August flowers*

I took these pictures in our garden on Friday, yesterday and today.

August

In the first six pictures… Phlox paniculata or fall phlox.

August
August
August
August

We have four different kinds of fall phlox flowers. Love the scent!

August

Someone else loves the flowers, too! A small tortoiseshell butterfly.

In the next five pictures…

August

Cosmos.

August
August
August
August
August

Clarkia amoena or godetia.

August
August

Calendula or pot marigold.

August
August

Echinacea purpurea or purple coneflower.

August
August
August

Oh, that power…

August
August

Sunflower.

August

A busy friend.

August

The best…

August

Head first. 🙂

August

Good morning!” coffee today, with heuchera

August
August

…and Helenium autumnale or sneezeweed.

August
August
August

Rose.

Leena

August

Well, this was in our neighbouring town, in the town of Kokemäki. I was admiring these wooden wolves very much. 🙂

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

The first four pics I took today:

October

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

October

A bit bleak today.

October
October

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

Hello!

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

October harvest

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)…

sweet corn sweet

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:

October

Some sweet corn plant decoration in the garden now.

October

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

hmm

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

The rest of the pics I took today:

love painting

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

October

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

October

It’s our big Norway Maple

October
Who’s raking?

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

  • Leena

Autumn? And pears, grapes, flowers…

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.

hill Kipari, lake Keyritty, Rautavaara, Northern Savonia, Finland

So now only one pic from the trip. This was on a hill Kipari in the municipality of Rautavaara, in the region of Northern SavoniaPohjois-Savo. The name of the lake is Keyritty. We stayed in Rautavaara. Such a lovely place.

pears

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.

grapes

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…

grapes
grapes
grapes
grapes
grape vine

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

sunflowers

We have a small patch of lovely little sunflowers. They are grown from our last winter’s bird seeds.

sunflowers
purple coneflower

And echinacea purpurea or purple coneflower charm…

purple coneflower

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… 😀

summer flower bed in September

The summer flower bed…

summer flowers in September
  • Leena

Spring waving from a distance…

…and spring is ‘throwing it right at you’ – snow, hail and shine, too! And it has been a bit colder again.

The first five pictures I took in our garden on Sunday. Sunday – funday: first the sun was shining, then some dark clouds started to appear in the sky, and then the sun was shining and it was snowing at the same time, and after that it was just cloudy and it was snowing, and then again clouds were going away and the sun was shining again, and after that again; dark clouds were appearing in the sky and the sun was shining and it started to snow at the same time… – This pattern continued all day.

March

And at one point it was hailing as well. The sun was still shining on the right-hand side when I took the picture above.

March

Spring says hello…

March

So there’s that…

March

I know what triggers you.

March

Solar power.

Three pictures that I took yesterday:

March

Coffee pic… Just to tell that the sun wasn’t exactly shining, but the scent of the coffee was wonderful, and that it was snowing yesterday, too.

March

And a bit later… Nordic walking in the forest. Ravens were croaking there, and it was snowing a bit.

purple coneflower & daisy, March
Echinacea purpurea or purple coneflower (bigger leaves) and daisy.

Purple coneflower and daisy growing in our kitchen…

And pictures that I took today:

March

Having coffee again today. ;D And the sun is shining.

March
From the garden bench.
dwarf spruce, March
~Hi!~

My dwarf spruce was completely buried under snow, now she’s back. 🙂

Sofian maailma
Sofian maailma, Sophie’s World.

I am about to finish reading this book, Sofian maailmaSophie’s World – A Novel About the History of Philosophy by Jostein Gaarder. It’s a great book! And a great adventure. And it’s a bit heavy book – there was a week I couldn’t read it, I couldn’t hold the book in my hands, because it was too heavy for my shingles…

March
  • Leena

Christmas time

Many things to do… I had some interesting new working experiences – it had something to do with getting some traditional Finnish Christmas food into stores, and now it’s Christmas time… Hmm, we’re cleaning our home now, and so on…

Christmas time

My morning coffee today. So, the house is a bit of a mess. That cloth… back there in the picture, for example, is a curtain from our living room. The curtain has fallen down because its handle got loose. And our couch ‘fell down’, too, so we’re basically sitting on the floor now. And we must clean the tables and take the carpets outside and hoover the house, and… But hey, it’s the shortest day of the year today! 🙂

The next three pictures I took in our garden today:

December
From the terrace
December echinacea purpurea and peony
Echinacea purpurea or purple coneflower and peony
December

We’ve had snow on the ground for many days now. And it’s snowing right now as well, and it’s -8 degrees Celsius, so we’ll have a white Christmas this year, too!

