Category: Warm.

I think it is finally letting go.

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We have fewer hornets here this year and I think it is because we don’t have any honeybees, hornets eat all kinds of insects and especially honey bees.

So it felt better on Wednesday, still with fever and tiredness but still better. Yesterday it hit bad again and I started to wonder what I really was having. The thing is that usually when having high fever one boils and freeze with heavy sweating but I never had that sweating, until this morning and everything felt so much better when it started. Haven’t been freezing all day though .

Well magpies, even the young ones, loves to lure cats out on the thinnest branches and then just leave laughing out loud. This is what it looks like when the monsterkitten tried to get back down.

Also I haven’t had any problems falling asleep at any time during this cold, I just sat down and fell asleep. Today I haven’t been able to take a nap at all so I think this might be the beginning of the end of this cold 🙂 Another strange thing is that in the beginning I had pain in al joints but now the pain has settles around my elbows and wrists, nowhere else 🙂 🙂 🙂 I can’t pretend to have been active at all today but I have managed to take a couple of tors in the garden and that’s more than I’ve managed before. I even found a nest in one of the trees with doves in it :-)We have two forest doves here and it looks like it is the bigger one of them nesting in one of my Ginnala maples 🙂

These gooseberries aren’t ripe until red.
The sprouts are growing rather well now.
So are the potatoes in the vegetable garden.
Scleroderris canker hit our prunus trees (and other trees as well) hard sometimes so this is what many of them look like now. Hard to fight as well so we either have to live with it or take anything hit by it down.

I’m even a bit hungry today so now I need to find something in the freezer, I feel that another bowl with corn flakes won’t do it today 🙂 It is almost quiet in the village, just one of the farmers driving around with a tractor. The first warm day in quite some time as well, so I’ve been sitting on the kitchen stairs with Alma a lot today, IU can’t understand how she can like it because she’s becoming really hot, heaving a lot but still won’t walk in to the shadows. Malkolm is more reasonable with that 🙂 I need to go to the supermarket tomorrow to fill up the fridge, freezer and larder. The coming week is an evening week at work and it sort of feels wrong to go on an early morning when I’ll be working until midnight.

It is time to take a look in that freezer for something to eat and I’ll also make more rose-hip soup 🙂

Have a great day!

Not the best of days today.

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He has one brown and one blue eye.

I’m feeling like sh.t today, no fever though so I hope this will be better tomorrow when I go to work. I’ve eaten lots of honey and been drinking a lot of tea but most of all I’ve been sleeping in the sofa a lot. It gets really warm when two dogs decide to share the sofa with me 🙂 🙂 🙂 No walk today but we did walk around yesterday so the photos comes from then.

Chamomile.

The road associating meeting went smooth and quickly and after that we just sat and talked. I gave up after one and a half-hour and I think the rest stayed for half an hour more. It bis a good way to learn to know other people in the village by going to these meeting even though they’re only once a year. Especially when they go as well as it did yesterday, then again one learns a lot when there are fights as well even though that was long ago that happened 🙂

Some sunshine today, some rain as well and when the sun showed it became so warm that it felt like walking in to a steam bath 🙂 🙂 The dogs have been going in and out of the cottage all day but I had to shut the kitchen door when the clouds became too thick. I’ve done my laundry and dinner is cooking in the slow cooker and today those were the shores I had to do.

I started to cut away big chunks of the Hungarian lilac yesterday. Still thick branches left but I’ll have to use a sw to get rid of those. When I had done that I realised that I could plant the potted gingko tree there. Didn’t go especially well because there weren’t a lot of roots in the pot, the tree managed to fall down leaning heavily towards one direction but a top branch is now instead pointing upwards so I just let it be as it is. Now I think I only have one red mulberry tree left to plant, five pear trees and possibly an apricot as well. I was thinking about possibly plants the trees as trellised but seed sown trees usually grow really high and there will be a lot of pruning to keep them low enough so I’m not sure but I will have that in mind when it is time.

