Pictures yesterday and today

More peony flowers…

peony

Follow the red petals! :

Follow the red petals!

Follow the red petals!

Follow the red petals!

peony

It was the peony flower that is the first peony flower who is dropping her petals this summer.

spinach

And we grow spinach from seeds in our garden. I made spinach soup. It’s delicious! 🙂 – Spinach, milk, some cream, a bit of butter, a bit of oat flour, a bit of salt.

herbs

Other herbs are growing from seeds with the basil in our garden, in the shelter of the house wall. There’s summer savory and rosemary, and then there’s some fourth herb – I can’t remember what it is… I must think about that a bit now… 🙂

cherry tree

We’ve now noticed that our grafted cherry tree has started to grow a branch on its own! High up there.

garden rose valamonruusu

And a bit more roses in our rose garden… Rosa splendens in the pictures… the name of the rose is valamonruusu in Finnish.

garden rose valamonruusu

garden rose valamonruusu

And peony flowers again, because…

Bury your face in this - flower therapy

Bury your face in this – flower therapy. 🙂

peony

lake Köyliönjärvi

By the lake Köyliönjärvi yesterday evening.

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Love for the countryside. In the same place by the lake, where I left our car for the visit.

-Leena

Dandelions, cuckoo bird, bug hotels… spring advancing

Yesterday I noticed that the spring was at the same point here where we are living than it was in Turku already last Wednesday ( – my previous blog post here). Now it’s greener here, too, and we have many dandelion flowers as well. We had the first few dandelion flowers here on Saturday – I saw them after I had written that blog post of mine, when we went for a car ride.

lake Köyliönjärvi

And on that car ride, we visited the lake Köyliönjärvi near our home village. The bench over there was calling… 😀

lake Köyliönjärvi

It was lovely to sit there on the bench… Truly, once again, after the wintertime (and all the hailing lately), it really did feel like I was in a fairytale! 🙂

lake Köyliönjärvi

hepatica

Hepatica flowers… these we’ve seen already a lot earlier here as well! But on Sunday I took a couple of pics of these as we were collecting some material for bug hotels. This was by a forest dirt road here in our home village. The forest was loaded with hepatica flowers beside the road, from one end of the road to the other end. Marvellous!

hepatica

dandelion

The first dandelion flower in our garden on Monday… or, actually, after this pic I noticed another one, too, and yesterday there was even more. It was high time to start eating them! 😉

We heard the calls of cuckoo bird already last week. From afar. Last night then we heard the bird coming near our garden. We heard a “Cuck-koo!” – only one “Cuck-koo!”. – It was funny, but I said that we want more!

bug hotel, insect hotel...

And the bug hotel or insect hotel… Even though we have many heaps of dry leaves and dry twigs and forest land for bugs and insects here, we are building some bug hotels – it’s just fun and helpful, and the bug hotels always look nice as well. 🙂

bug hotel, insect hotel...

Here’s the first two of them in the picture. And we’ll build even more bug hotels, different types of them, too. More pics then as well.

garlic growing

The night-time and ‘hailing time’ frost protection fabric has worked its magic in our vegetable garden. The peas, carrots and garlic have started to grow under it. This is the biggest sprout there, garlic, today.

-Leena

Early summer in full swing

So now the first blog post here in Owlnature when it’s already officially summer. 🙂 The summer has advanced very quickly in nature and in garden this year. I feel that it’s all been much quicker than a year ago… I mean, the apple flowers for example – it was like a *imagine some sound of magic here* and they were all gone, just as quickly as they came…

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First a pic from yesterday… I was sitting on a swing and almost didn’t take a pic at all, but some… magic made me grab my camera, and I’m glad I did! – It was a nice moment to sit on a tire swing by our lake Pyhäjärvi here in Satakunta region.

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A moment by the lake Köyliönjärvi over a week ago.

The rest of the pics of this post are from last week.

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Globeflowers in our garden. The previous owners of this house have planted these in different spots in the garden. Thanks! One of my favourite perennials.

About the weather lately… last week was hot, but then it became cold – well, you have to have the decent balance of weather here in Finland. 🙂 Yesterday was very nice and today, too, the sun is shining warmly, but the wind is blowing like crazy.

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The rest of the pics of this post are pics of lilacs. The first two pics are taken of the lilac bush by the big Norway maple beside our driveway. The lilac flowers, too, are something that seem to like come and go a bit too quickly this summer… but luckily there’s still some time to enjoy the lovely scent of the flowers.

The man who build this house has planted lilacs in three different spots in the garden, and these are only the common lilacs – there are also two bushes of different types of lilacs in our garden, I think they are called park lilacs or Hungarian lilacs and it’s so nice that they bloom a bit later, after the common lilac flowers are already gone…

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I somehow always find it a bit difficult to take pics of the lilac flowers, I’m never totally satisfied with my lilac pics. But I encourage and advise everyone, including myself, to take it easy and not to stress about something like the pics, and taking pics, too much. I promote enjoyment and living in the moment, without camera, too! Even when you have a website or a blog! 😀 The right people will enjoy and laugh with you in this life anyway…

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Another lilac bush beside the apple trees in the garden.

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OK, and now I don’t know what to say anymore… 🙂

Our third lilac bush is beside the woods and a bit under the bush somehow is one of our composts, too. And there are also white lilac flowers, so there are actually two bushes in one. Our other lilac bushes have only violet flowers.

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So, still some time to enjoy…

-Leena

Very miscellaneous lately

Hi! Things have been a bit hectic for us here lately. Everything like normal things and some extra, too. By the end of this blog post you’ll know why this post is very miscellaneous this time… 🙂

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My pics start on Monday evening… It was the first time we used our campfire coffee kettle that we bought at a flea market last week. We had been thinking about buying a kettle for campfire already for ages, and finally we found the perfect one at a flea market; made by Finnish Hackman and the price reasonable 12 Euros at the flea market.

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So nice! 😀 Perfect. -Water boiling, ground coffee added-

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Coffee was steamy and so good…

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OK, hello! 🙂 My blog is not about killing my darlings, so to speak. I mean, in the miscellaneous part and with my coffee pics I can have the world…. So now, I like cars, too, very much. That’s who I am. This week we had to change our car, get an unbroken car. We had a 1999 Ford Mondeo station wagon with a V6 engine. It got too broken for our patience. I took this pic when it was time for me to remove our Ibiza lizard from it. We were visiting Ibiza exactly two years ago – in the last week of May 2014. Ibiza is swarming with these cute lizards. 🙂 And naturally I still have this sticker as a keepsake.

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This. Is now our summer car. 🙂 Our own car, but it’s supposed to be somewhat temporary. We got this on Tuesday this week. This is a 1996 Volkswagen Golf GL. Very well-kept, very German, very red. 🙂

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Yesterday I took a pic when we stopped by the lake Köyliönjärvi. We live kind of between two lakes here – the other one is the big lake, lake Pyhäjärvi, and this is the smaller one, lake Köyliönjärvi. As I took this pic I was sitting on a bench so high that I could nicely wave my feet without sandals in the air. And the sound of the waves of the lake was nice and relaxing, too. 🙂
The weather has been very warm and sunny lately, today is a rainy day, but it should get sunny over the weekend again, they say.

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The apple trees are in bloom. We have two big apple trees in our garden. The scent of the flowers is lovely…

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Hopefully there’s still some time to take more pics of the apple flowers… this is all I’ve been able to do now… 🙂

-Leena