Sorry!

I´m not posting anything but this today. My computer gave up and I have been forced toreformat the hard disk and now I just hate it! I feel better when I´ve gotten everything right again, but that will take at least a day or so :-)
Have a great day now!
Christer.

This is all sunshine we got yesterday. Ten minutes sunset :-)

We haven´t been on any morning walk yet and won´t be either for yet a couple of hours I guess. The rain is pouring down, the winds are strong and it´s only 10,4C (50,9F) outside. According to the weather forcast it won´t get much warmer today either. But it will become warmer already tomorrow when the sun will entre the stage once again.

I almost ordered  a new camera on the web yesterday. I was just a second away to push the order button when I changed my mind :-) I will most probably buy it, but I do think I at least should take a look at it in real life too. It´s a Nikon D3000 and since it does cost around 4400 sweish kronor (that would be around 583 US dollars) I think it´s best that I do know what I´m buying :-) :-) But I´ve read all rewievs about it and all seemes to like it rather well, but that doesn´t mean I will.

There are lots of raspberries in the forest now. Unfortunally ten million flies is so annoying that I really don´t want to stay and pick them.

The crab apple tree outside the dogyard is full of apples. My dogs loves to eat them.

I´ll gets lots of apples in my garden too. But everything is very late here this year, these should be ripe by now.

So I´ll phone the store later today and ask if they have any comming customers can try in the store, because they dont have them in stock there. If they have one I´ll drive there on Monday and then You´ll all see some photo´s from Lidköping on tuesday.

All three flowers here are of the same kind, just different colors.

But for now I´ll just wash my dishes and take it easy for a while. But now I´ll make a pot of tea and then it´ll be morning tv I think.

Have a great day now!

It´s cloudy and cold here today, even now around 10:40am the temperature hasn´t reached 14C (57F), but it is actually rather nice now after the heat wave we´ve had. As long as it doesn´t stay like this too long. The flies stays calm too and that´s a plus :-) I know that I am a bit obsessed by the flies, but as You know we do have some here :-) :-)

Bittersweet.

I drove to Skara and the big supermarket there shortly after our morning walk. I had forgotten to buy most of what I needed yesterday when I was at the grocery store in Gudhem :-) :-) This time I actually brought the list I´d made and didn´t buy anything else than what was on it. Well that´s a bit of a lie because I bought a small pakage of mixed nuts and dried fruits too. A nice little snack while driving I thought. You could think that they would make this little bag easy to open up so You actually can get to the mix. But how wrong You would be then :-) :-) I pulled every corner, I tried to rip it open and i even used my teeth to get the contents of the little bag. The plastic looked untouched and I was exhausted, so I used all my strength one more time and guess what! The little bag sort of exploded! I didn´t eat much of it, it gets a bit unpleasant when it falls all over the floor and back part of the car where my dogs are when following me around.

I´m not that a big fan of daylilies, but I do have a couple of  them. This yellow bought as "Stella Dóro" and

this one that is an Tawny Daylily (Brunröd daglilja), Hemerocallis fulva. I have one more but it almost never flowers, perhaps it´s time to move it to another place?

Today is a clean up day. One of my aunts comes to visit tomorrow and I have to get rid of all newspapers lying around, put the books back where they belong and vacume the floors. My dogs are always shedding their fur and it isn´t especially nice to walk around in all that hair. My electric stove has to be cleaned as well. Not because I´ve used it, not at all. It´s because I never use it that it has to be cleaned. Having a fire heated stove is perfect except for the fact that there is a lot of ashes spread in tne kitchen. That happens when the hatch is opened so I can put in more fire logs. If the surface isn´t touched it looks rather clean, but as soon as the surface gets touched You have no troubles seeing that it actually is quite filthy :-) :-)

Skara Cathedral. Skara is over thousand years old and i guess some of this church is also.

The old library.

And the new one. I do prefere the looks of the old one :-)

But for now I´ll settle for a nice cup of tea and then I´ll start reading on the second book about Winnie the Pooh and his friends :-)

Have a great day now!

This has at least been a gallery, but it doesn´t look like it´s used like that now.

