Okay so it has not changed. I wrote about this thing in so many words, twice, here in my blog in early June. I have started to suspect that it just might be my phone… My phone is too old and it has already been useless in some other ways, too, for… some years now (but I do not know why Facebook still works well enough on my phone). I cannot even have many apps on my old phone and some apps I cannot have at all. All in all, I am about to buy a new phone now soon.
So yesterday was the last time that I will ever try to post a picture and to change my profile picture with this old phone of mine. The next time that I will do it, will be with a new phone, and if I still cannot do those things with the new phone, then I will create a new account on Instagram.
Visiting my boyfriend´s forest in Kauhajoki in August.
Accidentally climbed too high? – Hold on tight! I watched this ladybug climbing up and down the blades of grass yesterday. It was funny. 🙂
Good morning! Today, with our cherry tomato plants in the greenhouse. They are growing well and are sturdy. They are Tiny Tim tomato plants, nice. (I love A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.)
Okay, now that we have had some coffee, let us complain a bit… So in my previous blog post I grumbled that I cannot post pictures on my Instagram (“Kuvaa ei julkaistu” – “The picture was not published” it just says) and I cannot change my profile picture there… I forgot to mention that Instagram does store my pictures… I don´t know how to explain this, but I can see the pictures that I have tried to post there, on the spot where we first go to when we are selecting which picture to post, it´s like added to the gallery of my phone on Instagram, but the “filtered” (I usually use the ´normal´ filter) pictures are not in the actual gallery of my phone. (Oh man I´m good at explaining these things…) And I don´t usually have my Facebook app open on my phone, because I usually use my computer, but yesterday I had a good spot to try to post a picture on my Facebook from my phone and, well… yeah, I guessed it already beforehand – my Facebook worked as usual. Saatana.
Let us concentrate on the flowers… I took the following pictures yesterday.
The cherry tree is in bloom. We planted this tree two years ago, and a year ago it had 11 flowers. Now I can´t count the flowers, the tree is not completely full of flowers, but there many many flowers!
The cherry bush is as flowery as ever. We planted this bush cherry in September 2017, and this is the third year that it flowers like this.
Lily of the Valley amongst ferns.
Forget-me-not
Stars have started to come out in the woods and blue gold is ripening… Chickweed wintergreen or arctic starflower and bilberries. We had a tiny amount of rain yesterday evening, too tiny – everything´s so dry and we also want to collect rainwater… But they say that it should rain a bit more tomorrow.
Today´s pictures:
A pic of what I´m reading, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. I haven´t been reading much lately, but now I want books back into my life again.
Lilac flowers, most of the lilac flowers in our garden haven´t opened yet, only a few.
Oh, the scent…
Globeflower, always looking so nice in the middle of all the green.
On Monday a week ago, May 25th. I went outside, there was a pretty gentle breeze, it was fairly quiet, only birds were singing, butterflies were flying here and there around me… It was nothing new, but something felt strange, wonderful… Everything was so green around me, grass and leaves had grown fast. It was warm, it was 21 degrees Celsius – the first time that it was 20 degrees Celsius or more this year. – It was the first day of summer!
And my first parrot tulip had opened. This is the first time that I have parrot tulips in the garden.
It was, again, around 15 degrees Celsius on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday last week, but over the weekend it was again around 20 degrees Celsius in the daytime. On Monday this week, June 1st, it was already 24 degrees Celsius. And around 21 degrees Celsius in the daytime it has now been yesterday and today. But at night the coldest temperature was again a bit over 5 degrees Celsius here.
All the parrot tulips opened.
We have seen the first bats for this year here. On Saturday a week ago and last Saturday as well. – Saturday may be the best day of the week. 🙂 It may be just one bat that we have seen, though, because we have seen only one at a time. Anyway, lovely creatures!
Okay so I cannot post pictures on my Instagram, and I do not know why. I have already tried to do everything… I have been restarting, checking, uninstalling, reinstalling… trust it, use it, prove it, groove it like Spice Girls… I even changed my username just for the heck of it, and changed it back again, just because I could do it… But I cannot change my profile picture or post pictures. I can like other people´s pictures and use Instagram in every other way, but my own pictures are doomed…
There has of course never been anything shady about my Instagram or about my actions, the last time that I posted something on my Instagram was on December, but come on, that cannot be the reason! 😮 Can it? And my boyfriend has tried everything and more, and he is a professional software person. I don´t know what I´m gonna do… I can always follow other people and like their pictures, but if I do those things and I am not posting anything, then I´m just weird, a stalker, a creeper… And I still wantto post pictures on my Instagram! Perkele.
Grumbling followed by gorgeous flowers…
This is a pic from my phone, the pic that I was kinda trying to post on my Instagram.
Hyacinths, a lovely scent…
The pear tree is in bloom. It´s not as flowery as it was a year ago, but there are flowers, on four spots, as seen on the pic below. And the tree has grown!
In the back of our garden, I think that this is peony tulip. 🙂 It has a wonderful scent.
Forget me not, forget-me-nots… In the back of the garden, and near them…
…our small bird cherry tree is flowering, too.
I had already waited for it… “Cuck-koo!” – Cuckoo bird came back and started calling cuckoo on Sunday evening, and after that it has done it both in the daytime and evenings.
Tulips by my dwarf spruce…
My spruce is growing every year! 🙂
Parrot tulip break ~
I love parrot tulips, they just get better as they get older…
Random 🙂 Viola
The apple tree is in bloom. As marvellous as ever…
Our plum tree already bloomed. – Whoa! We´re just hoping that it had the time to get pollinated… Yesterday when I took this picture there was only a few flowers left to be seen.
