Autumn around here is starting to be at its best, with trees and undergrowth, like blueberry bushes, changing form green to yellow, orange and red. Many trees have lost all of their leaves already. Mushroms are everywhere, a lot of them already decaying.
This autumn was half of an autumn for quite some time, until last week leaves started to fall, and this week the temperatures dropped, at least temporarily. This morning was the first frosty one.
There stands one lone shaggy cap by the road. A tall one it is, too! Before it opened its cap, it looked like the Seattle Needle in the grassy undergrowth of the forest side.
September is here, autumn is here. A strange on it is. Trees are still persistantly green, musrooms are not receiving the message that autumn is here. There are some here and there, popping out, but none of that outburst that the weather conditions - except for the warm nights that haven't dipped below +10C as of yet - would have already suggested.
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.
Another weekend, another hike. We walked an about eight kilometer hike at Luutasuo, a trail that goes through some bog and marsh, by a couple ponds, and climbs up some steep hills of taiga - boreal coniferous forest - formed by the ice retreating after the Ice Age.
Despite the drought of this year, there were plenty of different kinds of mushrooms, most of them already on the decaying side. I also found some blooming strawberries, confused by the extended warm season.
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.
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!
We live at the edge of the city, in the quiet suberbs of Helsinki. Almost right behind our house, just a few streets down, there are vast forests and fields of hay, wheat, barley and oat, meadows with flowers, city owned orchards of oak trees, and a golf course. Yesterday we went for a walk on the footpaths throught those fields in the gloom of late summer, early autumn.
Geese, while planning their escape from this cooling country, seem to like the already cut hay fields, as well as the ponds of the golf course, where the ducks like to reside as well. They were sitting around in flocks, discussing their strategy. Every now and then one of flocks would take off and re-locate. In the evening, when we went strolling around again, it seemed that the flocks had united and decided to take off to a completely new location.
As of late summer, there are still flowers on the meadows, but already mingling with the flowers is a whole lot of mushrooms. The trees have not started to turn yellow or red, but apples are ripening fast and acorns are growing bigger, berries are making bushes hang heavy.
As already mentioned, we went for another walk in the evening, as the one in the daytime was cut short by rain. The evening sky was mostly clear, with some scattered clouds around, and the almost full moon partly visible through the clouds. The rain and still wet shrubbery had lured the snails out in herds to munch on the moist leaves.
The red clover is blooming now, as are the hosta undulata and our rucola too. Mushrooms are growing through our patio, in the cracks between the planks.
