Cloudberry

Spring came 2-3 weeks earlier than usual here in the north. The snow has melted fast with the help from the sun and the wind. So the last couple of weekends hubby and I have been fixing the greenhouse; we've painted it, made a floor and benches. And about a week ago I moved almost all my plants out of the living room and into the greenhouse. It's still cold during the nights and we might get a few frost nights, so we have to have an electric oven on. But so far both my tomato and cucumber plants seems to thrive :)




With all the snow gone so early, we could fix the soil in the vegetable garden by adding some cow compost and adding a few more raised beds. They are made from pallet collars.


I'm so lucky that hubby likes to drag home all sorts of things and that he likes to build.
So the other day he made a deck in front of the greenhouse and a bridge over the creek :)
All made from recycled materials! Endre is digging after earthworms to put in the vegetable garden.




Still lots of snow in the mountains, but the bird cherry is full of sprouting leaves.
Can't wait for it to bloom :)



And my red currant bushes have survived the winter. Hopefully they will carry lots of berries.




I have no idea what this tiny flower is. Tiny, tiny as the size of a fingernail.
I'm not sure what the next two flowers down below are either. Need to wait until they bloom ;)


                      Smågullkorg :: Leopard's Bane                                         Ballblom :: Globeflower

The kids are spending the week with my mom, so I'm alone during the day until Hubby comes home from work. Since the weather was great today with 18 C, I desided I'd take a walk in the forest to our lean-to. So I grabbed my camera and a water bottle and headed out. I haden't come far before I heard some noises, I just thought I had scared a bird up. But no, just ahead was four mooses! I only managed to take a few (not so good) pictures before they saw me and ran away. So I sure received more than I seeked today :) Just wish the kids had been with me, but then again, I guess they would have made so much noice that the mooses would have ran off before we would even now they were there...


I must say I wasn't sure if I should walk all the way up to the lean-to, knowing there was four mooses running around in the forest. But I desided to walk on, and it was good to rest and have a sip of water when I came up. I couldn't sit for long though as I got surronded by horse flies :(


If it hadn't been for all the flies I might have laid down in one of these soft spots. Big areas of the  forest are filled with the flowers of skrubbær / Bunchberry. Looking forward to Fall when all this will become red.








I almost steped on this tiny frog when I headed home, but I managed to grab him before he jumped his way into the gras.

The Common Frog, Rana temporaria also known as the European Common Frog or European Common Brown Frog is found throughout much of Europe as far north as well north of the Arctic Circle in Scandinavia and as far east as the Urals, except for most of Iberia, southern Italy, and the southern Balkans. The furthest west it can be found is Ireland, where it is an introduced species. Common frogs are active almost all of the year, only hibernating when it gets very cold and the water and earth are consistently frozen. Common frogs hibernate in running waters, muddy burrows and can hibernate in layers of decaying leaves and mud at the bottom of ponds. The fact that they can breathe through their skins allows them to stay underwater for much longer periods of time when they are hibernating. Common frogs breed in shallow, still, fresh water such as ponds, with breeding commencing in March. The adults congregate in the ponds, where the males compete for females. The courtship ritual involves croaking, and a successful male grasps the female under the forelegs. During the mating season the males can be recognised by a darkened swelling, the nuptial pad on their 'thumbs'. The females, which are generally larger than the males, lay up to 4000 eggs which float in large clusters.