This house has two dates on its walls. I think that the oldest part was built 1787 and then over hundred years after they built the new part 1913 in the exact same style. That would never happen today. Skara is still one of those twons where they stops and talks to people and waves to those they know driving by in their cars. It´s a rather nice little town to be honest.

The old railroad station. There are still some tracks behind it used by a railroad museum. Nowdays it´s used as a bust station and there is also a sandwich shop. They make so nice subways :-)

It rains outside, sometimes a nice drizzle sometimes a bit more heavy showers. I realised that we need the rain much more than I thought. When I made the small place for my potatoes I realized that the ground was totally dry just a couple of centimeters (an inch) down. As I wrote, my garden soil contains mostly of sand so it dries out fast. The funny thing is that just some meters (some yards) outside my garden its a totally different soil in the ground. The bog starts just behind my garage and it´s almost never completely dry there.

The morning walk was so pleasant that I almost totally forgot to take any photo´s :-) But I have around 200 photo´s You haven´t seen yet, so I just use some of them today :-)

This will be a day of relaxation I feel. I´ll go to the grocery store in Gudhem and perhaps I´ll drive in to Falköping too. I´ve seen ads in the papers and here on the internet that there are many cameras for sale now. It would be fun to get a more advanced one but even on sales they do cost a lot.

I think it´s almost seven years since I could see my patio from the garden :-) It´s been covered by honeysuckle and a climbing rose (with lots and lots of really sharp and big thorns).  I haven´t gotten rid of the roots of those yet and that´ll be a nasty job. My dead nectarine tree is still standing there too, but I think I´ll let it stay and plant a clematis or two by its side. If You look on the pillar furthest away You can see my Frost grape vine. Now it´s supposed to take the place where the honeysuckle and rose has had.

I´ve always loved Minolta´s cameras, but now I´ve heard that that company doesn´t exist any more! So I´ve been looking at some different Cannons and Nikons instead. But even on sales they cost around 4600 swedish kronor (that would be around 614 US dollars) That´s almost a third of what I get payed a month from work after taxes :-) :-) I really don´t need a new camera to be honest, but what does need have to do with anything :-) :-) :-)

Iliamna remota, Kankakee mallow. It´s very rare and grows only in a small place in Illinois and nowhere else (in the wild that is). Seemes to love it here in my garden too. I never see any seeds, but still I have small seedlings in the flowerbed.

Kitaibelia vitifolia, Vine-leaved Kitabelia. A Mallow relative that also seemes to like it in my garden.

So I guess I´ll just drive home after Gudhem and continue to read Winnie the Pooh. I always read those books when my vacation starts. Sort of puts things in perspective if You know what I mean, because those books shows what´s really important in life. Cameras doesn´t exist in them at all :-) :-)

Lady bells.

Well it´s time for breakfast and a cup of tea. Teodor and Bertil is sleeping beside my feet and all dogs sleeps in my livingroom. Perhaps I´ll join them in a nap too :-)

Have a great day now!

The red morning sky says it´s going to be rainy today.

And so does the red sun.

It was a hot but rather nice day yesterday, as long as the sun stayed behind the clouds that is. As soon as it showed itself the nice breeze we´ve had dissapered and the heat struck at full power. The flies got nuts and I could feel tension was building up in the air. So I wasn´t the least surprised when thunder could be heard from a distance. By the time I went to bed the thunder had placed itself right above my little cottage. But it was a nice kind of thunder. The lightning mostly flew between the clouds and the rumble sort of friendly and low voiced.

This morning started out real warm and the sky became all red for a couple of minutes when the sun started to rise. I can feel tension is building up again and they have more or less promised thunder today too. Most flies seemes to have dissapered along our morning walk road (I walk the same road every day now since I pick up my newspaper on the way home). I think it has to do with the fact that they have cut down most of the grass on the fields now, to make silage from it. Now they have no place to hide and seek shelter in when weather gets bad. I have to say that I don´t feel sorry for them :-) :-) But with my luck they´ll probably just move to my garden instead :-) :-)

This butterfly has the same brown color on both sides of its wings. Not the most colorful one but it is rather pretty.

Potatoes, what can I tell You about potatoes? Lots actully but most of it is rather boring to be honest. The potatoe had troubles being popular here in Europe in the beginning. No one liked the taste and in the begining they tried to use it as an ingredient when baking bread. It didn´t even become popular when they discovered that one could distill it and make alcohol from it :-) :-) We had to have famine 1771-1772 to make people grow it here.