It is time to check the dinner in the slow cooker and after that I’ll make a pot of tea 🙂

Have a great day!

My Rosemary survived the winter :-)

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My car is almost clean after all this rain we’ve had lately 🙂 and tit will stay clean for at least this week out because we’re getting more of it. It’s also still reasonable warm so the only thing that bugs me now is that mosquitoes will become many more, so far I’ve only had three of them trying to drink my blood.

The old strawberry plants flower now despite being trampled by both dogs a a little monster 🙂

Columbines comes in most shapes and colours.

We’re having our annual road association meeting this Saturday and I’m usually chosen to be the secretary of the meeting so I needed to write the meeting protocol today. Always a good thing to give angst but to my very big surprise I had already done it 🙂 🙂 Normally it is the angst that kicks me to do it, so I think I’ll do the same this year 🙂 🙂 Now days the meetings are calm but back in the days they were feeding the rage in people and a meeting could take hours, mostly because there always were people who wanted to discuss other things than the road. All of those are gone so now days a meeting usually takes fifteen minutes and after that we drink coffee and chat 🙂 🙂

A Nanking cherry and there are several more on both the bushes. Unfortunately it seems to be easily hit by different pests and my two bushes look so sad.

The first strawberry! These plants have been a bit odd since they usually only give berries in autumn, looks like that has changed now.

People are normally not interested in coming to these meetings, as long as things works and they don’t have to pay any money they just don’t care. Now we’re also having the meeting on a Saturday, the day after our national day so I doubt many will show up. Since we now days also only get our mail every second day most people doesn’t even check their mailbox more than once a week so my guess is that most people not even knows we’re having the meeting 🙂 🙂 🙂

New growth on my hardy rosemary plant! Normally rosemary plants die here if I just would think winter but this is supposed to be the hardiest there is and so it looks 🙂

Time for that last cup of tea and tomorrow is the last work day for the week. After that I’ll have one full week and the week after that a short one again because of midsummer. Midsummer eve isn’t a holiday at all but since they place it on a Friday every year and it most likely is a bigger day than Christmas Eve here and no one wants to work that day it’s treated like a holiday and we’re also getting full pay that day. I’ll write something about our folklore and traditions here that week.

Jerusalem artichoke. A beautiful but rather weedy perennial sunflower (almost if not all perennial sunflowers are weeds, spreads like wildfire to be honest). There’s only one variety that manages to flower here and it is called Bianca.
Our wild Wood even. Each flower doesn’t last for long but it keeps on making more. Unfortunately the seeds have small hooks, like velcro, so it spreads really easy. Also easy to keep control of it since it doesn’t spread via the roots.
New leafs on the Gingko.
So it is tree peony leafs that shows but I doubt it will give any flowers this year.

Have a great day!

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I found those morning mist photos in another camera after all 🙂 So this was a few days ago.

The thunderstorm that passed by was quite fierce and three lightnings hit about 1000 yards away from the cottage. My work friend who lives up on the mountain said that it was quite exciting to see all the lightnings hitting in and around my village 🙂

Yesterday and today however have been both rain and thunder free. The vegetation loves this so the grass is growing like crazy but I need more grass cuttings to cover my potatoes so for once I don’t wish we had a drought so I didn’t have to mow it 🙂 🙂 🙂

The Magpies younglings are still having around the garden but they’ve learned how to fly shorter distances now. So when dogs and cats comes close they just fly up to the top of the trees in my garden. Their parents are still pretty noisy when they think we come too close 🙂

We’ll have rather mixed weather here this week, we’ll get everything from sunshine to heavy rain and the temperature will stay just below 20C (68F) according to the weather sites.  It might even drop down to 14C (57,2F) as lowest on Saturday. That’s how summers used to be when I was a kid but nowadays that sounds awfully cold 🙂

It is time for that last cup of tea and then. watching some tv I think.

Have a great day!

It’s a bad aphid year here.

