Category: Insects.

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It looks like all but one of my sown Petunias will have this color.

We’ve had unusually much sunshine today  since we weren’t supposed to have any 🙂 Still mostly cloudy anyway and it has been just enough warm so it has been rather nice, we even had a nice walk later in the day because the flies in the forest really didn’t care much about us. Well there was this one horse fly that insisted on paying me a visit and I can happily say that she will visit no more.

This time it is evening fog I show.

   

Yesterday I went to a pet store rather far away, a work friend lives just beside it so I had a cup of coffee first. He has one of those really modern and I guess rather expensive coffee makers so I think it is impossible not to make a really good cup of coffee 🙂 The pet shop is rather big and it turns out they sell snakes, spider, turtles, scorpions and aquarium fish. I have nothing against snakes so I took a look at them, I think it was mostly boas and pythons of different sizes but I skipped to look at the spiders and scorpions 🙂 🙂 🙂 I bought myself some fish and went home again. Took a bit longer than it should since I got a bit lost, I also was a bit lost on my way there too so now I’ve seen places in this county I never would have otherwise 🙂 🙂

Lots of Rowan berries this year.

 

I’ve never seen this butterfly before so I’ve asked the knowledgeable people on FB what it can be.

We had our nap, so so far I’ve still only missed to have one during this vacation 🙂 It was a bit too noisy today though, I have a neighbor with five horses and they are making hay bales and that tractor of theirs have been working quite a lot lately 🙂 I think I snoozed for twenty minutes and today I wished it could have been more because Alma woke me up at 3:10 this morning and it took some time to fall back to sleep again. No stomach problems though, just needed to go an hour earlier than usual.

     

I went to the grocery store in the village where I work today and they had cheap strawberries and cherries as well, so when I’m done here and have had something to eat I’ll make some jam. It is hard to find cherry jam here and if one would it costs a small fortune and since strawberry jam works for anything that needs jam I thought I might as well do some of that as a well. The few cherries I get from my sand cherry trees won’t go far and they are still unripe, just like the three plums I’ll get 🙂 🙂 and my strawberries gives the odd berry but they tend to start producing berries now, really odd since all other strawberry plants give berries in spring and early summer 🙂 🙂

     

I better stop writing here and go downstairs to clean those berries and the jars so I can start making that jam. Also the dogs are waiting for me to have a couple of sandwiches so they can get a slice of cheese each 🙂

Have a great day!

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I had both windows upstairs open during the night and woke up in the middle of the night because I was freezing 🙂 It was only 8C (46,4F) outside and not much warmer in my bedroom 🙂 So I just pulled up the blanket and had a really good sleep until the dogs decided it was time to get up, around 4:30 in the morning.

     

I was a bit too slow though so by the time we finally started walking the flies started to fly. It was still rather cool in the shadows but the warmth had already done the damage. The only place where the flies didn’t do what they could to drive us crazy was actually by the creek because it was still much cooler there. Nova did have a difficult time every time we walked in the sunshine, she can’t take any heat now days, thankfully though most of our walk happened where trees gave a really nice cool air. She is after all a quite old lady so it isn’t surprising. She eats better than she has in ages though, she doesn’t leave a single thing in her bowl for the other two to fight about 🙂 🙂

     

I have an ant colony in one of my older composts and I noticed that the new queens and can we call them kings? started to leave their old home. I noticed that when I was about to put in more grass in the compost and there were ants everywhere 🙂 🙂  They seemed a bit annoyed with all that grass poured over them but it only took a few minutes until they had made new passages so that they all could start to fly away. I really need to pour in more water in that compost, just enough for the ants to find a new place to live, after that I can pour in a lot of water because since ants are living there they dry it out totally so the compost just becomes a storage place for dry grass and twigs 🙂

     

I can’t say I noticed especially many horse flies but at least some of them found me and now my right arm itches and I’m a bit swollen around my knuckles on my right arm. Still this is an amazingly good year for us warm blooded animals because there are very few of those biting nasties  (well gazillions of mosquitoes earlier this summer but not so many now). I do hope this also means that we’ll get much fewer moose flies as well, since it has rained this much so that we have more ground water than we have place for in the ground it might actually mean that the moose fly larvae/ pupas have drowned but it sounds too good to be true 🙂

   

I had forgotten that I can make additional pages to this blog and thought that I perhaps should make a new page and write down gardening tips for those of You that are interested. For instance what to do and not to do with invasive species, when and how to sow different seeds and so on, would that be of interest? I know I live very much far north than most of You but most of what I know could be adapted to warmer climates, just as long as You actually have some kind of winter even though it might be shorter than ours up here 🙂

The Creeping bellflower is pretty but it is also a terrible weed so today I had to remove all flowers because they had started to produce seeds and it can be bad enough with just all the roots 🙂
Looks a bit empty now but they will most likely start growing new flower stalks already now so I might get a second flowering from them.
Buttercup ‘Citrina’.
Finally the Californian poppies flowers too.

