Bright lines
Posted in Gardening, Photography, Sabbatical, Travels on August 22nd, 2007
More from Mum’s garden!
Archive for the 'Gardening' Category
Curves and points
Posted in Family, Gardening, Photography, Travels on August 21st, 2007
Another from Mum’s garden in Preston :-).
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Fanning the flames of passion
Posted in Family, Gardening, Photography, Sabbatical on August 20th, 2007
I really liked the way the afternoon light filtered through the petals of this rose in Ann’s garden in Preston.
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OMG! A video podcast!
Posted in Events, Family, Gardening, Photography, Podcasts, Sabbatical, Travels on August 17th, 2007
HTB!* We’ve gone and made a silly video podcast that almost entirely fails to detail any of our adventures here in the UK! And posted it to YouTube! So you can watch! And listen!
Phew - I feel so much better now…
Ok, it’s short, silly, and largely pointless, but it’s us without all that annoying cost of flying over here to visit us. (You are, however, more than welcome to engage in the latter behavior as well.) I’ve never done this web video/YouTube thing before, and the amount of compression artifacts is kind of annoying.
We might try to do this every week or two if people care. Or we might not. It all depends :-).
We’re again super grateful to Jess, KK, and KK’s family for their help in getting us to the airport and across the pond. We had a very nice week in Preston (I know I needed the rest), and now we’re in Colchester looking for a place to live and a school for Sub-Evil Boy. We still don’t have stable internet, as the house we’re staying in at the moment doesn’t have any connection. I got a key to my office today, however, which is blessed with much happy internet, so we may spend part of the weekend in here cleaning out accumulated e-mail cruft, catching up with blogs, and the like.
Best to all!
*”Heavens to Betsies!”
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Much blather about photographing gardens
Posted in Education, Events, Gardening, Photography on July 22nd, 2007
Several weeks ago I was invited to participate in a Garden and Art Tour by giving a short talk on photographing gardens. The talk was today, and as part of prepping I went out yesterday to the Vorhees’s beautiful garden (where I would be speaking) and spent about 1.5 hours looking around and shooting. I started at the same time as my scheduled talk (4:30pm), and arguably the sun was still a little high and harsh, but I did have the good fortune of several insect and avian visitors, including this fellow who stayed put for quite a while as I walked towards him, clicking all the way.
It was very hot and humid today, so there weren’t big crowds, but I had a very engaged and enthusiastic audience who sat and watched me sweat talk about photography for about half an hour. Here’s hoping that they got something more out of it than just heat stroke :-).
The perversely curious are welcome to check out my notes for the talk. They’re ragged in places, but usable, although I doubt there’s anything there that’s new for my Flickr friends. Suggestions for additions and improvements, however, are certainly welcome.
Completists can also check out the full, unedited set of 260 photos from yesterday on my events account.
I’ll obviously try to clean and post some of the more interesting ones to my “real” Flickr account as time allows, but with only two weeks before we move to the UK, things are totally nuts here and I suspect very little of this will be attended to anytime soon. Sigh.
Thanks again to all the great photographers here on Flickr! You folks continue to both energize me and push me to raise my game. I’m sure that I wouldn’t have been asked to do this without the opportunities that Flickr has opened for me, and I’m sure my tips list and talk were full of things that I consciously and unconsciously picked up there.
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It comes to this
Posted in Family, Gardening, Photography on July 9th, 2007
Last year we lost two of our three elms to Dutch Elm Disease, and a few weeks ago we came home to find a large orange ‘X’ spray painted on the final elm.
This morning at a little before 8am we were awoken by the army the city had sent to deal our diseased tree, and a neighbor’s across the street.
This is the stump shortly after our tree was felled. A tree that had stood for around a century, shaded us and protected us from the harsh north winds of winter, is now chunks of wood and piles of leaves headed out for disposal.
WeatherGirl took some neat shots of the stumps of the other two trees last year, one of which will be on display Friday as part of the Horizontal Grandeur exhibition here in town.
Sub-Evil and I had a great time in Wisconsin, and it’s nice to be home again (even with this morning’s tree cutting racket).
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Tomorrow resting on yesterday
Posted in Events, Gardening on May 6th, 2007
Shot a bunch of stuff yesterday (5 May) in part because I was hoping to get something useful for the 24 hours of Flickr project. (Ego is a wonderful thing :-)!)
I’ll be cleaning up and posting some of these over the next few days, but I confess that this is one of my favorites. This was taken in the wildflower garden out front. That’s a tree seed resting on a leaf from last year; it looks all pretty and green there, but those darn tree seeds are possibly my most annoying source of weeds :-(.
This shot is also an annoying reminder of how much cleaning needs to be done in the gardens now that Spring is full upon us. I’m currently using grading and the blustery wet weather as my excuse for puttin git off, but eventually I’ll have to buck up and get out there…
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A stem in the jumble
Posted in Gardening, Photography on February 18th, 2007
Several years ago I planted some Cayenne seeds in an odd patch of ground that had never been much use to anyone. Much to my surprise, I got a lot of peppers off that, and very spicey ones to boot! Unfortunately, they were arguably too spicey, and we ended up using very few of them because they were just too darn hot for various members of my family.
So there they sat, drying nicely in a bowl in the kitchen. For years. Literally. Many years. Gathering dust.
Finally, WeatherGirl put her foot down and announced that we were composting those little husks and moving on. But before that happened, I just had to take some photos. The first ones are set on the lid of a cast iron dutch oven that I love (but which we don’t use all that often). There’s another neat group posed with an empty lime cordial bottle, but I haven’t had time to clean and post those yet. Hopefully in the next week…
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Ah, to come home to fresh corn…
Posted in Gardening, General on August 1st, 2006
Today’s share of veggies from Easy Bean contained the first corn of the season and some lovely little tomatoes, and I just finished shucking and trimming the four wonderful looking ears using the nifty ulu knife that my folks bought us last year while they were in Alaska. An native Alaskan knife and organic Minnesota corn - can’t beat that with a stick!
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Got the veggies in!
Posted in Gardening, Photography on May 27th, 2006
It’s always a shame that the end of the school year coincides with so much of the gardening that needs to be done at the beginning of our fairly short but enthusiastic season. Thus it was (and all too often is) that I finally got the veggie seeds in the ground, although arguably a wee bit later than I would have preferred in a perfect world. On the other hand, I would probably tend to put a lot of things in too early if circumstances allowed, so perhaps it’s just as well.
All that said, today I finished planting this year’s vegetable seeds. A motley and strange assortment of basil, cilantro, peas, beans, sweet corn, and winter squash. I’ve only done sweet corn here once before, and that was years ago, so it’ll be interesting to see how that goes. It’s also been ages since I tried winter squash, so that’s a bit of an experiment as well. Everything this year is starting from seed (all from the excellent folks at Cook’s Garden), which is a bit chancy with our short-ish season, but hopefully all will go well.
I dug in something close to 10 gallons of nice home-made compost in the process, and scared myself witless at one point. I was scooping compost from the composter we used for the finished stuff into my nifty rubber gardening pail, and the ground below me blinked! It turned out to be a toad that had buried himself in the bit of spilled compost that had collected in front of the composter. I took a bunch of pictures of him, and I’ll most more about that experience later!
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