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I’ve had a really nice day, the morning was rather chilly, only 4C (39,2F) and there was a layer of clouds early showing the sun, so the first thing we did was to jump in to the car so I could deliver invitations to the road association meeting we’ll have next Saturday. We drove away at 6 am so there wasn’t a car on the roads outside the village. The castle has properties in the village so they need an invitation as well, and not a single human could be seen in the village 🙂

Alma didn’t like the drive at all even though I drove so slow that she had the time to see everything happening in the village and outside as well. It wasn’t until we came back towards home that she suddenly thought it was a good idea to take a nap in the back seat 🙂 🙂 🙂 The sun did eventually show itself and we had a really nice weather until around 5 pm when clouds arrived and rain with them. Mostly it was a nice summer rain but every now and again torrential showers passed by, I had small lakes even in my garden despite the ground mostly contains of sand.

It’s a short work week once again because we’re having our national day on June sixth. They do try to make us a bit more patriotic so that we like in so many other countries go out and celebrate it on the streets but most of us just take it easy, perhaps having a barbecue or a picnic. If we do feel like having a small celebration we’ll watch what they show on tv, there’s always some show on our PBS (the biggest network we have) where the royal family sits in the audience 🙂

It’s a bad aphid year here.

I better stop here because there’s a massive thunder front coming this way, I just heard the rumble and it’s not many km or miles away now. First thunder for the year here and I do like a good thunderstorm 🙂

Have a great day!

Been gardening a lot today.

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I woke up at 4:50 today despite staying up much later yesterday, still can’t say I feel especially tired today. We had a wonderful morning mist so I took a few photos before we had our breakfast. Oddly enough I can’t find them in my camera or in the computer?? I really don’t think that I used any other camera than the one I’ve used all day so I have absolutely no idea what happened to them 🙂 🙂 🙂

We had around thirty minutes of cloudy sky today and the rest totally cloud free. Even though it’s slightly cooler it still feels much warmer today than yesterday. No wind at all to talk about so I guess that’s why it feels so warm here. So I thought it safe to sow beans now, beans will rot if the ground temperature is too low but even though we’ll get loads of rain tomorrow afternoon we will still have warm weather. The rain is good and I will not complain as long as it is warm. I also planted three squash plants but two of them looked really sad so I think I’ll only have one left at the end of next week.

I have lots of lilacs in and around my garden and I really dislike them 🙂 🙂 When all flowers open up it’s like living in a perfume bottle and when they slowly decay the smell is so nasty that it’s hard to breathe. Too much work to remove them all though so I prefer to suffer those weeks it happens instead 🙂 🙂 I do have an Hungarian lilac though, it smell less both times but it is growing too wide now so I’ve been cutting down big chunks of it on the side towards my Pawpaw trees. I’ll do the other side when the flowering is over. It is amazing how different a garden can look just by pruning bushes and trees really hard, light reaches everywhere and new weeds finds new homes 🙂 🙂

I can finally walk this way again but so far I’ve forgotten that so I’ve taken the longer walk around it all day 🙂
This is the next area I’ll start pruning but it’s so beautiful now and when the rose flowers so that will have to wait until late summer.
The potato sprouts are growing, the higher it grows the more soil I’ll put in the bucket and then it will produce more potatoes 🙂 I’ll have three buckets with sprouts soon 🙂

It was so quiet over at my neighbours today so I thought they weren’t at home, then suddenly now in the afternoon they started to mow their lawn 🙂 🙂 The rooster over at the next neighbour has been quiet all day, very unusual so I do hope it’s ok. Normally it isn’t quiet at all and I realised that I missed it a lot 🙂 Roosters and countryside sort of goes hand in hand and when one suddenly is missing it doesn’t feel right at all. I had to leave the dogs alone for an hour today and since it worked so great to have them in the cottage while I was working I didn’t think it would be any problem by being away for such a short time. The first thing that met my eyes when I came back home again was one of my working shoes and the heel on the shoe was chewed away and Malkolm looking really ashamed 🙂 🙂 🙂 I have another pair so no big problem but these were so nice that I will miss them.