It is time for a last cup of tea for the day and then hope it’ll cool down a bit before we go to bed.

Have a great day!

I hope it starts to dry up now.

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Lots of butterflies and dragonflies on our way to the creek today and also a few Damselflies down by the creek.

I hope I can mow the lawn tomorrow because today has been both reasonable warm and sunny plus we’ve had a wind blowing helping to dry up the grass. The early morning wasn’t that fun though, misty rain and so warm that the flies behaved like crazy so we never came out for a morning walk. We waited to have any walk until the weather became much more pleasant.

     

Instead I started to collect all cardboard boxes, breaking them down in to smaller pieces and then loading it all in to the back my car trunk. I still have loads to pack but it is almost completely full there now 🙂 My big problem is that if I have an empty box and I have something in my hands where I don’t know where to place it it goes down in the box 🙂 All but one of all those boxes are now in the car but I still have several big ones that needs to be unpacked and find somewhere to place what’s in them. I have almost no storage space in this little cottage, I have the cool cellar but I need that space for my plants that need a cool but not cold space to spend winter 🙂

     

Yesterday I went with my neighbor to a vintage shop, I’ve wanted to go there for a long time so yesterday my neighbor brought me there, turns out it’s her brother in law that owns it. I really lied it and found lots of things I would have liked to buy 🙂 I did come home with an old kitchen scale. There were a couple of really old ones but one need counter weights to make it work and those are always missing, so I bought a not so old, made sometimes in the late 1900’s. I have an almost new digital one but it eats batteries and it can change how much something weighs if I weigh the same thing again 🙂 I’ll take a photo of my new one if I remember it 🙂

     

We walked down to thew creek today. Still lots of puddles in the gravel road but the grass bushes along the creek were almost dry, the sun and the wind had done a great job there. For You living where temperatures around 22C (71,6F) is almost chilly this time of year 🙂 my dogs didn’t think it was 🙂 Totally ok while walking in shadow but coming out in the sun made them pant an awful lot. Alma always pant so I can’t say much about here 🙂 but Nova slowed down considerable and also Malkolm was less energetic. So I let Nova of the leash already when we were down by the creek, none of the dogs have show that there are wolves around so I felt it was safe to do so. I let Malkolm of the leash at the usual place and I must say that he’s really good at coming back if I call him.

     

So it’ll be an early walk tomorrow while it still is cool after the night because tomorrow will be warm, Scandinavian warm that is 🙂 25C (77F) and that will be too much for my Swedish dogs that are used to much lower temperatures 🙂

     

It’s time for a last cup of tea and then see if there’s anything worth watching on tv, I doubt that though.

Have a great day!

A morning I liked.

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The morning was almost perfect here today, only almost because as usual the vegetation was so wet that Malkolm was soaking wet when we came home even though he barely walked in the high grass today. It was cool, morning mist and the sun slowly rising. We skipped having breakfast before going outside hoping to be in the fog as much as possible. The mist actually stayed our entire walk so I was more than happy 🙂

I went up to the mail box before we went out on our walk, back in the days I would have had all dogs with me, unleashed, because they would stay close to me. If I tried that today Alma would be all over the place, most likely chasing cats at the farm, Malkolm would follow her and Nova would have turned back home again 🙂

   

I did hope that we would see some bigger animals since the sun just had started to rise but we only saw one and that was a wild hog down by the creek. It was passing the gravel road perhaps twenty meters ahead of us (much the same in yards). At first it stood still just watching us but decided to pass since we had stopped only looking at it. The thing is that wild hogs never comes alone and I had no idea if this was the first or last of them I decided to turn around and walk back home instead.

     

It is getting more tricky to have our walks now days. Nova is old and I’ve noticed how much slower she is compared to just a year ago. So it is a bit tricky to understand what speed we should walk in. First we have Alma who most likely would love to run around as fast as she can, last is Nova who now days mostly enjoys to just walk really slow sniffing on everything she can find on the ground and Malkolm in the middle 🙂 Malkolm is more like Nova, more interesting in smells than speed so it is Alma who has to adapt the most and adapt is not her strong side 🙂 🙂 She too can find smells interesting but can’t concentrate for more than fifteen seconds, I’ve actually measured the time and it’s rare that she can be interested in anything for up to twenty seconds 🙂 🙂

     

She did behave pretty well when we met the hog though, I must give her that! The weather after that was rather nice, lots of sunshine and just a weak wind blowing. the rest of the walks she behaved really well. I thought of mowing the lawn but even though it was fairly warm and the sun shone the grass was still soaking wet, no mowing tomorrow either because it has just started to rain again and it will most likely last until early morning tomorrow. One newspaper shouted out that after this rain we’ll get higher temperatures again and lots of sunshine so I checked the weather sites. Yes we’ll get one day with high temperatures and then it’ll drop down to 20C (68F) again 🙂 🙂 They always do like that when they know most people are desperate to at least get some sunshine before work starts again 🙂 🙂 🙂

     

It is time for a last cup of tea for the day and then bed I think. I guess it’s stupid to hope for another morning like we had today but I’ll be happy if it is cool and with some sunshine 🙂

     

Have a great day!

