About the fruit trees, new trees and a bush, an unidentified flower…

Our plum tree had last year (it was the first whole year for the tree in the garden) only one plum fruit, this year it has six! And what’s more, last year it had well over a hundred flowers, this year not many more than 20. Cool! 🙂

plum tree

A nice fruit.

cherry tree

In July our grafted cherry tree started to grow a branch on its on. After that it has grown three more branches. What great balancing! 😉

cherry tree

The tree has grown further its ‘original’ branches as well.

cherry tree

A tree in progress…

cherry bush

A cherry bush now, too, we planted it next to the cherry tree last week.

pear tree

And a pear tree, we planted it last week as well.

pear tree

The pear tree has such flawless leaves!

EDIT: This could be gladiolus, miekkalilja in Finnish… I suddenly remembered this name, and it sure looked like gladiolus when I searched it. 🙂

An unidentified flower. – Yet another new flower for this autumn and we have no idea what this could be called. I tried to google it a bit, but no luck with that. It’s a fairly big plant, big flowers. We knew that something was planted in this spot, but didn’t believe that anything would bloom here this year.

Beautiful it is…

aspen

And another new tree. We planted this aspen tree the other day.

aspen

The autumn colour of the aspen trees is always so enchanting, bright, brilliant… And the sound of the aspen leaves quaking in the wind is lovely.

aspen

Populus tremula erecta is this tree.

aspen

I got a bit carried away with the colours… Well, autumn is once a year. 😉

aspen

-Leena

Flowers in September

There are even some new summer flowers for this year in autumn, and some perennials flowering as well.

common poppy & friends

To begin with… there are still common poppy flowers in the garden. Friends are loving it.

calendula/marigold & friends

There is no autumn without pot marigolds or calendulas… 😉

calendula, marigold

My personal little autumn sun…

calendula, marigold

calendula, marigold

calendula, marigold

clematis

Clematis growing and blooming as well. Our first ever clematis plants, planted in summer this year. Yet another new favourite… now I would love to have many different types of clematis flowers.

clematis

clematis

Our clematis is growing by an oak tree.

clematis

annual mallow

And there are still many annual mallow flowers at their prime…

cosmos

There is no summe… yeah well, I planted cosmos seeds this year as well, but there’s been only few flowers – all the green parts of the plant have grown, but not much blooming this year. I think it’s the a bit strange summer and the spot where I planted them, both. I planted them by the ditch by the woods – that was the only place I could squeeze them in this year. 😀

shrubby cinquefoil

Shrubby cinquefoil is flowering this autumn as well.

sunflower

This year we have finally succeeded in growing sunflowers! We’ve tried to grow sunflowers already in the summers of 2015 and 2016, and last year we thought that we should start the pre-growing earlier. But… we didn’t pre-grow them this year at all, just planted the seeds directly into the ground. We think it’s the soil – this year we used both fresh soil and the fertile soil in the places where we put our grass clippings and some leaves. Worked like a charm. 🙂

sunflower

clarkia amoena, godetia

Candies… There is no autumn without clarkia amoena or godetia flowers.

clarkia amoena, godetia

peony poppy

And there is still at least one peony poppy flower.

peony poppy

dahlia

Dahlias growing and blooming. Our first ones ever these, too. Planted in spring this year, and new favourites again…

dahlia

Mellow…

dahlia

Cactus dahlia. How charming!

-Leena

Two and a half weeks in Eastern Finland

I spent two and a half weeks in Eastern Finland, in the municipality of Rautavaara in the region of Northern Savonia, in August and in September. It’s my boyfriend’s home region and I was travelling with him and our two cats. His family has an old house there in Rautavaara, no one lives in the house anymore, it’s just for summertime visits nowadays, and that’s the place we stayed as well. It’s always about an eight hour’s drive from our home to Rautavaara, and the same back of course. – Always worth the travel.

I didn’t take pictures of, like, everything, but naturally I did ‘get caught up in some things’, and the result is this blog post here now. 🙂 I also took some pictures for our, mine and Owlnature‘s, Instagram (owlnatureleena), and the real Instagram widget has, by the way, (finally :p ) been on the sidebar of my blog for some time now as well.

lake Keyritty

By the lake Keyritty, just outside the centre of Rautavaara. It was a summery day. So calm, beautiful… just stunning! And it was completely silent here and everywhere we went. 🙂

lake Keyritty

dragonfly

There were many dragonflies flying and enjoying the sunshine by the house on many days. Here’s two of them.

dragonfly

Tiilikanselkä

By another lake on some other day. This is called Tiilikanselkä.

There are actual creeks in the forest, I’m not sure if this is one of them, or is this just some ditch…? Beautiful water areas in the forests, too, anyway.

monkshood in forest

I went mushroom hunting and all I could find was poisonous monkshood. ;p In this one forest I found monkshood in the wild for the first time.

monkshood in forest

monkshood in forest

boletus edulis, penny bun

But we did find a lot of mushrooms, too, during our trip. Here’s one penny bun mushroom or cep or porcino/porcini or boletus edulis mushroom…

craterellus (or cantharellus) tubaeformis, yellowfoot, winter mushroom

And here’s our biggest amount of yellowfoot mushrooms or winter mushrooms or funnel chanterelles or cantharellus/craterellus tubaeformis mushrooms…

In addition to cooking with mushrooms we enjoyed bilberries (or blueberries), lingonberries and crowberries in the forests.

Another lake again. I was on a ridge. There are lakes on either side of the ridge. And there are many ridges in Rautavaara area, fairly small, beautiful… with lakes, forests and swamps.

creek

A creek in the forest, so clear you can see the bottom.

creek

Tiilikanselkä

By Tiilikanselkä again, we went there actually three times during our trip. 🙂

river flows

And river flows…

river flows...

…and flows. Until next time. 🙂

-Leena