North by North

For several months our one and only remaining Musquee de Provence has received admiring comments from all visitors. Today we decided to use it while it still is admirable – the other possibility would have been to sell it but actually we have been curious as we have never tasted Musquee de Provence. Well, now [...]

Once again the shops have closed at noon, the  Christmas  Peace has been declared for the whole country and we all are preparing for the evening festivities . It seems that this year Father Christmas has to hire a car (or a boat) to reach Southern Finland – here we do have snow, more or [...]

An old Finnish saying – and like most sayings, not quite accurate. Having grown up between two brothers (at times literally) I can assure you that the years are exactly like brothers – clashing every so often. – At this time last year we had -20C, blue skies and fairly deep snow – now we [...]

The snow seems to have an identity crisis this year: here yesterday and gone today – and definitely gone with the wind! The greenhouse used to be (yesterday) quite nicely and carefully covered… The days are so dark and miserable that it has been necessary to buy a lot of seeds to be able to [...]

…we are today. Yesterday Pekka had a look at the weather forecast and made tracks to the vegetable patch: up with carrots, parsnips, leeks, Hamburg parsleys and thyme. The Jerusalem artichokes were already harvested but still out; now they also are in the (unheated) sauna, waiting to be taken to the restaurant. Yesterday we peeled, [...]

… though not so fast as we anticipated: harvesting has been slowed down by the (for us) unseasonably warm weather (all of +6!) and today and in days to come by the wintertime (yeah – thanks a lot for that, dear Management! For us it means that it is greyish instead of black when we [...]

We have really done our best to ensure winter vegetables for granddaughter Alexandra (age 3.5 months) – the selection at the moment includes carrots (white, yellow, orange and the raspberry-orange in the photo), parsnip, Hamburg parsley,  cauliflower, calabrese, courgette, squash, sweet corn – we are still discussing Jerusalem artichoke as it causes wind with some [...]

Not at night but just at sunrise – quite pretty and very annoying. Especially as it means that we have to somehow find place in the freezers for carrots, leeks, parsnips and Jerusalem artichokes. Not much for Hamburg parsleys – the everlasting rain has caused them to start rotting in the ground; we managed to [...]

Sorry, couldn’t resist the title though actually we have had a – for our conditions – reasonably warm autumn; and an unreasonably wet one (hence the colds). Most of the root vegetables are still in the ground; let’s hope they won’t stay there permanently. There are still some sweet peppers, chillies and tomatoes in the [...]

OK, so we are living on a hill but that only means no wading while loading the Ark; water will be deep when it gets here (in a week or so at this rate). It was high time to get the squashes in – especially as this is a year of voles and those &¤¤¤#”?!  [...]