     

The new compost.

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This morning was sunny and quite chilly with some morning mist hovering above the ground. It wasn’t supposed to be like that but since the sky was clear blue I thought I had some time before the more cloudy weather would start. It started as soon as we came outside the entrance door 🙂 The sun had evaporated the fog so it rose and then created a evenly grey layer between us and the sun. It had also warmed up the air a lot so the few flies we have here were really annoying.

     

All vegetation was soaking wet, both from the rain yesterday and the morning dew. So we just walked down to the creek, followed it up-stream and turned back homewards again. We did see a Roe deer and when we just had turned around to follow the creek down-stream again a wild hog gave us a friendly warning that it stood hidden on the other side of the creek and that we shouldn’t try to go over to that side 🙂 🙂 I never saw it though but it did sound as if it was big 🙂 🙂 🙂

     

I had just done some laundry when a package arrived. It was the new compost I’d ordered, the one that looks like a tombola and that one shall spin every now and again plus it is supposed to stand in direct sunlight so the things inside it sort of get so hot that it in a way boils into compost. I was naive to believe that it would be put together already in the package but oh how wrong I was 🙂 I also believed that it as most would be just to sort of pop it together in to the compost. Turns out nothing of that was remotely close 🙂 The package was rather flat and when I opened it the first thing I noticed was a bag with a zillion screws and Screws and nuts. I have to say that they had packed it really nice and there were even some Screws and nuts extra so it didn’t matter that one of the screws was defect.

 

I think this is the first year that the Beekeeper will get cherries on this little tree.

So I unpacked it all and at that time it was cloudy and not too warm. I started to put the pieces together and I’m really happy that I am ambidextrous (for those of You who don’t know what that is, I am both right and left handed since birth) because I think it would have been pretty tough to reach all the screws from the outside to the bolts on the inside otherwise. So I stood there in a bad posture of course and then the sun broke through warming up the air even more plus trying to fry my back 🙂 I’m glad I remembered to put the middle piece in while I still could (a sort of wall in the middle to make two compartments, when one is filled but not really ready to use one has a second compartment to start to fill up), it would have been impossible otherwise.

They had packed everything really well and I now have more plastic than the world needs this year 🙂

Each segment had to be screwed on individually and overlapping the previous one with eight tiny screws and bolts. I also got a screwdriver and for some reason I just can’t understand a pair of very thin gloves that only would have made me drop anything smaller than a tea cup 🙂 🙂

In this photo I thought I would show the middle wall but forgot to brighten up the photograph 🙂 🙂 🙂

So every time one puts anything in the compost one is supposed to spint it a few times and one must also spin it around every now and again so it composts evenly. This one is supposed to be totally smell free.

The normal flies acted pretty calm while I stood there sweating like a pig and to my surprise only one horse fly tried to bite me! Last winter really thinned out the fly communities and also the ticks seems to have been culled hard thankfully 🙂 Still plenty of them around though but clearly fewer than before. I moved the compost to the sunniest place in the garden, just in front of the vegetable patch and put in the fruit peels and other things in to the first compartment 🙂 So all needed now is that the sun actually makes a try to shine for more than an hour a day 🙂 🙂 I’ll have some twigs as soon as I’ve started to prune the bushes that now have grown too much and removing small plants that has spread too well with their roots. I do have a rather wild garden but even I have a limit to how wild it can become 🙂 🙂

My garden raspberries aren’t especially tasty but the birds love them.

I do however have plenty of wild raspberries, they truly behaves like weed 🙂 The wild one are probably the most delicious berries we have this far south in the country. We have even more delicious berries up far north but they can’t give any berries this far south.

The Elderberry tree suddenly started to flower 🙂

The dogs are sleeping deeply right now. Malkolm on my left side and the other two in my bed. They’ve enjoyed a sunny afternoon being outside playing but quite often come in to drink lots of water. The weather will be mostly rainy this weekend but they’re guessing that our early mornings will be almost cool and sunny, so I better get up and go outside with the dogs as soon as we wake up 🙂

Doesn’t Malkolm look worried here? Two seconds after I took this photo he attacked Alma 🙂 🙂 🙂

   

Have a great day!

I slept away an entire day.

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I normally don’t have fog coming in to the garden unless it is pea soup fog and it was that today.