I’ll go out to the vegetable garden again after this because it is also time to sow peas and leek. I already have leek in a pot that I just brought outside so it can stay away from the sunshine for a week before I plant them somewhere but one can never have too much leek plus they can be harvested as long as the ground isn’t frozen. I’ll also sow pack-choi (Japanese kale) and broccolo, a sort of mix between broccoli and cauliflower if I understand it right. The broccolo seeds are old so I’m not sure anything will happen but I won’t know if I don’t sow them. There really is no place for either in the vegetable patch but I can get big pots to plant them in instead 🙂 Peas, I need to remember to bring the peas as well 🙂

I’ve also cut away parts of my biggest wild rose so that my little red oak gets some sunshine.

It is time to go outside to sown and I think I’ll bring a cup of tea so I can take regular breaks and not overdo my working 🙂 🙂 🙂

I have lots of creeping bellflower in my garden and they can be devastating towards other flowers. They grow so dense that no other flower can survive there. I usually dig up a big chunk of them when they become too many and pick it all up in one piece. Any tiny piece of roots that’s left will be a new flower.
The old broken wheelbarrow will be full of annuals like always. Poppies and I think clarkia seems to take over this year 🙂

Last year I bought one bood red peony and one pure white. The dogs managed to rip away the only bud on the deep red and the pure white is yellow 🙂 🙂 To be honest I could have gotten something much more valuable because it does look like a Golden peony, nicknamed Molly the witch because of a part of its scientific namemlokosewitschii 🙂

Have a great day!

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The sun is shining, a few clouds flies in the sky and both windows and doors are open 🙂 It has been like this all day but a low pressure is on its way with more rain but not especially much of it. Today the temperature reached above 20C (68F) and that’s summer temperature for me.

Alma behaved really well on our morning walk today and was almost quiet when we passed the new neighbours, both of the way out and when we were going back home again. Ok no human or dog was outside but for being Alma she was really good 🙂 We didn’t see any birds but sure heard them all the walk. Cranes and geese from a distance and all the small birds close in the trees and shrubs. I think we passed lots of interesting animals on the way because both Alma and Malkolm were really interested in what was hiding behind the trees.

We always have lots of morning dew here so my shoes and socks were soaking wet when we came back home 🙂 The shoes are now standing towards the cottage wall drying up in the sunshine. I’ve also mowed the lawn and all grass cuttings were placed around the potatoes so I don’t have to hill up the soil around them. The grass clipping’s will decompose with time so I need to place more around them a few more times while mowing. I think it will be time to sow beans, peas and cabbage this weekend plus what ever I might have seeds for in the space that might be empty.

It is time for a pot of tea and then I’ll bake a bread again. I’ll add rosemary of course and some cheese as well if I have any small piece in the fridge.

Have a great day!

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I think we’ve had really beautiful weather here today. Sunshine and warm when I drove to work, I think it was cloudy during our breaks but it was warm and now sunshine and warm again. Tomorrow will be sunny and warm until the night when more rain will come for a visit. Friday rainy again but since I work I really don’t mind 🙂

Chamomile.
We call this flower for Dog biscuits but I have absolutely no idea why 🙂 It is a close relative to the parsnip and can be eaten as such as well. The problem is that almost at the same time it flowers a few other that look almost the same flowers as well and those can be highly poisonous.

We met one of our new neighbours when we walked down to the creek after I had come home after work and Alma was only her insane self, so with other words so much calmer than when we met the puppies 🙂 She behaved really well the en tire walk after that though and that seems to be the norm now. Well if something moves or she think it will move or a bird burp she will be slightly crazy for a few seconds but then calms down again 🙂 🙂

Tomorrow is a holiday here but I’ll work on Friday as usual. Some people will have the Friday off but from what I understand they’re not as generous with giving time off as they were at my previous work place. We have loads to do though so that is something I fully can understand. I’ve always liked when I have one day off in the middle of the week because then the rest of what’s left of the work week feels quite good to work at. Sort of a mini vacation 🙂 🙂 🙂

I think it is time to have a cup of tea, after all I don’t have to get up really early tomorrow so it doesn’t matter if I can’t fall asleep as soon as I lay my head on the pillow like I usually do. I remember when  first realised that if I had a cup of tea or coffee after a certain time in the afternoon I then would have problems falling asleep. It happened from one day to the next, the day before I fell asleep like always the next I was awake so long that I only had two hours of sleep, thankfully it happened on a Friday evening 🙂

My new neighbours ponies, so beautiful.

