Our summer so far has really not been a warm one. Rain, and temperatures between +10 and +15C in the day time making our summer only a few degrees warmer than last winter was! Night temperatures have been below +10C constantly for 2-3 weeks already, killing nearly everything in our garden. The only thing prospering despite the cold are the strawberries, native to our stark country.
It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood... and the sun was out and it was warm already before 10am when I went for the morning walk with the dog. There's flowers everywhere, and the lilies of the valley cover the forest grounds. Hackberry and filipendula are in bloom too.
It sure has been coming down today, the sleety snow or something. Very wet, but staying on the ground somewhat. Most of our plants have died in the garden long ago, the last unused peppers rotting in place, everything losing their leaves. But not the strawberries, even when covered with snow. And not the rosemary either, tough thing as it is.
We went for a little hike today at Lemmenlaakso, in southern Finland. Autumn still hasn't started properly, even though the temperatures have dropped somewhat and leaves are falling. Forests are still quite green, flowers are still blooming. And the very dry summer and autumn so far has reduced the Kerava river into a shallow muddy stream.
The days have still been rather warm, but the nights already sufficiently cold and long to push the trees into the beginnings of foliage, and rising a fog on the ground in the mornings. We've had a very dry autumn so far, but yesterday there came the rains and winds, knocking down the first birch leaves.
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.
