winter – Page 7 – Owlnature

Dried flowers, a campfire, one knitted owl…

It’s a sunny weekend! And now that the spring is just around the corner, it’s starting to get miscellaneous again… 😉

It was finally time to take these friends outside for a pic yesterday. My dried peonies from last summer… beauties… lovely memories…

My dried flower crown from the summer of 2015 is hanging on a door window in our hall. What actually dominates this picture, however, is an unfinished door window curtain project. 🙂

Our garden campfire last night. It was warming so nicely in the beautiful but cold darkness.

I started knitting again. I love knitting, but I’m not always doing it. 🙂 And… I always need some practice with it. This, for example, is my first ever owl!

-Leena

Hear the blackbird sing – spring-like days

On Monday the sun was shining delightfully, it was warm. On Tuesday it was cloudy. And it was already very windy when we were taking our regular walk in the forest trail in the evening. The darkness fell and it started to sleet heavily when we were in the forest. And we naturally couldn’t feel the wind that hard there in the shelter of the forest, but when we came out of the forest, by the lake Pyhäjärvi, the wind felt already so fierce that it was almost incredible. It was a blast! ;D And the wet snow flakes were so huge for a while… Yesterday and today the sun’s been shining again, but it has been windy.

The pictures here I took today in our garden.

I noticed on Monday that one strawflower flower still opens its petals on a sunny day! 🙂 And closes them in the evening. I took this pic at around 8.15am today. And at 10.00 the petals were opening…

After I had taken the pic above, I started to really listen to the singing of birds, they were singing everywhere… Suddenly I recognized the distinctive voice of the blackbird! It is an enchanting sound of spring here in Finland!

Hmm…

The strawflower flower opened by 12.30pm. How beautiful! 🙂

The snow’s been melting all the time now…

Under our biggest pine tree.

It’s 4 degrees Celsius in the shade, but they say that it feels like -2, and it does – the wind is cold. But in the sunshine, it’s wonderfully warm there…

-Leena

It is coming! – Spring is almost here…

It’s March… quite nice, almost incredible! Lately we’ve had snow and sunshine, grey days, temperatures below freezing and wet snow… everything. And we just may have been hit by the biggest snowfall for this winter earlier this week as well – here in southern Finland we sometimes have this too-much-snow-too-late-it-should-have-been-at-Christmas -thing… But yes, this week’s snow, too, has already been melting. No one’s stopping spring! 🙂

The first 13 pictures I took today, the last two are from last night.

Moss magic at the summer flower bed…

Backyard pine trees.

A clover flower…

A strawflower flower… power. 😉

An annual mallow flower…

…and another…

…a few more…

Perhaps I should plant annual mallow seeds, too, in many places in the garden this spring – then there would be some lace all around the garden in wintertime, how nice would that be? 😀

Double sun… 😉

An Egyptian friend…

At the potato field…

Even though the days may be warm, the nights can be a bit cold:

“I adjusted the thermostat so that it will be a bit warmer in here… is that okay…?”

“Purr… nice! I’m telling you…”
Our radiator tiger. 🙂

-Leena

Sauna & snow

Just a brief thought on the traditional combination of sauna and snow. It’s nice to take some snow with you when you are taking a sauna bath. I did it yesterday evening, for example. And as with the birch leaves in summertime, I like rubbing it, the snow, against my skin and my face, too, taking a bath with it. It’s cool and very nice indeed! Relaxing and healthy! Sauna earthing… And, naturally, it’s nice to walk from the sauna barefoot, on the snow outside, cool down a bit, and then go back to the warmth of the sauna again – just lovely! Good for your blood circulation. 😉

Of course you can roll naked in the snow. It, too, actually feels nice, but it takes some courage to start doing it. I haven’t done it this winter. Okay, perhaps I should now challenge myself to do it, there might still be time to do it this week… I dare myself to… (?) 😀

As to “there might still be time”; it is happening again, out there… the snow is melting a bit again… But at least spring is just around the corner, soon. 🙂

-Leena

Snowy, snowy – a wintry month…

It’s already March next week! But, there’s still some time to enjoy snow and… ahem, some winter pics. 🙂

The first five pics I took yesterday.

It’s been a nice winter week. First we had one night of raining… WATER, but it didn’t melt all the snow, and after that night it started to snow, and now it’s been snowing with the temperatures being moderate and nice winter temperatures; between 0 and about -10 degrees Celsius, and some days the sun has been shining delightfully as well. And the sun is warming a bit, loving us…

But no, we haven’t had, like, heaps of snow this winter – we’ve just had freaking cold weather at times. So, in these pics here now is to be seen our snow record for this winter… Yeah well, it’s been snowing a bit today as well, but… you get the picture, I believe. 🙂

Okay, still some time to take winter coffee pics…

The sturdy clarkia or godetia flowers, too, still standing. I’ll plant clarkia seeds this spring as well, but this time, in many places in the garden.

Blue sky, love…

The next two pics I took on the day before yesterday.

One of those snowfalls it was. And this was at 17:45 PM – a huge increase in the number of daylight hours: on the 16th of December I wrote that the sunset was at 15:12 PM here where I’m living, and the length of the day was 5 hours 31 minutes. Today the sun sets at 17:47 PM and the length of the day is 10 hours 5 minutes – twice the energy already! 🙂

And the rest of the pics are again from yesterday.

Taller than the trees…? 😉

At the strawflowers again…

And this pic I took through a car window as we were travelling to Turku. This was at about 16:30 PM – not long ago it was completely dark at that hour! 🙂

-Leena

Amaryllis blooming again

My amaryllis today:

She really did it! 🙂

The bud was so thin that I thought that there would be only one flower and I believed that the flower would be tiny and poor, but… wow! There’s already two big flowers, and too new buds as well.

I wonder if this now is the last time my amaryllis has flowers… 😮 And it had three leaves growing, but one of them (the shortest one) has now turned brown, and it’s not even dry, just rotten… As I said before; I’m not at all confident…

But yes, this now… As majestic as ever…

It’s been freezing cold again and there’s still snow. But the sun’s been shining and it truly is warming nicely during the daytime! And it’s so bright…

-Leena

Whiteout, grey on

Today: snow and fog, thick fog. With the temperature around 0 degrees Celsius. I took these pics by the lake Pyhäjärvi here in Satakunta region.

A curious white wall there was…

On the ice.

One saw that one didn’t see…

The shoreline disappeared…

They disappeared…

-Leena