I think we all now are getting rid of our ailments. The dogs stomachs are much better and I finally woke up without a sour throat. I was really tired yesterday so both the dogs and I slept almost all day. The morning was quite nice and cool with some sunshine so we could have a nice walk before the rain and thunder arrived. I’m not sure for how long I slept but it was several hours and I woke up an hour before my usual bedtime and went to bed again and slept the entire night 🙂 🙂 🙂 I think the dogs slept the entire time as well but My sleep was so deep that I didn’t hear the thunder at all so they could have had a party while I was in the land of dreams 🙂

Most of it was gone before we went out though.

   

I was oddly enough really tired when I woke up this morning so I didn’t have the energy to go out with the dogs while we had a really nice and thick fog, we even had fog in the garden. We’ve only had one short nap after that and I woke up to heavy showers and thunder. As I woke up I remembered that the kitchen door was open so I had to dry the floor from the little lake that had formed in the kitchen 🙂 🙂 🙂

 

Still some visible water in the tarn but it is a deep hole so the grass is actually growing on roots coming from the vegetation around it.

The morning wasn’t especially cool when we finally went out for our walk so the flies were quite happy to greet us in the forest. To be honest there weren’t that many out there but the ones that were annoyed us enough. There’s unusually few flies flying around this summer, not that I mind but we do need these flies so the birds will have enough with food to raise their young ones. I remember not to long ago when one had to stop at petrol stations because the windshields were just disgusting covered with dead flies, so far this year I’ve had one fly crashing in to the windshield. It is nice to have clean windows on the car but something are clearly wrong out in nature now days. To be honest though, I have so many in my garden that it might be that they all have moved here 🙂 🙂

   

I drove to the big grocery store in Falköping this morning. I don’t live in a tourist area so there weren’t many cars on the road. I bought what I had forgotten to write down on my list last Tuesday 🙂 and then some 🙂 I tried some new gluten free cookies they had gotten and I must say they were for once really yummy. If it is something I’ve learned since I got to know I can’t eat gluten is that most baked things taste like shit so even though I was hesitant I bought two different cookies and to my really big surprise they didn’t taste disgusting 🙂 I’ll see if they can get them in my usual grocery store because what they have are abominations to mankind 🙂 🙂 🙂

My first hazelnuts 🙂

My Himalayan Cedar looks great.

My Gardenias seems to like staying outside and this is the first flower to open up.

The perennial sunflowers are early this year.

They are guessing that we won’t have any rain tomorrow and 20C (68F). No sunshine though but they said that about today as well and we had plenty of it in between showers. They’re also guessing that the three days after that will give plenty of rain but mostly after noon each day so we’ll be able to have our morning walks without getting soaked. Well the grass will be dripping of both rain and dew so my feet and Malkolm will be really wet. Malkolm won’t mind though and Nova will walk after both him and me so she’ll mostly be rather dry when we come home.

     

It is time to go downstairs and watch the English Antique Roadshow. There’s always someone there who had an old aunt that was a Russian grand duchess or similar and they always pretend that they are so surprised when the jewelry they brought are worth a small fortune 🙂 🙂 🙂 Ours is so much more dull when it comes to that and sometimes the owner of the object tells from the beginning they already know the value of what they’ve brought. To be honest if I had something worth loads of money I wouldn’t want the world to know, it would be just like asking to be robbed one day 🙂 🙂 🙂

A cat from the farm was visiting the Beekeepers so I guess both Sally and Salmiak were indoors 🙂

Have a great day!

Summer weather for once.

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Yesterday evening after all the rain finally had blown away. Is the pot of gold still there after the rainbow is gone? I could see exactly where the rainbow hit the ground but the pasture is full of curious cattle and I would never have the chance of reaching it before they all had surrounded me 🙂 🙂 🙂

We have actually had summer weather here today! Sunny and 20C (68F) in thew shadow and just a slight wind blowing every now and again. 20C perhaps doesn’t sound much but after having below 15C (59F) for such a long time it feels like the tropics 🙂 It was way warmer in the sun though, I noticed on our walk how the dogs suddenly started to pant as soon as we didn’t walk in the shadow.

     

We woke up at three fifteen this morning, don’t know why but I guess there was something outside making some noise. I let the dogs outside and when they had done what they needed we went to bed again and slept until just  after five. I must say I didn’t feel especially awake after that so we skipped the morning walk for once. Instead, when I felt awake enough I drove to the supermarket in Skara. I had my note with what to buy, bought everything on it and didn’t realize that I had forgotten to write everything down so I’ll go to a big grocery store in Falköping on Thursday. Not especially much but I can’t bake bread if I don’t have everything I need 🙂

 

I had unfortunately the wrong lens on the camera when I photographed this dragonfly (the Swedish name for it would be Troll spindle in English). I think this is the next biggest dragonfly we have here.

