – more pine trees, two apple trees, a birch tree, a bigger rowan and one other yellow Norway Maple…

And one sturdy annual mallow! This flower hasn’t fully opened up, and it, too, has already been facing downwards, but it’s been there for ages. 😀

Some lovely yellow tiny flowers spotted in our carrot field…

Under our bigger oak tree…

Our smaller oak tree. 🙂

Dill, too, was still growing nicely in the ground, despite the cold at nights. Now I’ve picked most of them, some we ate, the rest are drying.

Still some tiny single viola flowers in the pots… Two of them in the pics here, symbols of boldness and strength – in the beginning, these plants were here and here. – Oh dear… 🙂

Some October fern…

My next blog post will be about growing tomatoes. 🙂

-Leena

Coffee, pink flowers, blackberries

Today’s morning coffee pic along with some more pics of pink flowers, taken lately and today, and a couple of pics with blackberries in them. – Pics in the still very warm September here in Finland. 🙂

Other one of my upper eyelids is a bit red, very swollen and somewhat sore today, it started already yesterday. My boyfriend had the same thing a while ago. But my eyelid is a lot more swollen than his was. Nice. Just taking it easy today…

These two flowers I met amongst the shaggy ink caps. We haven’t planted these. I’m not even sure what these actually are – they look a bit like tiny, and somewhat dark-coloured annual mallows, though… 🙂

Blackberries! And I’ve missed almost everyone of them, when it comes to taking pics. 😀 – I’ve just been eating… We planted the blackberry bush in our garden last year. This year we’ve gotten many berries, so juicy and delicious.

Dasiphora fruticosa or shrubby cinquefoil, ‘pink paradise‘. We planted the bush a couple of weeks ago.

A tiny bush to fill the empty space ( a bit too big, and not to be seen wholly in the pic) in the middle of our garden. – This is a start… 🙂 Very flowery shrubs are shrubby cinquefoils in autumn…

And these old friends today:

Annual mallow, one more pic…

And a bit of cosmos…

-Leena

A plum fruit in the garden, autumn thoughts coming, too

One delightful plum fruit in our garden! Our plum tree really has grown and ripened one fruit this year. Well done, wonderfully happened, as this is the first whole year of the tree in our garden. It did have more than hundred flowers in spring, but I was hoping to get only two fruits, because that’s how it goes in the early years of the fruit tree’s life… Yeah well, I was actually hoping to get “any fruit”, so one purple fruit in the tree is a marvel. It looks quite amazing! 😀

My previous blog posts about the tree here and here.

This is even more amazing, because we already thought, at one point, that also this fruit had gone – one day I just couldn’t find it in the tree. I said that to my boyfriend, and he also searched the tree, and said that he couldn’t find the fruit either. What are we? A couple of morons? 😀

All of a sudden then, the fruit was there again, on another day… And it still grew bigger. Then suddenly it started to change colour from green to purple, and once it had started to do it, the colour change happened very quickly.

Wow, oh dear oh dear, I’m grateful! 🙂

So hey! It’s already September! But I’m actually quite content with the fact – the autumn may begin. 🙂 And in Owlnature, too. I was away from here for a while, because I had the moving in and out project, or an ordeal, as it turned out to be, a bit. 😀 – Too big closets to store your rubbish there, years of dirt in some spots in one’s student apartment, and so on, but it’s all over now. 🙂 But I do feel that I should have started, everything, that I’ve been doing now, and that I’m about to, hopefully, do next, already a year ago… Buuut enough of this right now, maybe a bit of reminiscing the old things later, again, and we have to rearrange this whole country home of ours here, too, every room, now. Aaand I still have some flower pics and some other pics, too, from August, that I’ll reminisce here in my blog a bit. And for this autumn I indeed have some plans, other than cleaning the house and everything, too, but let’s see what happens – just taking things easy… but very, very, seriously… ;D – And I can say that it all comes down to the fact that I want to grow mentally and I want to learn to do new things, too. And no matter how diminutive the new things are, it’s always an adventure. – Let us not destroy our inner child!

-Leena

Harvesting here, harvesting there…

Hello from Turku! It’s this moving in and out project again that I’ve been at… and now I’m saying hello from here, with a couple of pics.

My morning coffee here today. This is the last coffee pic that I post from here… so, that is why I’m so eager to say hello to the world, from here, now. 🙂

I just say that it’s truly interesting, enlightening and… educational to go through your belongings and your… rubbish, when you have lived in the same apartment for years, and if the place has been your student apartment… whoa! 😀

This was yesterday afternoon in our country home before heading for Turku. Strawberry ice cream and berries – raspberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants and gooseberries fresh from our garden, and blueberries fresh from the woods next to our garden.

And we’ve started digging up, harvesting, our potatoes. Home-grown potatoes look always so sweet and hilarious. 🙂 And they taste so delicious! Oh, and that lovely soil, too, like in this pic that I took here in my apartment in Turku today, before I started washing the potatoes a bit.

-Leena

About the plum tree and taking care of it

Our plum tree today. My first blog post about the tree here.

The flowers disappeared quickly and our tiny tree really started to grow some fruits! At least started, and some of the diminutive green fruits have already grown bigger. But still a lot of waiting, though… The plums in this tree should not be that big when they are ripe, but they should be very blue.

So, still hoping to get the two plum fruits that I’m dreaming of this year… 😉

And about taking care of this tree:

The net is keeping our forest rabbit away, although we have our lettuces growing in open ground, and the bunny hasn’t eaten them, but still… And we had a tar moat made out of a plastic container around the trunk of the tree, on the ground, to keep the ants away. That was really necessary and worked very well!

And the aphids, we keep them away with the mixture of water and the traditional Finnish washing liquid, pine soap, called Mäntysuopa – works like a charm! 🙂

Now just waiting what happens to the tiny green fruits…

The next blog post about the tree here.

-Leena

Rainy day pics

But first one pic from yesterday:

I was playing a surgeon, a seed potato surgeon – you have to be very cautious when you’re taking the seed potatoes out of the net bag packing, because the shoots get so easily detached from the potatoes and then they will not give you any food… or the food will be very slow… 🙂

So yesterday we made our potato field. It was actually hard work… as it always is with garden… hard, but so nice and therapeutic. 🙂 I took this pic today, as well as the rest of the pics in this blog post.

A rainy day, fresh air and expecting it to be even greener after some rain. It hasn’t rained for days, weeks, at least for a bit more than two weeks it has been dry. Now we don’t have to use the tap water to water everything growing in the garden. Have to be grateful. 🙂

OK, I don’t know how to keep up with the rhubarb…

These, some fern, we have many, the previous owners of this house have planted them. I’m not sure, but the current man of this house may have planted some, too.

Just some of our fern…

This geometric flower plantation is a man made. 😉

-Leena