Geese moving back south.

I went down to the lake yesterday and this is the creek You normally can see on my photo´s but here closer to the lake.

You can´t see much of the lake now since it is very shallow and the vegetation is thick in it.

There are actually several species of potatos, especially grown in Peru. Some need short days to make potatoes others long days. Some can be storaged for months others not even a day until they start growing again. But what ever species one grows it is a nutricious part in a dinner. Sweet potatoe is not a potatoe at all! It is a relative to the Morning glory and can´t be grown here in the north due to the fact it needs lots more sun and heat than it can get here. Some however uses it in big pots and if the pot is placed in a calm, warm and sunny spot it happens that it flowers.

Yellow water lily.

Bjurums church and the old village school.

This old shed belonged to a yellow house that stood abandoned here for several years. The hous is torn down, but the shed still stands.

Well the rain has started to fall and all my animals are sleeping all around my home, so I think it´s time for another cup oif tea and perhaps some breakfast.

Have a great day now!

I removed the lawn on a spot beside my pond. This area is going to be covered with a ground carpet later on anyway. This is about one yard long and almost as wide. Just enough place for one potatoe or maybe two.

I had actually forgotten about my potatoes :-) but found them two days ago. As You can see the sprouts already has the beginning of roots and that is actually all You need. If I had done this earlier in the year and the sprouts had been longer I could have removed theese sprouts from the potatoe and placed them in small pots. They´ll start growing rather fast and can then be planted in the ground. This however takes longer time and they are a bit sencitive in the beginning.

But since I´m a bit late planting theese I´ll do it the old sibirian way. People that were moved to sibiria usually had very little food as it was, so they couldn´t just plant many potatoes in the ground. So they cut out about 1x1 cm (1 cm would be around a bit more that 1/3 of an inch) around the sprout and planted it. The rest of the potatoe then could be eaten. If You plant one small potatoe You´ll get a few but big potatoes when You harvest them. If You plant one big You get many small instead. 

Since I had several potatoes to choose from I cut out the best bits from them. But this is more or less around one potatoe. The  potatoe piece placed by itself is a bit bigger than the others. I want to see if that size difference makes any difference in how many potatoes I´ll get from it.

I´ve placed these potatoes a bit to close to be honest, but then again I don´t have to survive on what I harvest. As You can see the soil is very light in color when comparing it to the soil closer to the pond (the top of this photo). It contains almost only of sand, perfect for potatoes but difficult otherwise.

The ground was quite dry despite of all rain that has been falling, so I watered it quite a lot. After watering I used a rake to make the surface rough. A rough surface contains the moisture much, much better than a smooth one. Since I planted these  potatoes this late I´ll most probably won´t get fruits on them. You know the green "tomatoes" the potatoe plant produces. It can be fun to sow the seeds in them because You´ll never know what kind of potatoe You´ll get. They can be blue, red, clear yellow or even black :-) :-) and some of them keep their color after being cooked. All are edible but some will perhaps not taste that well. Just note this! If You sow potatoes some may be more sencitive to some unpleasant potatoe diseases You don´t want in Your garden. One more thing!! Never keep tomatoes and potatoes close together, not even bits of them!! They will only give each other different diseases and there will be no crop of either tomatoes or potatoes!!

Finished! Did You know that You don´t have to dig down the potatoes? We all know that potatoes kept in the sun will become green and poisouness but still You can grow them above ground. Just put the potatoes on the ground and cover them with black plastic. Only make a small hole where the green vegetation can come up. No sun or daylight is allowed to come under the plastic!!! When it is time to harvest, just remove the plastic and You´ll have nice clean potatoes :-) You can also cover the ground with a thick (around 40cm, that would be around 12 inches) layer of straw (put the potatoes on the ground first though). Walk around on the straw (but avoid the potatoes :-) :-)  ) so that it won´t allow any daylight benieth it and water a lot on it. The vegetation will still be able to grow through it. When it´s time to harvest just lift the straw and You´ll have nice clean potatoes. When You´re finished just dig down the straw in the ground, You´ll have perfect soil for other crops next year.