Frost!

I looked at the thermoteter when I got up this morning and got a bit surprised. Only 2C (36F). But I have to say that it felt much colder when I opened the door so my dogs could walk out. Wha I forgot was that the heat censor hang towards the wall that still was a bit warm since yesterday. I realised that when I saw the windows on my car. They were covered with thick solid ice!

So I bade farewell to my tomato plants when I came home today after work and picked those tomatoes I think has a chance to becoe red and ripe. Then I looked at my potatoes and I think I´ll have to say farewell to them too. If they go under I´ll check if they had managed to make new potatoes, but I´ll give them some days more before i do that. It is at least one week to early for frost here. I do hop this isn´t a sign of a cold and awful winter!

I tasted that little apple I showed You yesterday and I have to say it tasted delicious!! But all of those apples are more or less destroyed by worms I´m afraid. To bad they are so small, not even an inch wide :-) :-) but if one has twenty or more of them they will be as much as a ordinary apple I think :-)

Tese three photos shows Toadstools.

No fire in the stove today, the sun has shined all day so it is actually a bit warm inside. But I will ofcourse make atleast one pot of tea and then I´ll wander out into cyberspace to visit You all!

Have a great day now!

I thought it was time for You all to learn some more swedish now. It´s very simple like these two videos sows :-) If I understand it correctly there are more episodes if You like to see them :-)
Christer.

Autumn.

Perhaps I should make myself an autumn wreath this year. I have plenty of these big rosehips and I can pick some acorns in the forest. I haven´t done any since I closed my gardencentre/nursery so perhaps it´s about time now.

The sun is shining and it is 14C (57F) outside. Autumn is here for sure now. They say it will become warmer again and that the rain will keep away this week. I love cool mornings but I´m not that fond of cold mornings and that is waht we have now. It was 5C (41F) this morning and I guess that the first night with frost comes next week or so. If it doesn´t the autumn usually gets long and warm. I do hope for that!

I sowed a seed from a Paradise apple nine years ago and this year the first fruits showed. If I remember correctly the apple I took the seds from were bright red, this looks more like a normal apple, but very tiny. I think I´ll try to eat one of them :-)

When I go to the store I almost always pay with my bank card, if I have money on me I always spend them to fast :-) So naturally I didn´t have any money on me when I went to the grocery store in Gudhem when I went there yesterday. I´m really glad that they know me there because they card system didn´t work. The lightning had struck several times when we got that storms on Saturday and their internet connection had died totally. It didn´t work again until it was time to close for the day. We do live in a very wounerable world these days. If internet goes nothing works :-) :-)

One of the species of Katydids we have here. This one looks much like a gigant grasshopper, but we have those looking a bit like aliens too :-) :-)

The common red toadstool. We call them Fly musrooms, I think we do that because they made a fly poisson from it bac in the days. This i also the mushroom the vikings mixed in their mead. After that they wn berserk. Well they didn´t have tv so what should they do on a saturday evenig :-) :-) :-)

Bertil ha decided that he wanted to go out to an island in the bog on this little bridge that Yu hardly can see because of the high water level. I told him it was a bad idea for such a tiny cat.

He stood there for quite some time until he decided I probably was right. He weighs only four pounds after all :-)

For once I have lots of time today. I went from work two hours earlier than usual (so I could go to the store and pay my bill) and it feels like I have had the whole day off :-) :-) My dogs and I was trying a part of the forest we´ve never been in before, but all rain we´ve had lately made it feel like we were going in a swamp. So we went back to our usual areas but it wasn´t much better there to be honest. But who am I to complain really. Thousands of people are drowning all around the world just because thet have got so much more rain than we have.

Now there´s a fire in the stove and a pot of tea by my side. Well it´s to much to say that there´s a fire in the stove. For some reason the fire log won´t burn especially good. It sort of only glows. I think that the firelog is to dense so the fire just stays on the surface. The quality can vary quite much between different brands.
Have a great day now!

No I haven´t forgotten :-) You have to click on this photo to make it bigger to see her, our little doe tha always stands on the same place every morning when we take our walk. I´ve never seen her here before so perhaps that was why I didn´t see her until ater I took this photo. 

There´s a fire burning in my stove and I have a hot cup of tea by my side. It is really cold outside today (only 5c, 41F) and it started already yesterday afternoon. The day had been rather nice with some sunshine, little wind and some raindrops now and again. But then it started.

The thunderclouds are building up already now in the early morning.

I think that the property that this barn belongs to (this is the one I´ve shown You before) is sold now. I´ve seen cars there every morning when I drive to work and I saw a little boy, seven or eight years ol the other day whe I came home.

