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Fair Gardening
An hour before the fair opened. Noin tuntia ennen messujen avaamista. Ungefär en time före mässan öppnade. This week has been super busy, but also quite exciting. There was quite a bit of planning beforehand, but the real effort has been from Tuesday to Wednesday in building a 68 m² fair garden for my employer Kekkilä. Kekkilä has some splendid products that provided the building blocks, but then it was up to me, Ulrika Tuomainen and Juhani Tapiovaara to plan the stand and build it in 30 hours over two days. Luckily we had help from other builders at Helsingin Projektitoteutus and two other competent gardeners that work for Kekkilä…
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What Would the Hardcore Enthusiast Do? Part 2
There are easy ways of sowing and there are complicated ways of sowing, there are of course also easy complicated ways of sowing 😉 I wrote a bit about raising woody plants from seed in Part 1 of my slightly beyond normal gardening endeavors. Uncomplicated seeds germinate in something close to room temperature or a bit more within a week or two, but in addition to those kinds of seeds there are several ones that require a few tricks. Cold treatment is the most common one, but there are fire treatments, hormone treatments and all sorts of minor tricks. Cold treatment the easy way, sometimes I have been using the refrigerator, but then…
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Visiting Viherpaja
Corylus avellana ‘Contorta’ – peikonpähkinä – trollhassel I was out trying to score some herbs on Saturday; I’m being literal: I was looking for Thyme, Rosemary and other herbs for the windowsill, it’s surprisingly hard to find nice ones before the season starts. Viherpaja though, had some good ones, and once you are there you just can’t miss their Japanese Garden. The Japanes Garden is entirely indoors. This is gives you a chance to admire some beauties that just aren’t hardy enough for Finland and you get to see them flower before the season really starts outdoors. On Saturday the cherries were just starting to bloom, the Japanese maples were…
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I Could Have Taken One More Day of Cold
As long as it would have meant the kind of beautiful weather we had until Friday. The mornings especially have been beautiful, but unfortunately I’ve had to go to work and then today it was overcast, but also a lot warmer. Warmer (-7°C …) is nice, but the morning mist with a lot of frost on the trees and the beautiful sunshine was really beautiful. It would have been nice to try to get shots like the ones in the first picture. They are both quite old and that kind of weather isn’t very common. On the other hand 4 out of my 6 cousins + one of my uncles…