wild food – Page 2

If not cooler, then hotter…

…or the other way round. So the first half of the last day of April was snowy, here is my blog post about it. But the sky did start to clear up and the snow started to melt. In the evening we visited the Kauttuankoski rapids:

I ate my ice cream down there somewhere (=the spot where I was can’t actually be seen in this pic), but by the rapids I was first, and then I came up here. And from here, from the bridge, I took this pic… no snow, not anymore.

And the first day of May, the second day of the Finnish Vappu celebration, the May Day itself, was lovely, sunny and warm. I enjoyed sitting here, on the ground, between our vegetable garden and the woods. 🙂

The next four pictures I took by the lake Pyhäjärvi on Saturday. Oh, the colour blue…

Friday and Saturday were sunny and warm days, too. On Friday I saw the first butterfly of this spring for me this year! It was a peacock butterfly. And I heard and saw the first bees buzzing as well! On Saturday then we visited the lake Pyhäjärvi, and on our way there, we saw a deer. I was actually driving the car at that moment, the deer didn’t jump to the road – it stopped by the ditch. And it was so beautiful! 🙂

Under an alder tree and its catkins, by the lake.

We need more days like this!

But:

The Ibiza lizard and hail in our garden yesterday. It’s been hailing and snowing on many days – last week between Tuesday and Thursday, and this week, it’s been cooler… But the sun has been shining, again, right after almost every time that it has hailed or snowed.

The rest of the pictures I took today. And yes, especially today it has hailed and snowed many times, but the sun’s been shining a bit as well. And today I saw black woodpeckers! Two of them. I hadn’t seen those birds before, in nature. Now they were in ‘our’ woods! And their calls sound so… interesting, too! 🙂

In our vegetable garden. Some frost protection fabric now. We moved some of our strawberry plants here, too.

I thought that there wouldn’t be any narcissus or daffodil plants in our garden this spring, but on Friday I found them, on two spots in the garden, here’s one of them. They had started to grow there again, like, overnight! Literally… I mean, I had been watching those spots! 😀

Leopard’s bane or doronicum. It already has some flower buds, too!

And some green grass has grown everywhere now as well, during May. – The spring has been slow this year, but now it seems that everything has started to grow a bit better, despite the occasional hailing and snowing. And indeed, I already started eating some nettles! 🙂

-Leena

Leaves coming out

I took all the pictures today. First some birch leaves that are growing inside the house now. I wrote about my birch twigs in the previous blog post .

Pure green. Pure love.

And the happymins! 🙂 And naturally I already tasted one of the tiny leaves… it tasted so fresh, so green, so lovely…

This is so inspirational, too…

Yesterday we noticed that rhubarb is coming through again. 🙂

And these, too. We have no idea what these are… They grow in a place where we put some of the leftovers in our garden – leaves after raking them and some ‘surplus soil’ when we are digging somewhere in our garden and we have to remove some land. Hmm…

Some of the leaves of the lilac bushes have almost started to come out as well. Already in the winter I noticed that the buds were very swollen! I was almost a bit worried about that. 🙂 But yes, this bush is in a really sunny spot all year round.

-Leena

Spring comes by doing, too

It’s a sunny day today. Lately we’ve had sunshine, but some cloudy, even foggy days as well. Last Friday when I woke up in the morning, it was white everywhere… we had snow, but only during the first half of the day – during the other half of the day the sun was shining, and the snow melted away fast.

My morning coffee today. 🙂

The air, too, has already become a bit warmer, the wind can still be a bit cool though – in the shade…

We have seen swans flying and heard them honking almost every day for some time now. It has been lovely… And one night when we had a campfire in our garden we heard the haunting calls of cranes and the delightful voice of the blackbird. Oh, spring… And on another night, when we had a garden campfire again, we heard some very loud voices of swans and other waterfowls from the lake Pyhäjärvi near our home. It lasted for hours, and we even heard some flapping of wings and splashing of water – we can’t remember hearing the sounds of the lake water before, in our garden. 🙂

And we have started digging in our garden… This is just one, a bit bigger example – this we’ll be doing a lot this spring – helping the rain water to flow away from the house and away from some places from our garden lawn as well…

I’ve been moving, for example, rocks, from the other side of our garden to other side, here. There’s still many more to go, some are still frozen to the ground on the other side. And these here in the picture I’ll pile in some way, and so on…

And it was already high time to get some birch twigs, to make the leaves grow inside the house. These are my first for the spring… and the last, too – I’m rationing every spring these twigs; I’m not like grazing, but getting just a little something for the promise of the spring, or the summer! And a little something for some additional vitamins then, too, and for some… happymins – happymins could also mean that it’s more about the feeling than the amount – as I said already last year with my birch twigs… 😉

—

“But I don’t always want to know about the sunshine!”:

“This. Is my new house…”

“Just for your information…”

Okay. 🙂

-Leena

Mushrooms

I absolutely love mushrooms! And mushroom hunting. Self-picked mushrooms and self-prepared food with them are something totally different from the canned mushrooms that we meet on pizzas, for example… – No wonder many people believe that they don’t like mushrooms at all… 🙂

And probably we all know how dangerous mushrooms can be – that is a fact indeed! We, me and my boyfriend, got our first facts on mushroom hunting, and bolete mushrooms or porcini mushrooms in particular, when we were mushroom hunting for the first time, with my boyfriend’s father in Eastern Finland. After that we have used a mushroom guide book and the internet, both. 🙂

This blog post of mine is not a proper guide to these two types of mushrooms that I have in the pics below, so don’t eat mushrooms based only on knowledge you get from here! – I’m just having a bit of fun with mushrooms here in this blog post, with a little bit of information! 🙂

The first five pics I took on our front yard on Friday.