Carrots and beetroots growing fine beside the strawberries.

Have a great day!

 

I don’t complain about the weather sites got it wrong :-)

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We were supposed to have rain and strong winds today so I’m not surprised that we had a lot off sunshine and sort of half strong winds 🙂 Couldn’t notice much in the garden though since the winds came from south.

I wonder what they use this for? I thought it looked like a piece of art but I’m sure they have a more practical use for it 🙂

So the dogs, cat and I spent a lot of time in the garden today, the dogs playing like crazy and the cat running up to them so they would chase her 🙂 I spent a lot of time cutting of dead branches from bushes and trees and also got attacked by small black ants, it never hurts when those black ants attacks (the small red ones though is a totally different thing, that hurts like h..l 🙂 🙂 🙂 Still it took hours to get rid of all of them since they were crawling all over my body 🙂 They lives in a pot whee I tossed away the dead plant and since I had no idea they lived there they managed to run over to me in rather big numbers before I noticed them 🙂 🙂

It was a bit warmer today because of the sunshine, sort of perfect this time of year, not too warm so one could do some gardening but not so cold that one wanted to go inside to have a pot of tea. I’ve also pulled up a lot of weeds from places where I didn’t want them to grow, normally they’re quite welcome here if they flower a lot so that the bees get lots of nectar from them but if they grow where I don’t want them they’ll have to go, if not for any other reason than that snails and slugs love to live there.

I’m baking a bread right now and everything would be good if I just had remembered to start the timer 🙂 🙂 It looks nice in colour but I put a tooth pick in it and it felt a bit too damp, then again it might have been a prefect bread since I did put a lot of cheese in it and therefore it should feel like that sort of 🙂 🙂 I put a lot of rosemary in it and the small is filling the entire cottage. Talking about rosemary, the extra hardy one I planted in the garden has actually survived winter and is now producing new shoots 🙂 Still tiny but I can see them now. This is an American variety and I’ve forgotten the name 🙂 🙂 I have also forgotten from whom I bought it so I can’t get the name from the seller either 🙂 🙂

I just went down to the oven and checked, I’ve shut it off and will let the bread stand there for five more minutes, the cooler of it says it should be ready by then. Even though I did enjoy working the evening shift I still don’t think it is worth it. I was really tired all Friday long even though I did lots of things during the day and I’m still tired today. I’ll probably be back to normal tomorrow so I’ll be fit for fight for work on Monday. I’m an extreme morning person, goes to bed at nine pm and up around 4:30 am the day after, changing sleeping hours even though just four hours later does cost me a lot but thankfully this will only happen every fourth week.

New leafs on the Pawpaw trees

and on the ginkgos as well.

It is time to go downstairs again to pick out the bread so wish me luck that it is ready 🙂 🙂

Have a great day!

The first evening was quite ok.

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The first day at the evening shift yesterday and I have to say it wasn’t that bad with the hours, I am however not so sure I’ll feel the same on Thursday night 🙂 🙂

Both today and yesterday have been wonderful summer days, just above 20C (68F), almost no wind and sunshine all day. This will shift tomorrow, chilly weather is on the way and tomorrow won’t be that bad but on Friday we’ll only have 5C (41F) as warmest. The temperatures will rise slowly after that but the entire weekend is supposed to be rainy. I don’t mind the rain but those temperatures after having summer is just nasty 🙂 🙂

My left hand is itching and stings a lot after I put my hand in stinging nettles. Normally I wouldn’t do that but I planted a potted sand cherry tree in the garden and there were lots of smaller nettles in I didn’t see and when I tried to remove them it only went worse. Sand cherry tree are not growing upwards like most trees but along the ground but the trick is to let it grow some before planting it so one can plant it upright. That way it is easier to not mow off the branches and it is so much easier to pick the cherries if one get the chance before the birds do it 🙂 🙂

It is time for a pot of tea and most likely something to eat. I might even have a nap with a timer on because one never knows for how long that nap might become 🙂

I’ve mowed this sand cherry tree too often now so it was time to plant it. It becomes quite high when forcing it to grow upwards 🙂

Have a great day!

