Sunflower, bees and butterflies

One, yes one, of the sunflowers I planted has grown to be a beautiful tall one. At least now I know where to plant them next year. This one is growing right next to our overgrown garden, which is really loved by bees and butterflies. They talk about mass deaths of bees, but there's plenty in our yard! As for the butterflies, I saw the first ones this year in August.

Wild raspberries

I thought we had a couple raspberry bushes in the little forest patch behind the house. I was so wrong! There are huge bushes full of wild raspberries, way more berries than I could ever manage to pick even if I had all the patience in the world. Which I don't have, so 1,5l (770g) was all I managed to bring home and freeze.

Potatoes, onions and berries

Starting to be harvest time. Yesterday I dug some new potatoes and onions from our garden. I did try to get a few radishes too, but they don't seem to like that clay soil much. Berry bushes are heavy with berries. I never had th patience to pick more of those red currants myself, so we had a neighbor pick them for herself. I am determined to go and do some gooseberry and raspberry picking today though. We'll see how that goes ;) 

Unfortunately there's not much else to be harvested from our garden this year. The poor summer, poor dirt, all the other projects etc. sort of took over and ate the motivation. Apples we will have, though a whole lot of them are already rotting into the tree and falling off - not because of being over ripe yet, but because the locusts destroyed the tree a lot in the early summer. The other tree does not bear too much fruit this summer, but those few apples there are looking quite delicious already, though not ripe yet.

Busy lizzies are finally blooming, in two colors: fuchsia and orange.

Out on a sunny day

Today has been a sunny day, after a couple weeks of rain and thunder. Several times has it happened in the past days that I have left home for a walk with the dogs in full sunshine, with my sunglasses on, and gotten wet halfway through our walk. Sun casting shadows, hard rain falling on me and the dogs. True eeyore-moments... Not today, though :) Sun has been out for good all day. Then again, I haven't. We've been resting and taking it easy mostly, after a few rather eventful days and sleepless nights.

So, only some moderate dog walks today, in the sun. Enough to feel the warmth and cherish the light. And take a couple pics of a chokeberry tree and that hydrangea paniculata, that has turned almost completely pink now.

 

 

 

Hail and thunder

This year, after the hot weeks were over, we've had one heck of a thunder season. Can't remember similar. Thunder and lightning and hard rain day after day, several days a week. Today was the latest episode of thunder and lightning right on top of us, accompanied by hard rain and hail, nearly 1cm in diameter.

Berries

Fruit and berries are ripening fast with the approaching autumn. Late summer flowers are blooming.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bolete

Hot and humid days turned to cool rainy ones a couple weeks ago. All this rain with occasional sun has gotten the mushrooms popping up here and there and everywhere. A bolete even decided to grow at the edge of our lawn.

 

Tomatoes

As I have stated a few times already, the poor June sort of spoiled the gardening season for us. So I hadn't even given our tomato plants a second glance, thinking that they were a lost cause. Today, however, my husband asked me if I had noticed all those tomatoes growing an little flowers on the two plants. I hadn't, but when I went to look, sure enough there were dozens of green plum tomatoes and even more flowers there! One of the plants had grown quite big, leaving the other one with less sunlight. The warm weeks had indeed boosted our tomtaoes into action. Now we just hope that the nights won't get too cold again before we can harvest our own plum tomatoes :)

 

White turning pink

Hydrangea paniculata in some of our neighbors' yards is blooming beautifully now in the late summer. It is mostly white, and looks like it's turning pink, but then I don't know if this is simply how this bush is.

 

Down by the sea

With our garden so shriveled up this year, the Seasons Diary has been more quiet this summer than it has ever been. Oh, well. Summer is still searing hot, even though it's nearly mid-August already. Next week should start the rainy cooler season, according to the forecasts. Cooler being day temperatures around 21-23C whereas they have been like 26-30 for weeks now. It is humid - 50-70% or so - making the still-moderate temperatures feel even hotter. Sweaty I would say.

The sea with its never stopping breeze is always a good choice when the going gets hot. A couple weeks ago we spent the weekend at our friends' island, and yesterday we drove down the Porkkala peninsula to enjoy the sunny Saturday.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Early autumn bog hike

We went for a hike on Torronsuo bog approximately 100km North-East of Helsinki. We walked along the duckboards through the bog admiring the fabulous colors around us, then through the forest to a road that took us to this cabin and lean two with a fireplace.

 

 

The path through the bog was aligned with wiry hay, cotton grass, marsh tea, a lot of cranberries everywhere and some small lingonberries, but no cloudberries anymore; their leaves were already turning red. Small mushrooms were growing in the wet bog, but the surrounding forests were home to some rather big fly agarics and porcinis.

 

 

 

Garden in late August

Even though most days still are quite warm - after that autumn spell a week ago - the nights have turned quite cold. Cold enought to put the tomatoes into a non-productive safe-mode and most of the other plants into slower motion as well. There were still three cucumbers, fully grown, that I picked today, as well as a zucchini in the zucchini plant, which actually has still put out a couple new flowers!

But the tomatoes are not growing anymore, and not ripening anymore. So I picked the rest of the tomatoes to ripen in our house. Hopefully they do!

 

The bhut jolokia seems unweilding to the cool nights, is making new flowers and growing its purple chilis rapidly! Soon we can make some fiercely hot purple jolokia chili ;)

 

We pulled the rest of our red onions out of the ground; they didn't do quite as well as we had hoped, but definately we can use at least some of them, too.

 

We also trimmed the basil again, making another 1 liter batch of pesto out of it. There's still plenty left to grow, we'll see how well it does with the autumn coming on here. Oregano still awaits picking and drying.

 

Mushrooms

All sorts of random mushrooms are already popping out. I have seen people come out of the forests carrying chanterelles and my husband had seen a few porcinis too. Mostly, though, it seems to be a bit early for those kind of mushrooms. And all I've managed to see are these strange fellas. Then again, I never have been a real mushroom hound even though I do like them a lot!