Norway Maple – Owlnature

Tomatoes, a pumpkin, sweet corn, building a garden shed, KonMari (don’t ask…;))

The first four pics I took today:

An autumnal sunflower bowing beside our porch. Dignified, charming…

A bit bleak today.

There are still a few small marigold flowers in the summer flower bed.

Harvestman…? That’s funny. 🙂 This guy was waiting for us beside our front door when we came back from grocery store yesterday.

This picture I took today. I emptied our greenhouse yesterday evening. The things we can eat… Tomatoes, tomatoes, and some of them are still ripening here in our kitchen now. When we planted the tomato plants we used seeds from Finnish greenhouse tomatoes that we bought in grocery store last winter. And The Pumpkin, our only pumpkin this year. I already had a picture of it on my Instagram (owlnatureleena)…

This was a bit over two weeks ago. We harvested our sweet corn. Well, we get some seeds for next year again. 🙂 We also ate a good amount of ‘baby corns’ raw out there while harvesting, they tasted so… sweet!

The next two pics I took today:

Some sweet corn plant decoration in the garden now.

Purple coneflower in October… I love this colour, too!

This was last week. We are building a garden shed.

The rest of the pics I took today:

I love painting! This is the floor of the shed.

I honestly still don’t know what this bush is called…

So KonMari, the method of tidying up. Up! I read the book (had already a pic of the book here in my blog…) and I watched the Netflix series, and I liked them both a lot, and I like her. So it was time to start organizing The Mess. 😀 Here in our house. We just finally need to organize and tidy our home up, also for some empty spaces, and some places here need to be more reachable, so to speak, and so on. And just simply… for cleaning up. Now I’ve already done my clothes and our bookshelf. I find the KonMari method very helpful and inspiring. 🙂

A bit of our bookshelf now… Finally it’s presentable! More pics later…? ;D

It’s our big Norway Maple…

Things and stuff to do, these among other things. What’s enough? Hmm…

Leena

And the summer began…

And all of a sudden… it’s summer! The summer began on Friday: it was 17 degrees Celsius in the shade already at 9.00 AM and at around 10.15 AM it was already 20 degrees in the shade, and 24 in the shade at 13.30 PM. Yes, I wrote down everything. 😀 It was also the warmest day that we’ve had this year.

We haven’t had any rain now, and all the rain before this was hail and sleet… So a good rain is what the garden and nature need now!

The first four pictures I took on Saturday, first some of the fern in our garden. Aww, those rolls…

I heart…

What did you say?

And we visited the Kauttuankoski rapids again in the evening. On the bridge again, we didn’t go down there by the rapids at all this time, but… look! Over there, inside the ruins of the mill, there’s somebody sitting there!

Can you see her?

The Norway maple in flower beside our driveway, yesterday morning I took this pic. The tree’s been buzzing with bees in some mornings…

Leopard’s bane or doronicum today, flowers…

The first two narcissus or daffodil flowers opened yesterday. The other one here in the evening light…

The rest of the pictures I took today.

Small grape hyacinth or muscari flowering…

The garden fern growing…

Fern still so small in the woods…

Oh, my peonies! 🙂

Our peas growing…

Everything is growing now, but we really would need the rain to help us out a bit… But we did already start the lawn mowing. 🙂

-Leena

October, October, October

I was eagerly waiting for October already at the beginning of September this autumn. – I was just so ready for everything autumnal; for colourful leaves, and… no leaves at all, dark evenings, campfires, cold nights, (campfires), the cool, crisp air on a sunny autumn day, raking, steaming hot coffee, tea, hot chocolate, glögi… outside in the crisp air, gloves, scarves and knit hats or pipos as we call knit hats in Finnish, I love the Finnish word pipo – it’s just perfect for the item. 🙂 And I was ready to start creating our dream home, here, in our home. – About this project more later, and some pics, too, when anything is ready… ;D

October 1st. I tried to make a flower crown with the natural spring and summer flowers that still were blooming in our garden, there were not that many of them anymore… 🙂 After taking this pic 12 swans flew over me, honking as they went.