I can hear a gentle rain hitting my windows.

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The day has been really nice despite the sun quite early hid behind clouds. Still strong winds but fairly warm. It’ll get chilly on Wednesday and a few days more but it’s too early to say anything about the weather so long ahead. I mean sometimes they can’t even say what weather we’re having without getting it wrong 🙂 🙂 🙂 At the moment though I can hear a gentle rain hitting my windows.

Some trees, like the oaks, just doesn’t care if summer starts at new year, they start when they normally do every year.

We saw another deer today and Alma actually behaved pretty well, normally she’s all over the place when she see deer but this time she just stayed excited but nothing more. I had brought an older camera with me and after a while I realised that I didn’t have any film in it 🙂 🙂 🙂 I’m pretty sure all those photos I took while walking in the forest would have been masterpieces 🙂 🙂 🙂

I’ve also mowed the lawn. At first I was going to start hilling the potatoes but since all my composts now are full I instead decided that I would cover the potatoes with the grass cuttings. It makes the plant grow potatoes along the stems but also fertilises the soil when the grass slowly decompose. I’ll keep on doing that every time I’ll cut the grass. Plus it is time to start spreading all that compost as well, No meaning having composts if I don’t use it 🙂

I’ve also baked a bread so now I can have a fresh sandwich while watching the Eurovision final. I did have a nap while sitting in the recliner but I feel that I most likely should have had an even longer nap, right now it feels like I’m not going to make it through the show that ends around midnight. I really need to though since I’ll be working until midnight next week. I better start checking what’s moving around in the garden at night, yesterday Alma chased away a poor animal, most likely a cat but it did sound heavier so it might have been a fox.

It is time for a cup of tea, perhaps that will help me to stay awake tonight 🙂 :-)it does when I don’t want it too though 🙂 🙂

Have a great day!

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Still very windy with northern winds but today they were almost lukewarm. We only work to 2:30 pm on Fridays so I had the chance to experience it for a while 🙂 We walked down to the creek and thankfully the winds were so strong that the forest flies never came to us.

I had forgotten to buy toothpaste and a toothbrush yesterday when I was at the store so I had to make a stop at the smaller grocery store in Gudhem. They only had toothbrushes for kids 🙂 but any toothbrush is better than none 🙂 I’ll get a bigger one next time I’ll go to the supermarket. I was supposed to work overtime tomorrow but they had missed that lots of people at work are going out to have fun tonight so they had to cancel it. I must admit that I’m quite happy that they did, it’s one thing to say ok on Monday because one never knows how tired one will be on Friday evening 🙂 🙂

I’ll work the evening shift next week and it’s a long time since I did that. It usually messes up the sleep for a while but since this only will happen every three weeks I’ll take it without complaining, at first they said it would be every second week. It would have worked for a while but I’m pretty sure it would have been too much in the long run. When one need a job one has to take what one gets 🙂 I have had another call from a staffing agency but I really like this place so I didn’t answer the call.

I often get the question if it isn’t scary to work with coffins all over the factory but it’s just like working with boxes to be honest. I guess there’s just too much of them. The only time it gets a bit sad is when one need to pass the coffins for children. Especially the tiny ones but thankfully they work with them in a part of the factory we seldom pass.

It is time to have that last cup of tea, today I need to start wit being up late so it won’t be a shock for the body on Monday 🙂 Also later breakfast tomorrow and dinner tomorrow as well.

Have a great day!