So we had our morning walk when I came home again and since I couldn’t see any cattle in the fields I hoped they had removed the electric wires so that we could walk along the creek again. The employees that work for the cattle owner is most likely good at what they are doing but they are also extremely lazy! They rarely remove those wires and if the do they only remove the ones closest to their four wheelers, they just refuse to move more than five feet away from them. So naturally the wires were still there and at the other place we need to pass they had removed two of them, the other two were still attached and for some reason they still are electrified. This time we managed to pass without getting stung and the two left at the other place is now detached lying on the ground with no electricity in them. If the first ones still are attached tomorrow I’ll detach those as well.

I wish I could have taken a photo of the three male Damselflies when they were all flying.

Can You see the spiderweb?

 

I was watching a video on Fb this morning where a well educated young man dressed in what I could see expensive clothes was asking people if they thought money was important in life. The people he asked, in Miami, all said that of course not, money wasn’t important at all. I could both see and hear that they all had expensive clothes and by the way they spoke and their answers of course they were all very well off. Some had sold their companies, others had worked their way up in their work places and of course made a lot of money so they were all retired even though some looked younger than most retired people. I kept thinking the entire time why don’t he ask people who has low paying jobs, people who don’t have a business to sell? Of course those people wouldn’t have given him the answers he wanted 🙂 🙂 🙂 I’m not saying that money in itself gives happiness but if You have enough money You don’t have to worry about the bills that will come and if You don’t have to worry about that You’ll feel much calmer and most likely more happy 🙂

 

For once the dogs sat still while I removed the wires, if they are there tomorrow I’ll detach them (and of course put up the wires that stop the cattle from going out of the pasture). I’m rather tired of those workers by now!

We met the fox again, too bad I was too slow with the camera. I’ll have the bigger lens on tomorrow, just in case 🙂

It is time to go downstairs to the kitchen and make myself something to eat. The dogs have already eaten. Malkolm is much better now but Nova is still very wobbly, so from now on I’ll continue to give Nova chicken and rice (which she loves) and start giving Malkolm more of the normal food he eats. Tomorrow will start fairly nice but it will become pretty hot and then rain and thunder will arrive yet again. Good thing I’ve decided to have a long nap every day during my vacation 🙂

     

Have a great day!

     

The morning was really nice anyway :-)

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The weather has been really mixed today. The morning was cool and nice with the sun warming up the air rather quickly, later on the clouds arrived and with it heavy showers but lots of sunshine in between. Now we have sunshine and rain at the same time 🙂 Thunder was heading towards us but went north on the other side of the mountain.

The cattle have now moved on to the pasture beside the one behind the beekeepers cottage and that means the road still is blocked with electric wires so therefore much more difficult to walk along the creek.

We saw this deer buck on our way to the bog. Well I can see that it is more or less impossible to see it in this photos 🙂 🙂 🙂

Besides the morning walk I’ve spent most of my first day of vacation with having a long nap 🙂 I’ve had a cold for quite some time now, it has spread all over the country it seems, so I’ve been unusually tired this summer. I’m hit much less hard than most who have had it but instead had it for a longer time. I didn’t miss much while I, well we, were asleep. Every time it stops raining I’ve had the kitchen door open but the dogs have refused to go outside, they were caught in a shower early in the morning that not even Malkolm liked 🙂 🙂 and they wouldn’t do that mistake again 🙂 🙂 🙂

     

Both the big weather sites are guessing we’ll have a rain free day tomorrow but loads of rain on Wednesday. I’ll have to go to a grocery store as well, I should have done that today but I looked in the fridge and decided I have enough at home to last until tomorrow 🙂 My neighbors did the same but decided to go today so they don’t need to go for the rest of the week instead 🙂 We all started our vacation today and none of us want to do anything unnecessary during these weeks.

     

I already have three composts but I ordered a new one today, a kind of tumbler. It is black and is supposed to stand in sunshine so it becomes a hot compost. One puts in the material, could be grass or what ever comes from the garden or kitchen, turns it around a couple of times and leave it until next time. This will make compost much faster than the other warm/ hot composts. I bought it mostly because I have a family of mice in one of the old ones and lots of ants in the second old one. I’ve tried to make them move by pouring lots of water through it but they refuse, plus it is hard to open up so I can use what’s in it 🙂 🙂 🙂

This is most likely not a Creeping bluebell because the flower grow out from the stalk n several sides of it.

This is a Creeping bluebell because the flowers all grow out from the same side of the stalk. Almost impossible to see the difference otherwise but my guess is that they both spread just as happily 🙂

I better start writing a list of what I need to buy tomorrow and put it in my wallet already today so I won’t leave it at home as I so often do 🙂 It is so much more expensive to forget that list because I keep guessing what I might need and come home with so much more and most of it is something I really don’t need 🙂 🙂

The peas are in bloom and have started to grow over to their neighbors 🙂 🙂

Malkolm is now almost as high as Nova is 🙂   

Have a great day!

