valkosipuli – Owlnature

May may

What´s around the corner? – Be careful!

Well, the crocuses are nice…

It is May now. It has been a pretty sunny week. We had some rain last weekend and after that there has been the scent of green grass in the air! The first dandelion flowers have come out as well.

Glory of the snow flowers. Aaand, but it has not snowed in May, yet. 😀

It was the warmest day of the year so far on Tuesday. It was 16 degrees Celsius in the daytime and it was not windy. I was sitting on the grass in our garden, by the woods. It was wonderful…

Solar power in our greenhouse as well.

Night owls´garden light the other night…

And yesterday I saw a hedgehog for the first time this year late in the evening. It was getting pretty dark and we came across each other by a tub/container where we collect rainwater so suddenly that I frightened him and he frightened me. 🙂

Full moon was coming my way, too…

The first thing today… I went to the greenhouse to open the windows. The greenhouse was heated up to 10 degrees Celsius at night, because it was too cold in the nighttime. It was a bit over 30 degrees Celsius inside the greenhouse with the sunlight in the morning, as seen in the pic above.

I had to water our cherry tomato plants, they already were all too dry…

Outside, garlic has been growing since March.

Those grapes… The first small grape hyacinths this year.

It is 13 degrees Celsius, nicely a bit warmer again today.

Leena

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