And here’s a video from our trail camera or game camera – I just call it an animal camera. We had the animal camera in my boyfriend’s land in the region of Etelä-PohjanmaaSouth Ostrobothnia. We brought the camera home for the winter. And here at home it was possible to get the videos to computer. We got some interesting and delightful videos. There were night-time wanderers… I’ll have a few videos here in my blog, too, so here’s the first one, a hare. 🙂 :

  • Leena

Flowers in the garden

I took all the pictures in this blog post in our garden today. I already have a couple of recent flower pictures on my Instagram, here’s now a few more.

viola

There’s still viola flowers, red viola flowers…

echinacea purpurea, purple coneflower

A bunch of pictures of the echinacea purpurea or purple coneflower flowers, the most long-lasting flowers I’ve ever had! – Some of the flowers have been there for over a month now. 🙂

echinacea purpurea, purple coneflower

echinacea purpurea, purple coneflower

echinacea purpurea, purple coneflower

Still new flowers, too.

clarkia amoena/godetia, calendula, marigold

Clarkia amoena or godetia flowers and calendula or pot marigold flowers again. 😉

clarkia amoena or godetia

calendula or marigold

“Psst…!”

-Leena

The heat’s been on

The summer has been unbelievably hot in Finland, as it has been all over Europe. At least for now the temperatures have gone down here in Finland, and yeah, there shouldn’t be temperatures like 30 degrees Celsius anymore this summer. (?) Anyway, this summer we learned that temperatures around 25 degrees Celsius are kinda cool. I mean, usually 25 degrees Celsius has been the Heat for us, but this summer we had 30 degrees Celsius or even a bit warmer for so, so many days that, yes, one truly felt it. And it was so dry everywhere for so many weeks that we couldn’t light campfires.

And about me, myself and I… I woke up at 4.30 am when I was working, and with so many early mornings during the week this summer, I didn’t quite yet learn to get my shi…itake together in my free time, I mean, it can be seen, for example, here in my blog… or, you just can’t see anything here… But I learned that I can make money by doing something that has something to do with gardening, funny. 🙂 And now it is the time to do… many things, I have a ton of things to do, but that’s nice, and I’m quite excited about writing here in my blog now, too. 🙂

echinacea purpurea, purple coneflower

Echinacea purpurea or purple coneflower flowers in our garden now. I planted three tiny young echinacea plants last summer and two of them have been growing this year – the one in the middle didn’t grow at all a year ago either.

echinacea purpurea, purple coneflower

Butterflies, too, love echinacea flowers… The right wing of this beauty was a bit damaged.

echinacea purpurea, purple coneflower

echinacea purpurea, purple coneflower

echinacea purpurea, purple coneflower

New flowers still growing.

echinacea purpurea, purple coneflower

Echinacea has been one of my dream flowers for my garden.

And here’s another one of my dream plants, in our garden now as well:

bougainvillea

Bougainvillea. My ‘mini Spain’. – Bougainvillea is “the miracle bush in the south” for us here in the north. 🙂 These plants are so huge in the south! And the first time I met this wonder was in Spain. My plant was tiny and there were no bracts or flowers when I bought it, and it cost me only a few euros. I’m glad it began to flower!

bougainvillea

The actual flowers of bougainvillea, small and sweet.

This summer I’ve seen a bat in our garden. One bat, only once. My boyfriend has seen a couple of bats a couple of times here this summer, but we definitely saw more of them a year ago.

And last week I saw a raccoon dog here for the first time. My boyfriend has seen it here once before this summer. I’m not quite sure how to feel about raccoon dogs here…

The summer is not over yet!

-Leena