We have numerous shaggy ink caps on our front yard every year. They have their own special place there. 🙂 Shaggy ink caps are quite charming and funny mushrooms; they have many phases when it comes to their appearance.

First they are just white, short and chubby ‘trunks’. Then they grow to be tall and thin mushrooms with a proper cap, which then starts to melt away, to dissolve, to drip down, as black liquid or ‘ink’.

These mushrooms are edible when they are very young and white, that mushroom in the pic above is already too old. We have never eaten these, but they say, these are quite good edible mushrooms when they are young.

This ‘ink’ of shaggy ink caps actually was used as ink in days of old. 🙂

Ink dried up?

The rest of the pics I took on Saturday night, after a walk in the forest. – We came out of the forest with our hands full of woolly milkcaps.

Fluffy mushrooms! Cute and delightful! 🙂

Woolly milkcaps are fully edible, but they must be boiled, and they must be boiled longer than some other mushrooms. Woolly milkcaps must be boiled about 20-30 minutes. The taste of raw woolly milkcaps is strongly bitter and raw woolly milkcaps don’t agree with one’s stomach, at all. Cooking, boiling and rinsing the mushrooms removes the poison from them. The taste of woolly milkcaps after boiling them is very delicious! We cooked a creamy sauce with these.

Mushrooms always have funny and cunning names. In Finnish, for example, this woolly milkcap has two names – other one of them is karvalaukku – fur bag, literally. 🙂

-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

Blueberry gold, the next peony poppy, the very last peony flower

We’ve been doing quite a lot of Nordic walking, but I don’t always take pics of it… On Thursday I took a pic – I tried to demonstrate what we’ve been doing quite a lot lately; Nordic walking and during that activity picking and eating blueberries, too (isn’t that a healthy and pleasant combination 😉 ) in the forest where one of our favourite walking trails goes.

The starting and ending point of the trail is by the lake Pyhäjärvi, I took this pic after our walk – trying to get some of my blueberry fingers, too, in the pic. 😀 This previous blog post about Nordic walking was from the same forest, our raven forest near our home. We just love it! – There’s always a raven or many ravens croaking. Once we heard, and saw, many many ravens. We tried to count them; there was at least 15 if not over 20 ravens dashing, flying and croaking. Amazing it was. Ravens are both funny and noble birds. 🙂

A muffin again yesterday evening… We’re lucky enough to have a lot of wild blueberries in our back garden, too. Yesterday evening we made some blueberry muffins. Muffins of gluten free flour; whole grain oat flour. Oat is the best! 🙂 So delicious and healthy. And traditionally Finnish!

Two pics of the next peony poppy flower today. This, too, is one of my ‘wild poppies’. This was hit with rain – yesterday, heavily…

And the very last peony flower – just had to take pics today… Yesterday I was hoping that this would survive the rain and grow bigger…

…so that I could cut it for drying today. And that was what I already did, because I thought the flower is big enough to cut, to save, now. The other peonies that I cut for drying earlier, are still doing (drying) just fine. 🙂

-Leena

Tea, flowers, Medieval Market, birch sap, coffee…

Some miscellaneous yesterday and today again. I’m visiting Turku now. – I’m on the second floor in a block of flats. I wrote a “story so far” in the sidebar of my blog the other day, telling that I studied in a city, and so on. So, clearly, I’ve lived again in the countryside for two years now, but I’ve had one part of my belongings still here in Turku. But, that’s about to change soon – I’m moving out of here completely now…

…like this – having some tea with no hurry whatsoever, trying to figure out my place in the solar system… 😀
OK, there’s a lot of coffee here in my blog, but… I do drink tea, too! Coffee is coffee and caffeine for me, but my tea I prefer without caffeine. Tea is an evening or a night drink for me. My favourites are chamomile tea and rooibos tea. Yesterday evening (in the pic above) I had chamomile, honey & vanilla tea. Sweet. 🙂

And again flower pics I took in the garden of our country home earlier yesterday. Again phacelia.

And more pics of maiden pink, too. It’s difficult to capture with camera the striking neon red colour the flower has, it dazzles the camera… 😀

One peony bud, three pics…

Yesterday we visited the annual event, the Medieval Market of Turku. The Medieval Market is one of my favourite places in Turku. It’s a place for old, traditional and genuine things, scents, sounds, atmosphere… And I had my traditional cup of nice super drink, ice cold birch sap there. 🙂 Nature’s renewable and healthy magic potion that I’d love to have a little more often.

And morning coffee today. Here’s to us, I guess… 😉

-Leena