October 2nd, pic above and pic below. A foggy morning. In the pic above our big Norway Maple.

This was at around 10 AM and after a moment it started to clear up… and all of a sudden the sun was shining in the clear blue sky!

Oh my… Oh, my new rubber boots! And the old ones, too! 😀 I took this pic as I was wearing my new rubber boots for the first time on Thursday last week. I just finally had to buy new rubber boots as my old ones had been leaking, both of them, already for over a year, now they are almost completely cracked – I’ve been storing them with care, but I’ve been wearing them A LOT here in countryside, even in sunny weather, because they are so comfortable. 🙂

The next eight pics are from Friday last week.

Our Norway Maple in sunshine.

Whatever happened to our sunflowers? Well, our biggest sunflower for this year is in the pic above… and I love it! 😀 And the tiny spider was feeling the same way! Okay, this year we know that the pre-growing of sunflowers has to be started earlier. 🙂

And these… I still don’t remember what these flowers are called. They are summer flowers grown from seed in summer. Very tough flowers – they are still there in our garden today – cosmos flowers already got frostbitten, badly. EDIT: This flower is clarkia or godetia, silkkikukka in Finnish. Thanks for the answer, A! 🙂

Pot marigolds or calendulas are sturdy autumn flowers as well. Still there.

In our backyard, a smaller Norway Maple and its friends: three pine trees, a rowan and two junipers.

On a bridge above the Kauttuankoski rapids, going for a walk, at around 7 PM, it was about to get dark soon.

The bridge down there, in the pic above. The lamp posts were already lit. And the lovely scent of dry leaves around everywhere…

In our front yard today. Who’s raking? – Me! When the time is right. 😉

And the strawflowers are still standing there with their rustling petals today!

-Leena

Some miscellaneous in owlgarden & identification ( – answer found)

These first two coffee pics are from yesterday. Some food included in the first pic. 😉

They say it will rain over the weekend. Today we still have some planting to do, and lawn mowing, too.

Our Norway Maple in flower beside the driveway. I took this pic in our front yard today.

Have some cactus, or… Bali? One of my favourite pastilles. Tasty.

Now I need some heeelp! What is this flower called? 🙂 I have a hunch that it’s actually quite common in Finland… The leaves of this plant look a bit poisonous… it’s the spots. I tried to google this flower, but couldn’t find it. This flower stands in the middle of our garden.

EDIT: I found the answer last night, on 14th May. It’s Pulmonaria officinalis, rohtoimikkä in Finnish. And common names in English: common lungwort, lungwort or Our Lady’s milk drops. It’s not poisonous, but an old herb used for medical purposes. It’s a perennial plant and cultivated, not natural, in Finland. They say that the white spots look like unhealthy lungs and the scientific name Pulmonaria officinalis comes from that. Well, I couldn’t see that in particular, but they do look dangerous to me. 🙂 They say this actually is a herbal medicine for lungs.

I already earlier had browsed through a couple of plant and flower books we have, but couldn’t find this flower in them. Last night I finally started to browse through a book that I bought from a flea market some weeks ago. And I found this plant very fast from the book. The book’s original (=English) title is The Complete Book of Herbs and it’s from the year 1988. This book is fairly big and it cost me 50 Euro cents. Sometimes it’s just the books, not the Internet, and the older the book, the better! 🙂

On the vappu weekend we planted sunflower seedlings outside. They were raised from the seed inside the house. We planted these on four different spots in our garden. Hopefully we’ll have at least one fully grown sunflower. That would be great. Last year the seeds were planted straight into soil, and nothing grew. This time we did it properly and in the right way. So, now just hoping… This one in the pic for example has already grown stronger. 🙂

-Leena

Narcissus flowers, small grape hyacinth, Norway Maple in flower…

One positively overwhelmed nature and garden blogger here again, hi! 🙂

Yesterday we stopped by the lake Pyhäjärvi…

And yesterday the first narcissus or daffodil flowers opened. The narcissus blooming with pure yellow flowers is lovely, but these different shades are so welcomed… The previous owners of this house have planted these next to the woods.