{ 0 comments }
Posts tagged as:
VT
Nice set by these talented musicians at a midweek farmers’ market in the north country.
{ 0 comments }
Those are the White Mountains off on the right horizon, and that’s probably Roy Mountain above the farm buildings on the left. Photo taken from the Peacham/Groton Road.
{ 0 comments }
Old friend Mike Aiken (now back in Georgia after a decade-long sojourn in northern VT), sez further:
“I can’t fully explain it but Vermont is so unique, ordinary, unspoiled, commonplace, interesting, beautiful, astonishing and ghastly that I can’t get it out of my system. I tell people it’s like your favorite jacket or pair of jeans and every favorite childhood memory and adult romantic interlude rolled into one, wrapped in a psychotic’s vision of bizarre weather.”
Photo taken at Brown’s Orchard and Farmstand, where I had some of their fine apple pie and cider to start out the day.
{ 0 comments }
” Ya, we homesteaded for ten years..”, the man on the scaffolding told me as he nailed the quarried slate shingles to the side of his house. The statement didn’t surprise me one bit, given how the property itself stood out from its neighbors: no finely manicured lawn here, but a magical profusion of perennials, shrubs and berry bushes (red raspberry, black and red currant) where it used to be, and the whole place such a wonderful work in progress.
What did surprise me were the black currant bushes – laden with berries – the first I’d ever seen in New England. They had been banned for nearly a century in the US, a suspected vector for a fungus that significantly impacted the commercial viability of the Eastern White Pine. That ban was lifted in NY state in 2003, and Vermont also has no restrictions on their cultivation. I’ve been a believer in organic black currants for some time now, for the myriad of health benefits, especially for eyes.
A note on the processing: the photo was taken under a bright midday sun, not the best of circumstances for the nuances of color or light. It seemed to work best in post-processing as an INFRARED or this one, OLD POLAR.
{ 0 comments }
A group of wild turkeys forage on cow manure recently spread over the field (those brown lines in the foreground), probably for the undigested corn from the cattle’s feed.
There’s a whole science to minimizing the cost of feeding cows, including harvesting the corn when kernels are at their peak maturity, decreasing the particle size of the corn kernels when ground, or using a bacterial inoculant in the silage to maximize fermentation (from an article here, thanks Google). My guess is that the small farmers in the area don’t really concern themselves much with those economics, probably for the same reasons we put up bird feeders in our back yard.
There’s a nice article here on the conservation effort over the past century that brought the turkey population in the US back from thirty thousand to seven million.
{ 0 comments }
I was struck with the flaxen hues of many of the mown fields throughout southern VT last week, a color no doubt enhanced by the light rain that was falling throughout most of our trip. “Looks cold and bleak..”, says a friend from GA, where they are currently reveling in camelias and azaleas. If I was looking at this scene in November, with four or five months of winter to come, I might have agreed. But now, here in April, this scene is positively summer-ish, a prelude of the warmth to come.
{ 2 comments }