Snowy

It snowed quite a lot in the evening on Tuesday and at night between Tuesday and yesterday. And it was very windy. The storm had been even record-breaking for a while at the sea. It was windy yesterday, too, but the sun was shining. Well, about the snow… must always say this, but this is quite a lot snow for us here in southern Finland – in eastern Finland and northern Finland, for example, they always have a lot more, that’s only natural. 🙂

The first pictures I took in the morning yesterday:

January

My dwarf spruce. Hopefully it survives the winter…

January

Hmm… Our car.

January

The wind made it look a bit different…

January

…but beautiful.

January
January

By the lake Pyhäjärvi near our home at noon yesterday. There was a chilly wind…

January

And in our garden in the afternoon.

January

And today:

composter, temperature
Year-round composter

It’s warm inside the composter in our garden.

It’s -11 degrees Celsius outside now at around 11.30 am. But they say that it “feels like -16 degrees Celsius”. Yes, it does feel a bit like that, but it’s not windy anymore and the sun is shining.

January
  • Leena

Collecting stuff

We collected acorns in October.

acorns

First these…

acorns

…and then these – about 300 acorns in total. Some of the acorns were already sprouting, lovely. 🙂 We collected them from the ground, under big oak trees, here in our home village.

The first two pictures I took in October, the rest of the pictures in this blog post I took today.

acorns planted

So, we planted the acorns in our garden, here…

acorns planted

…and here.

And we also collected some acorns for the land that my boyfriend now has in the region of Etelä-PohjanmaaSouth Ostrobothnia, about 180 kilometres north from our home, that is to say, we already planted the acorns there, into the forest ground. There’s a certain spot or place, an island actually, where broad-leaved trees are growing in the forest, but there are no oak trees, not yet…

So, this is all an experiment, with these acorns, just nice and interesting.

spruce cones

I collected spruce cones, too. These were on the ground in our yard, on the driveway. We don’t have big spruce trees, but there are spruces just outside our yard. I started to collect these just because I think that they are lovely, but my boyfriend said that we could try to get seeds from these as well. Well, that’s a good idea, an interesting experiment, too. The cones have been drying inside the house now.

emptying a compost bin

And I was shoveling compost, emptying a compost bin a bit today. We have this year-round composter for kitchen (and garden) waste.

emptying a compost bin

We shovel the compost into this container, where the process continues, and in the end, it all goes back to nature again. 🙂

-Leena

More crocus flowers, onions growing, year-round composter…

Spring days… But it’s been a bit cooler now, but not cooler than normally in Finland this time of the year; the temperatures have been around 10 degrees Celsius in the daytime. – Some days it’s been more like 5 degrees, but some days it’s been 13 degrees. And in the nighttime the temperatures have been a bit above 0 degrees Celsius. It’s been a bit more cloudy now, but in the daytime there still has been more sunshine than rain altogether.

I took all the pictures in this blog post in our garden today.

More crocus flowers. Now we already have crocuses growing in many places in the garden. We don’t even remember all the places we planted crocus bulbs last autumn, and I don’t even know all the places my boyfriend planted them. 🙂

crocus

That white stuff on the ground, by the way, is spring fertilizer for the cherry tree…

crocus

Charming surprises.

And more butterflies… I saw the first butterfly in our garden on Sunday the 15th, it was a brimstone butterfly, and I’ve seen brimstone butterflies here a few times more after that, too. A few bees have been buzzing as well, and we saw a tiny hedgehog in the woods next to our garden, too.

We’ve been working in the garden for some time now, turning the garden into our outdoor living room again, clearing it up and so on. And raking, raking again – how come we have so, so many fallen leaves on the ground now in April even though we raked, like everything, last autumn…?

growing onions

Onions, red onions are already growing, from onion sets, in these pots in our garden. Planted about two weeks ago.

composter with a crown

A composter with a crown on the top. 🙂 We have been using this composter for fruit and vegetable peels, coffee grounds, used tea bags, and so on… for over a week now. This is our first composter for kitchen waste, Biolan pikakompostori – quick composter 220eco, a year-round composter. So simple, useful and nice. And the crown is a container that we use for collecting the fruit peels, coffee grounds, et cetera, in the kitchen.

-Leena