Such a nice day.

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The Beekeeper has really managed to make beautiful meadow flower patches.

It has been such a nice day here, mostly sunny and just below 20C (68F) as warmest. The wind was blowing pretty hard in the early morning so I skipped the mosquito hat when we went out on our morning walk and it was cool enough to wear a hoodie. I sprayed us all with the anti tick, horsefly and mosquito spray but I can’t say it was because of that I only found two ticks in total on the dogs and no insects bit us either, the insects bit could be because of the wind though because the only place we came close to them was down by the creek.

     

Later in the morning my neighbors texted me asking if I needed an office chair because he was going to toss some away because they had ordered new ones at his work place and since there were nothing wrong with the ones they would toss away he thought of not only his family but also on me 🙂 So now I finally have a really good chair when I sit in front of the computer 🙂 I can’t remember when I didn’t have any pain in my back or legs while sitting here.

     

I’ve finally planted the last Mulberry tree I ordered but I still have four Sea buckthorn bushes to plant. I have also pruned the Laburnum so that the, so far, little Wisteria gets some sunshine and also the area behind the tree. I once had a rather nice flowerbed there but it went too dark when the tree got bigger. I also pruned the Japanese quince and a Ginnala maple, the Japanese quince because it has become too big and threatening the little new white mulberry tree and the maple because it gives too much shadow towards the root zone. I’ve decided to remove that maple just because it gives too much shadow and Ginnala maples tend to spread like weeds. I have another one that also needs to be pruned just because no sunlight can reach the ground where it grows.

     

I found the first tiny tomatoes on one of the tomato vines 🙂 I was fastening a string towards the cottage wall so that it has something to keep it in place and while I was doing that Alma decided that she would give me a visit. Alma has this habit where she must press her face towards mine and it isn’t a gentle touch, she press her face really hard towards mine 🙂 🙂 So while I tried to tie the string around the tomato vine she stood there pressing so I couldn’t see anything and managed to break off all the other flowers 🙂 🙂 Well I have more plants with more flowers so I’ll get my tomatoes 🙂 I also tore off the new shoots and planted them too. I will not get any tomatoes from them but I can save them till next summer. If they’ve become too long and thin I’ll just cut them down in large enough pieces and plant those in new pots.

     

The weather guessing on the weather sites are galloping right now 🙂 🙂 🙂 The big Swedish one says rain all day and around one fifth of an inch with rain. The Norwegian one that I trust most of all those sites says rain all day and two inches of rain!! Well in which case I think we’ll be able to have our morning walk but two inches is a bit much 🙂 🙂 🙂 Well I have things I must do indoors anyway so I won’t get bored 🙂 🙂 🙂

     

Have a great day!

The first Gooseberries are turning red 🙂

Red currants but I won’t get a chance to get any, the dogs and Magpies are there as soon as they ripe 🙂

This tomato variety is called Tigerella, I guess one could translate that to Tiger Ella 🙂

I’ll get lots of Blueberries this year.

Really nice day.

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I really hope the birds don't find my Sand cherries. They are really delicious and I rarely get a chance to get any myself.
I’ve found several Sand cherries this year 🙂

I slept late, for me this morning. I didn’t wake up until after five am. The weather was just as grey as they had guessed and it was actually pretty chilly when we finally came out for our walk. So instead of wearing my mosquito hat I just wore a hoodie and it was enough to keep the flies away from my face. Also I did spray the entire hoodie with that anti tick, horsefly and mosquito spray that works for both animals and humans and that could have helped more that I thought it would. So today both my dogs and I smell like an old lady in the sixties that didn’t understand when to stop spraying her perfume 🙂

I do like ferns!      The Grape Elder is early this year.

We have actually had much more sunshine than they guessed that we would so the kitchen door has been open most of the day but I really need to buy a new mosquito net for that door, I’ve taped it together in some places 🙂 🙂 Dogs never walk though slow and carefully, they run through ripping of the magnets keeping it together but every time I’m out on the internet I tend to forget to order any. From now on they’re guessing that we’ll have sunshine and hot weather for the rest of the week so I didn’t mow the lawn today as I had planed because the grass is still very wet since it has grown so high. I’ll start doing it tomorrow after work and just take small areas each day until it is done. So I won’t write anything here tomorrow.

I've never seen either a toad or frog here so I guess the Källrå might stay in the lake itself :-)
No unusually big toads or frogs here so I guess there isn’t any Källrå living here.

Lots of Lingonberries this year, I might even go out and pick some myself this year.

  Squirrel berries in bloom still.

