LEMONDE, SYRUPS, JUICE AND ALL THAT

 I picked most of the rhubarb before midsummer already; jammed, juiced, pied and froze in. Now I made a last batch of syrup of what was left of it in the garden. At the same time I did a set of summer lemonade, the one with black currant leaves.

 Dag was very eager to help picking the rhubarb. It's fun now that he is so big he can almost really be of help. Well he did pull all of the staves out from the bucket afterwards, but kindly out them back after I told him to. He probably would have repeated the procedure over and over again wold I not ave been finished with the gathering after that.

 Earlier I made syrup the plain way by boiling the fruit (or, herb or vegetable or what it was now again that rhubarb was classified as) and then filtering it and heating it up again with sugar. This time I made the other version of just pouring boiled water on a mix of rhubarb, lemon and some tartaric acid and let it stay for three days, after which I added sugar and set it to boil, the same with the black currant leaves.

 On the last day of letting it soak I put in some mint from the garden too.

I fill up a few bottles to drink at once but put the rest in the freezer, to enjoy later. It's also good to pack along for a picnic or a longer trip away - a bottle of frozen syrup or lemonade in the picnic or grocery bag doubles as a cooler as well.

PAIRS IN COLOUR

 Green & orange.

 Purple & yellow.

Red & blue.

IN AND AROUND THE EVENING GARDEN

There are lots of flowers blooming here and there in my garden. I mostly let them tend to themselves.

So things get a little wild, but that's OK. Here we have a mix of (edible) weeds (edible and healthy, what a great excuse to just keep them there!). strawberries, chive and parsley. Plus some random flowers that have found their way there trough the wind.

 

The garden is very well set originally though, by Eddi's grand-aunts and parents. There is always something blooming and when those flowers have faded the next ones are on their way.

 My little gardener.

Saying good night to the lambs.

Brothers and farmers. Talking farm stuff.

 

I love these light nordic summer nights - it's past eleven int the evening when I took this photo!

THE PARTY

Last week Eddi turned a big even number and we celebrated that during the weekend.
(It's funny btw how you one day realize you start being the same age as your parents! Or,  you think you are ; I always think of my parents as in their forties but, well, obviously they are not anymore.)

Quite suitably summer decided on kicking in at the right moment.

The party was put together of old things on the farm, wagons as tables, old buckets etc.


And we finally got around hanging up a hammock-chair that was waiting last year already. (Having a lot of people over is always a good way to have to tick things of your to-do list...) Summer chill points to the max!

Birthday boy and BBQ master with his home made smokers.

Another bbq-boy; my brother-in-law. Not the first time he and Eddi turn up as accidental textile twins, and probably not the last either.

My sister with K and their big bellies.

The "how to pose for photos" one finger test. Cheese!

Obviously I didn't go for it in this one.
I'm wearing a kind-of new Trashy Diva dress btw, because you know, the internet must know.

Then it got dark and my dusk-activated fairy lights turned on!

I have a huge thing for fairy-and party-and-what-not lights you know. If there's a party, it will need liiiiights. I take it a big part comes from the parties the Moomins held, the books I read as a kid. They always had lots of lights hanging in their gardens at their hullabaloo's, those images got stuck in my head.

But the the May night is pale and does not last long.

The sun is up around four already.

And so the party is over. (Carefully cropping out anyone sleeping on the lawn).

A PHOTO - OR TWO - AN HOUR, SORT OF, SUNDAY

I love to browse photos an hour-posts by others. Sometimes I even manage to do those myself, although I propably should just forget about that whole an hour-thing and think of them as days in pictures; I was never too exact with time :)

10 am.
Woke up...

11 am.
...but wouldn't get up until now! And oh,  all autumn-y outside. (Surprise...) I did not manage to take a fabulous photo of pretty cascading leaves outside of the window, everywhere in the air.

Since we've had a flu with Dag our day rhythm has slid an hour or two; he has been sleeping somewhat late in the morning. Kind of. (And don't write "Lucky you, he still wakes up every night.)

 I' wore my "moomin character dress".

And had a late breakfast. Pineapple-lingonberry smoothie and the best raw balls; with cashew, hazelnuts and sunflower seeds.

My mixer in the city broke a long time ago (that happens a lot with raw food, processing too much at once) so I only have the one in the countryside home to use. I try and make batches of raw bars etc during the weekend for the week to come but they are so good they seldom last past Wednesday...

Noon. 

I know it will soon be time for some autumn gardening.

So going to get my stuff. I use my old harbour workwear boots for countryside outdoors. Out there it's like being in god damn Australia when it comes to spiders; I have remember to check all boots and gloves before putting them on because those little (and not always that little) fuckers make their nests and put their webs and choose their hide-abouts everywhere. Well the difference being basically none of them are poisonous. But see there in the background is one of them already! One that may or may not have been at the wrong place at the wrong time, this story here does not tell that, but I did remember to do some vacuuming in the porch (lots of dead flies and spider webs) right thereafter.

(There's this Australian tv spider guy on YouTube finding nasty spiders everywhere making me think I might have to forget about wanting to visit down under after all... Oh, the Hunter Spider, likes to hide and hunt in cars? But it's totally haaarmeless! Just a few centimetres of brown hairy nastiness down in your lap all of a sudden aaaaa! Damn.)

Well well, spiders forgotten for now. I planted some of my pelargonium tickles (which is my own word for cuttings, I just can't let it go).

1pm which is 13 over here so, sticking with that.

We went for a walk with Dag. It wass actually the first time we were out walking without a pram.

Autumn is beautiful!

A couple of weeks ago most trees were still green; it had been so warm in early September. Last week I was away and missed out on most of the colours as now the biggest part of the leaves are on the ground already...

 14 hrs
"Feeding" the lambs. Most of them are still out on the fields.

15 hrs
And then I actually did some gardening. Cut dead flowers down, and so on. My mint was still green and pretty but I took it down too and put to dry (for tea). I had the mint planted in a bucket under ground but some of it had still managed to sneak out and try and take over the place. Snip snap, not anymore! Oh yeah and that's a poncho Eddi got me from Bolivia; he goes there for work. I wear it around the farm because it's kind of practical (not really for gardening though, hello fringes and dirt) and because it looks kind of odd.

I wonder what I will walk around with then when Im old and go crazy cat lady.

A little btw, a Clematis which I thought I had killed by chopping the root off earlier this summer is blooming. Now! When no-one is here to see it properly... Well thanks to the good ol' internet these flowers now have their moment. Yey.

16 hrs.
Dag is napping and I do some work with my rather sad looking lunch.

17 hrs.
And then I do some un-working too when I really should not.
Or, not true. Ordering things for costumes is actually work too. I should just learn to concentrate on one thing at a time...

18hrs.
Start making dinner.

19 hrs.
My dinner, done. I thought I had a pack of tofu at home but I didn't so aubergine had to do. I like it, a part of different sauces/mashes but especially oven roasted with some oil and a little salt sprinkled over. The boys not so much. Well, Dag eats it, kind of. (Half of what he eats is on the floor anyways so sometimes it's hard to tell.) So they had other stuff on their plates, which then is Eddi's domain.

 20hrs.
Start packing to return to the city. Which mostly means: find the cats and try not to let them know what you're up to.

21 hrs.
Time to drive home!


Radio Helsinki has this great show with old Finnish iskelmä on Sunday nights which I often drive home to.

 22hrs.
Late night porridge!

23 hrs
While the rest sleep I work some more. But the internet gets me and I don't really get that much work done. But, ehrm, I learn about this guy who reunite with a gorilla he raised as his son -sniff- and about headless Victorian photography...