 

I was looking at TV when I heard a sound that I thought was my neighbors V8 engine. So I didn´t care much about it. Not until the sky became so dark that I had to turn on some lights and the first lightning went through my telephone :-) (it is a miracle that the telephone works as it is since so many lightning has gone through it. But it is an old time telephone and they can take almost anything).

It didn´t rain at first so I thought that we might be on the edge of the storm. Thinking that, the rain started. The rainfall was so strong that I thought the road might be damaged by it. After ten minutes of heavy showers the hail came. Within a minute the temperature dropped to 45F (7C).

It went on for at least half an hour and after I went out to see what had been damaged. I think my tomatoeplants are dead now, they look anything but healthy. So I brought some of the green tomatoes with me inside to let them ripe in my kitchen window.

There´s actually a deer in this photo. Can You find it :-) I almost didn´t and I knew it was there :-) :-)

Potatoes are stronger ( they can actually survive in the ground in mild winters) but they too looked really sad. But looking at them today now when the sun reaches them I think they might make it. It was when I was looking at the potatoes that I remembered that I had my Cattleya orchids on the entrance stairs. Yesterday I thought they would die for sure, but today it looks as if they are alive, but very damaged.

My dogs and I walked in to the forest and out towards the bog later that evening. The ice was melting slowly, making mist rise from the ground. Not a sound could be heard except for some migrating geese up in the air. The temperature had dropped some more and I realized that I had way to little clothes on me. But not a single mosquito or fly flew around anyone of us :-) Hector, that thinks everything above 10C (50F) is way to hot really enjoyed our walk.

Now the sun is shining but I have already seen more thunderclouds close to the village. I don´t mind the thunder but I would appreciate if the hail could fall somewhere else :-)

Have a great day now!

 

It came smoke from all chimneys in the village shortly after the temperature drop.

 

Do You all know that we nowdays have a "Junk comment file" here om Blogger? I didn´t and now I realised that Beatrice had left a comment that got stuck there. I did wonder where that comment went, because I had read it in my mail :-) :-) So Beatrice! I just answered that comment You made on August 9 (You can find it under "It´s pitch black" on the sidebar). If You didn´t know that just look under the headline Comments on the place You write the blog.

I forgot to turn of my alarm clock yesterday evening so my dogs and I got up before 5am as usual. Since they were awake I thought it was best to let them out to do what they need to do and after that there was no use getting back to bed again. I normally wake up around that time anyway, but it´s always better to wake up without the help of an alarm clock.

My neighbours new garage for his two tractors. One of them stands in front of it here, do You think it will fit or does he has to make the garage a bit bigger :-) :-) :-)

It was a quiet morning, like it always is on a Saturday and I could hear a dog bark, probably from a farm on the mountain some miles away. Most of the fog had risen to the sky but some still lingered on the mountin sides. We have a doe that always is on the same place every morning when we take our morning walk. She´s rather young and the first times she saw us she jumped away in panik. Nowdays she barly strolls lazily away some yards and looks at us. Soon she won´t even do that :-) :-) I took a photo of her the other day, but I´m afraid I delelted it minutes ago.

If You click on this photo to make it bigger (something You can do on all photos) You´ll see the smoke comming out of my chimney.

Today will be a day dedicated to lazyness. I´ll replants some cuttings I have on my patio, open up some or all of those kernels I found in the Donut peaches/nectarines and sow them in moist paper towels and later put them in the fridge, read some and look at the Finn Struggle on tv. For those of You that don´t know what the Finn Struggle is I can tell you that it is the worlds oldest competition in Athletics between two countries. Sweden and Finlad meet every year since long ago in a battle where no one is above cheating to win :-) :-) It has happened that all competitors has been disqualified during a race :-) :-) I missed it yesterday because I sat here writing and reading blogs :-) But today I´ll make a pot of tea and watch it.

All the little black dots that You can see on the cable are swallows waiting for the insects to start flying around in the air.

I started a fire in the kitchen stove for the first time this season too this morning. It wasn´t especially cold inside to be honest, but all the rain that we´ve had has med the air a bit to humid even inside. So now my home is a bit to warm but it feels so much nicer when the air is dry. I think I´ll even open up my bedroom window again. It has been closed since the almost storm we had some days ago.

The weather forcast says that we will have some rain and some sunshine today, quite normal weather here for this season. But I wouldn´t mind if we got it a bit more dry here now. Just so that most of the deep holes and small ponds in the bog dries out for a while. That would most probably kill most of the fly and mosquitoe larvaes that needs water to survive and that would make next summer so much nicer :-)
Have a great day now!

Sulphur tuft, Hypholoma fasciculare. Beautiful but nothing You want to eat. People that has done that may die. It looks very much like an edible mushroom but is said to taste bitter.