Two more weeks until the vacation starts 🙂 Those two weeks will feel like years because when it is hot outside it’s even hotter in the factory. The one standing at the paint ox it can quite often reach 44 C (111,2 F) and no matter how much waster one drinks it’s not enough. Hopefully the painter working there will work every day, otherwise it might be me they think should do that job and after 16 years of it I truly hate it. So cross Your fingers and hold Your thumbs for good luck so he’s healthy both weeks 🙂 🙂

Japanese climbing rose in bloom, lots of flowers this year.
I can’t remember that I’ve seen as many flowers on the Japanese climbing rose as I have this summer. These are above my head now making a roof together with the apple tree and a grape elder.

I think the flowers are quite beautiful and these have no thorns 🙂

Red leafed rose, self sown.
The self sown Red leafed rose has been planted and grows really fast now.

Today I’ll write about a slightly more nasty being, the Mara. She’s the one that gives us nightmares But also from how I interpret it anxiety attacks at night. She crawls up on a humans chest at night and squeeze out all air and will to live. If she has been visiting You Yo’ll know it since You will wake up cold sweating and have the feeling of being suffocated. She cab squeeze through any crack she can find so it is more or less impossible to keep her out of any place. Thankfully the Mara suffers from obsessive thoughts so it is fairly easy to occupied until it is morning. One can for instance put a bible with lots of hair in between the pages because she must count them all before she can do anything else. Another way is to spread lots of tiny seeds around the beds because she must count them as well.  I guess that not cleaning the floors if one has dogs could help a lot as well because of course she would have to clean before doing anything else. I’m pretty sure she hasn’t been around my place for ages because my floors are just as dirty as they were the night before 🙂 🙂

Old Nova, 18 years old and still going strong :-)
She’s hanging on the old lady 🙂

   

No one really knows where the Mara comes from but it is usually a female and some think it is the soul of dead unmarried women who tries to get the warmth from the living. It could also be as simple as a curse is put upon her because their mothers, trying to not have as much pain giving birth and therefore used black magic by crawling through amniotic membrane from a new born foal. If the woman would give birth to a boy that boy would later on become a werewolf. Now our werewolfs  are slightly different than the ones we have seen on films or read about but more on that another day 🙂 🙂

I asked Malkolm what he was doing and then he covered the hole and looked so innocent 🙂

 

This beetle doesn't seem to do any harm in the garden so it is a favorite of mine.
This is a favorite beetle of mine.

It is time to prepare something to eat at work tomorrow, I really don’t have anything at home so I’ll just make a couple of sandwiches and bring some yogurt too.

Have a great day!

A flower on the tomato plant.

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Fuchsia Magellanica, Hardy Fuchsia.
Do You remember all the cuttings I took from the Hardy Fuchsia? These ones are not any of those because they all died 🙂 Turns out that the peat free soil I bought turns in to concrete after a while, perhaps works better for big plants but really bad for cuttings 🙂

Another chilly day here, some sunshine but rain as well. The clouds covering the sun brings out the mosquitoes and I have quite a lot of them because of all the vegetation I have in my garden. It doesn’t itch that much after a bite though so it won’t take long until the itching is over for this year. It can still hurt while the mosquito bites though.

Despite the cold weather the first tomato flower has opened up.
This tomato plant grows in the ground beside my cottage and now it flowers 🙂

I’m not fond of roses and still have plenty of them 🙂 So since I don’t like roses that much I naturally bought a new one 🙂

Camellia sinensis, Tea bush.
The tea bush (Camellia sinensis) looks pretty healthy.

These gooseberries will soon turn red.
The gooseberries are slowly going bigger.

Nothing much has happened today, just as I like it 🙂 but even if I had to do a lot at work time passed really slowly. It’s strange that the same amount of time at home pass so much faster 🙂 🙂 Time started to fly as soon as I left the factory and besides re-potting one of my Jacaranda trees I only had a walk in the garden while being attacked by both mosquitoes and flies and get slightly wet from rain I have no idea what I’ve been doing 🙂

Four photos of Alma and Malkolm playing.
Sometimes a sort of failed photo still look pretty good. This one is too bright but by being that we also can see Malkolms face so much better.

   

They had a sale in one of my favorite seed businesses, it was dirt cheap, and I had forgotten about it so I was really surprised when a thick envelope came in the mail today 🙂 I have forgotten most of what I had ordered but too a quick look and there are some perennials, some annuals and some vegetables waiting until next year. They have quite a good expiration date as well so the results should not be bad because of that 🙂

I have no name for this rose I'm afraid.
This rose has been growing in this garden for almost a hundred years I’ve been told. It has changed places where it has been growing though. I moved it here a couple of years ago and after fighting with wild roses for years it now has its own place.

Smells nice and it also grows in the beekeepers garden, a shoot from the roots of this one.

I do have a lot of roses for someone who doesn’t like them 🙂 🙂 This is one bush from the ground up to the top of the photo 🙂

We call this violet for Stepmother violet.
Lots of Heartsease growing in my garden.

