We took a walk in the forest this morning - in the pouring rain. I don't remember ever walking in the rain in February in Finland. Very strange. In some places the forest is so green you find yourself bending down to look for mushrooms! But there are none. Not at this time of the year! In other places the snow comes past your knees and there are tracks clearly visible: raccoon dogs, rabbits, deer. An elk crossed the path in front of us just as we were nearing the back field. He wasn't in a hurry. Meantime, on the back field...
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Peter and Fredrik spent several hours clearing felled alder from the back field hampered by about 30 cm of fresh powdery snow that even the Land Rover struggled to deal with. In the end Peter ploughed a road to the logs and left it to freeze overnight. Then on Monday he managed to get the Avant up there and pulled to logs out of the field and onto the trailer. This time of year the ground should be as frozen and solid as a rock but that hasn't happened so manoeuvring the machinery in the soggy bits is pretty difficult.
We talked a bit about the visakoivu. The plantations are now 15 years old so we should be thinking about spacing out the trees which involves felling some of them. We will probably call in an expert to give us some advice. Lots and lots of small birds - the nesting boxes looked fully occupied. Yes, we do have oak trees in Finland, mostly in the south. These photos were taken this weekend in Fiskars. The area is well known for its oak trees. The municipality is trying to re-establish the oak woods in the area: the woods which established themselves after the Ice Age were decimated several hundred years ago through shipbuilding and iron ore smelting when the town was an active industrial centre.
Pretty colours in Rosendal.
Not many trumpet chanterelles yet. Peter found a few but I think we'll have to be patient - maybe we need another frosty night or two before they really get going. We watched a big black woodpecker climb up one of the pine trees. He was making a huge din, frightening off a lot of the smaller birds. Not so many chanterelles but a great year for ceps (boletus). We had a risotto al funghi tonight with forest mushrooms.
Wet and windy weather on its way so I decided to improve the wind breaker around the red birch tree. The winds off the sea are funnel up the Pojo fjord and come straight through our area. When the tree is a bit bigger and stronger we will be able to take the wind breaker away. I think we will also build up a natural wind breaker of red alder on the lake shore.
A few weeks ago we read an article in the local Espoo newspaper about a birch tree in Matinkyla (near where we live) which had mysteriously turned red. No one is quite sure why this happens, Our own tree comes from a wild birch tree like the one in Matinkyla which morphed into a red birch. It is quite a rare occurrence. The rowan trees (pihlaja in Finnish) are covered in berries. They are yet to turn bright red though. The trees are short of water and the leaves are already turning brown. This tree is on the sandy moraine ridge behind the cabin, which is a sun trap. There is a saying in Finnish that rowan trees never carry two loads: either lots of berries or lots of snow. So, plenty of berries means we are in for only moderate snowfall- Alnus glutinosa - the black alder likes to grow with it's roots in water so we have quite a lot of them down by the lake and along the shoreline. We also have a plantation of them behind the back field on the northern edge of our plot in an area which is very damp. They are amazing trees which are quite attractive, staying green well into the autumn and producing tiny little cones (green in this picture I took this morning). T The sheep love to eat the leaves which is fine as the alder throws up suckers everywhere and we have to cut them back. The black alder has many medicinal uses and the wood makes beautiful furniture, turning an earthy pink colour as it matures. I picked almost a bucketful of bilberries in the forest today and this evening I cleaned them and rinsed them - next stop the freezer: they freeze very well. Fredrik wants to make blueberry muffins tomorrow so we'll do that when it starts raining. I also found a handful of chanterelles so P & I had a mushroom omelette for lunch - first one this year. Excellent. Back-breaking day though: picking bilberries is not my favourite occupation.
Peter said, "Why do you call them bilberries and not blueberries?" so I explained that, strictly speaking, the wild ones are called bilberries in Europe and blueberries are the US species but they are related. Wikipedia gives more details. We do have a few blueberry bushes in the vegetable garden but they have only just flowered. The fruits are twice the size of the wild bilberries and the flavour is more intense. This morning I picked one litre of wild bilberries in the forest, washed and froze them. I think I'll probably wait a couple of days before I pick some more as these were only just ripe and quite small. The red sieve is used for shaking off the leaves that inevitably get caught up in the combs when we're picking them. |