Lily of the Valley flowers are here! Love the scent, love them.
Lily of the Valley is the national flower of Finland.
The first lilac flowers have begun to open.
Also our cherry bush and cherry tree are in bloom, hopefully I still have time to take pictures of cherry flowers tomorrow… I have been sitting at this desk for too long today and I have already seen too many pics today as well, phew…
Peonies have grown! I should like clean this spot up a bit…
The summer is moving on… This summer hasn’t been as hot as last summer here in Finland, but we’ve had a few fairly short hot periods this year, too. This week it was hotter than ever in many places in Europe and in a few places in Finland as well. Here where I’m living it was 32 degrees Celsius on Sunday. Yesterday it was only 23 degrees Celsius and today 16degrees, in the daytime – last night it was around 11 degrees Celsius. That was fast.
This summer, thus far, I have been enjoying nature and gardening, naturally. 🙂 And I have been using my Instagram (owlnatureleena) a bit. I have been reading a lot. During June and July I have read 14 books and finished reading two books (I had read half of both of them earlier) and I’m about to finish reading yet another book, so this has definitely been a lot for me. And, naturally, I have a Goodreads account (leenannih) to keep track of books. 😀
Now some summer snapshots:
A young hare in the forest. I love hares and rabbits. I had a rabbit when I was a child.
Sheep here in our home village. They were baaing so much, they were just funny and adorable.
We found some cloudberries in a forest we had never been before, about 20 kilometres from our home. The berries were so delicious. And we can’t remember finding this gold here in the southern part of Finland before!
And there were quite many small blue butterflies flying in the forest, pretty magical… These two were on a rock by a small lake there.
~”Did you say ‘itsy bitsy’…?”
A spider on our terrace. There were a few of these guys there one evening. They, too, are just lovely.
I’ve tried to take pics of our summer flower bed. Last year we didn’t plant any seeds here, so there was only weed here a year ago. And this year we finally had the possibility to add a lot of compost to the soil thanks to the year-round composter we have.
The last three pics I took today:
The summer hasn’t ended yet…
And now just one picture that I took in our greenhouse today as well:
It’s been summer here in Finland all the time now… The temperatures have been between 20 and 25 degrees Celsius during the day, and some days it’s been even warmer than that, too… And when we’ve had like “a bit cooler weather”, the temperatures have been between 18 and 20 degrees. So, it’s been quite incredible to experience this here now… But one morning was cold this week – it was 4 degrees Celsius, whoa! But it’s been all sunshine, sunshine, and very dry everywhere…
And about myself… and my blog now. I’ve been working outside the home, so to speak, now, it has something to do with gardening (would you believe it? 😉 ) aaand not working at home with my computer means that I don’t sit by my computer that often now, because I wake up very early in the morning, and I drive to work very early in the morning – I’m some sort of an early owl altogether now, and I don’t have that much time or energy for this dear blog of mine. Well, I don’t mean that I was super blogger before, but I mean, for example, that some of the content of my blog will now be only on my Instagram (owlnatureleena), like most of the flower pictures, and so on. Well, let’s see how everything happens, just thought I’d mention that even if it looks like I’m doing nothing here in my blog, I’m actually doing many things out here and there and preparing myself for many things all the time. 😀 And yes, I still have some planting to do here at home, seeds, seedlings… Oh dear, oh dear…
I took all the pictures in this blog post in our garden today.
Oookay, to begin with, our cherry tree didn’t survive the winter, it didn’t grow any leaves – it just stood there, all bare and dry…
So, this is our new cherry tree now. The dead cherry tree was by the woods, this is by the terrace of our house.
We actually thought that our cherry bush wouldn’t survive the winter, but here it still is. And it is flowering!
It still has many flower buds, too.
The pear tree is flowering as well. The flowers are… down there, all on the same spot… There’s been like five or six of them.
About some animals… Cuckoo bird has been calling here every day now – the delightful voice of the early summer! And my boyfriend has seen bats in our garden again. I haven’t seen them – I’ve already been sleeping…
The plum tree already flowered, it had perhaps around 100 flowers. And the apple tree already flowered, too.
Lilacs, common lilacs are blooming now. Oh, the lovely scent…
“Oh, summer, the light, the dazzle, oh, that shi…itake…!”:
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.
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. 🙂
There were many dragonflies flying and enjoying the sunshine by the house on many days. Here’s two of them.
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.
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.
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…
And here’s our biggest amount of yellowfoot mushrooms or wintermushrooms 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.
A creek in the forest, so clear you can see the bottom.
By Tiilikanselkä again, we went there actually three times during our trip. 🙂
Today a few pictures from sunny yesterday. We’ve had some sunshine already today as well, but some hailing, too. – Spring is definitely coming. 🙂 Now just waiting for it to become warmer – the wind and the air have been cold. But fortunately, it’s been ever so warm in the sunshine…
The Ibiza lizard in our garden…
The garden bunny and Ibiza lizard…
Okay, I had been thinking about joining Twitter already for some time… and now I’ve done it; my username on Twitter: leenannik. It’s a bit weird place to be, when one doesn’t actually know anybody there, but I think I have my spot there… every once in a while. – I think it’s safe to say that I surely will use my Instagram (owlnatureleena) way more often than my Twitter. Hoot! 😀