I did take a few photos while walking in the garden and most photos shows Alma and Malkolm playing 🙂 They weren’t out for especially long because of the weather but if they’re guessing it right we will have a sunny and cool morning before warmer weather and rain will arrive. We’ve gotten so much rain now that even if we should have a month long drought we would still have a ground water level so high that there wouldn’t be any risk of water shortage 🙂

Four more photos of Malkolm and Alma playing.     

Have a great day!

P.S. Alma just scared the shit out of me because she kept on walking to Nova who was sleeping beside my desk, she never does that, so I had to check on the old girl because for a moment there I thought she had passed on 🙂 🙂 🙂 She’s fine and looked just as surprised as I was 🙂 🙂 🙂

Cool and nice!

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Malkolm sitting in the middle of the garden doing nothing, very unusual :-)

The mornings was quite cool here today, so cool that no mosquitoes or flies were pestering us even though we went out to the bog. Nova wanted to go down to the creek but since she has been a bit off since the last walk there I’d rather have her walking a shorter distance but at least come out so she could sniff on every track she found. Good appetite though so she’s not ill. She did get grumpy though so she dragged her feet all the way until she realized we were on our way home again, then she suddenly could walk really fast 🙂 🙂

The village on the mountain bathing in sunshine but they too got this mixed weather after a while.  The haunted tree :-)  Not all photos will have an ALT text, this is a piece of the log from a pine that was cut down earlier this year.  Cool summer mornings has a special kind of light that I like a lot.

It has been less cool than what they were guessing in the weather sites and so far we’ve had a couple of small showers but that’s it. Lots of sunshine between the clouds as well. After we came home we had a little nap, well I tried to but Malkolm decided he would play with a nasty sounding plastic bottle so he woke me up every now and again. I guess the good thing was that I still just relaxed and most of the time even Alma stayed with me and Nova 🙂

Guelder rose in bloom. This one is unusually fine, they are almost always attacked by tiny pests.      There's still water in the tiny tjärn.

I only found three ticks crawling around on the dogs when we came home, cool mornings keep those calm as well 🙂 The deer was outside in the cow pasture again this morning, I still haven’t see her young one but I’m pretty sure it’s out there with her. My neighbor, the Beekeeper, saw a doe with two young ones a couple of days ago. I guess that Alma and I are just too loud so that they can hear us from a long distance, Alma shouting and whining like always and me scolding her for it like always as well 🙂 The thing with Alma is that if she can keep calm until we pass the Beekeepers she’ll stay reasonable calm for the rest of the walk as well, if not we’ll have a constant war between us all they way 🙂 🙂 🙂

  The first wheel shaped spider web for the year.    Now when the forest has been thinned lots more ferns grow big.

I’m thinking of buying some fish to have in my water barrels again, there are so many mosquito larvae in them and I can’t find the fishing net so that I can bring them to the fish i my aquarium. The problem is that they now have so tough rules for pet shops to be allowed to sell aquarium fish that most just don’t care to do it, I’ve heard that the license to be able to sell fish just costs too much. Good thing for the fish, annoying for us humans. Well I can always go down to the creek and see if I’m lucky fishing there 🙂 🙂 🙂

The first wheel shaped spider web for the year.    Now when the forest has been thinned lots more ferns grow big.

You don't want this one in Your garden, it can cover a big tree during a summer. The Swedish name foe it is Dog turnip :-) Its scientiffic name is Bryonia alba.
Bryonia alba is nothing You want in Your garden, it can cover a tree during one summer, smells nasty and I have had lots in my garden. Thankfully I’ve got rid of most of them.

Sorry but can't remember the name of this one at the moment :-) I have lots of our wild flowers in my garden, one can say that I'm lazy or say that I care for the pollinators :-) Chose the one You like most :-)
I have lots of wild flowers mixed with garden flowers in my garden. Some would say I’m lazy not weeding them out and some would say I think of the pollinators 🙂 🙂 🙂

Male flowers on Hardy Kiwi.
This is the male flowers on the Hardy Kiwi. My female plants are always freezing during winters (this one did in the beginning as well) so I’ve never seen those flowers but I think they look much the same.

Geum urbanum, much smaller and sort of shy comparing to all the garden varieties there are.
This is a Geum urbanum, grows everywhere here and beside it a wild pink Geranium.

The reasn this old flowerbed look so wild is that it actually grows a Sand cherry tree there, it is impossible to mow that area or keep in well maintained :-)
It grows a Sand cherry tree is that old flower bed so I can’t mow the area or remove all flowers we tend to call weeds 🙂

Another shower is just passing by and when they do the temperature drops a lot, then again it gets really hot when the sun shines instead so it evens out during the day 🙂 I forgot to write about our National day and what we are celebrating (most people doesn’t know why to be honest. So most just take this day as a day free from work and if the weather is nice they’ll barbecue something and just relax. I’ll try to remember to write about it tomorrow instead!

     

Have a great day!