I wrote this summer story / poem yesterday and today. This is a true story, so all the things in this story have happened to me this summer, just the way I wrote them. At the end of this blog post there are also some flower pictures that I have taken this summer.
Hot days in June, it is so light at night, different things it allows
The lovely sound of summer, little birds are flying around, I know them, they are swallows
The birds wintered in the tropical lands, but now they are here
We humans do not have to travel far, nature is so amazing, near.
A cuckoo bird calling, baby woodpeckers are loud, a fox at me now stares
A tiny spider as white as the flowers of the Midsummer rose. Fancy, just to say who dares
Hide now, seek now, just wait and see, the day just might be fair
Wandering the roads, no one knows, I might meet a friend, it is a hare.
In July then, I am wearing a winter coat, I see a tiny moth dive into embers
The rain is hammering the peony flowers, that a gardener remembers
Then suddenly it is warm again, cherries, strawberries, everything you desire
The scents, the memories, the long-awaited coffee around the campfire.
Frogs are greeting me, raspberries, bilberries, the gold red and blue
Grasshoppers I meet in the kitchen, now that is something new
August, the days are getting shorter, sunflowers open their petals, so yellow
Look at the stars, think now. Learn what is new, wonder, know.
Late August, the Midsummer rose is flowering again, pears and plums ripen on the trees
A hot day, every time the last one for the summer, who knows, oh, summer please!
- Leena, August 25-26, 2020
PoppyFinnish Midsummer roseFinnish Midsummer rose flower and flower spiderIrisPainted daisyRose, on the longest day of the year, at midnightPoppies, on the longest day of the year, at midnightFinnish Valamonruusu ´Rosa Splendens´PeonyPoppies, pot marigolds… summer flowers…Sunflower
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…
So it’s officially autumn in Finland. I can’t believe I just wrote that.
I was travelling in Eastern Finland with my boyfriend for two weeks, and I will have some pics from there here in my blog a bit later. I have most of the pics on my phone (and there are for example pics of our plums on my phone, too) and I have to find a way to get all the pics to my computer (I have no idea what I’m doing… ;D ) But I did post a few pictures on my Instagram (owlnatureleena). We even saw a tiny bit of Russia. 😀 – Where the country begins, so to speak.
So now only one pic from the trip. This was on a hill Kipari in the municipality of Rautavaara, in the region of Northern Savonia – Pohjois-Savo. The name of the lake is Keyritty. We stayed in Rautavaara. Such a lovely place.
The first ever pears from our garden! I didn’t have time to take pics of our small pear tree when it had all the pears, but I took a pic of the pears on a plate – all the pears had fallen down from the tree during our trip, they were ripe, and I just picked them from the ground. They were delicious! I made jam.
This year we have grapes, too! I took all these pictures of our grapes yesterday. We had a very little amount of grapes two years ago, but now we have quite a lot, well, relatively lot. They, too, taste so sweet…
The grape vine itself.
The rest of the pictures I took today:
I’m still very much immersed in my reading hobby. Now I’m even reading how to get organized, so this is getting pretty serious. ;p
We have a small patch of lovely little sunflowers. They are grown from our last winter’s bird seeds.
And echinacea purpurea or purple coneflower charm…
This is my “I’m about to finish this blog post” coffee in our greenhouse, with some tomatoes. 🙂
Hmm, in general, I feel like I have tons of things to do now, but it’s just nice, I guess… 😀
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 officially summer! And lately… First it was very freaking windy for many days, and a bit cold, too. Now it has been very warm again, even hot (too warm 😀 ) for a few days. For example here where I’m living it was 31 degrees Celsius in the shade in the daytime on Thursday, and not much cooler on Friday, and yesterday it was around 29 degrees as well. Today it’s 21 degrees Celsius – oh, normality… 😀
Our greenhouse is ready, yay! It has been fully ready for a few days now. First pictures that I took when it was still possible to ‘see through’ the greenhouse a bit:
And these are what we put into the ground, going round and round… hmm…
There it is, one of them…
The greenhouse is almost, but not quite, under the monster, our biggest pine tree.
Two pictures from the inside.
A few pictures I took today, the first ‘ready pictures’:
It was a lot of work and everything, but “Phew!” now finally… 😀
There are for example watermelon and sweet peppers growing. We carried 1000 litres of garden soil in bags into/outside the greenhouse.
Fuchsia flowers.
And viola flowers today:
Love the scent in the air…
Sage, too…
Stars on the ground…
The stars are on the ground again this time of year in Finland. 🙂 – Arcticstarflower or chickweed wintergreen in the woods next to our garden, I took this picture at around 11.55 pm on Wednesday. (And I was attacked by mosquitoes, there are plenty of them evenings these days.)
So the days are long now, light and bright. And they are still getting a bit lighter. Today for example, here where I’m living, the sun rose at 03.58 am and the sun sets at 23.03 pm – the length of the day is 19 h 5 min.
