The Ice Storm

We were lucky; the ice storm got us, but only enough to leave a coating of ice over all the trees and shrubs.  No serious damage nearby, though we were without power last night for several hours, and further south damage and power outages are much more widespread.

I first noticed the Birch tree in our yard, with some of its branches bent right over.  Birch trees do tend to be flexible like this, and I expect they will bounce back up once the ice melts.

We just got about a cm. of ice on the branches and twigs, not enough to break them very often, but pretty..

The White Pine do tend to suffer in a storm like this, but these young flexible branches will likely bounce back too.

In the meantime every single needle is coated in white.

The Red Osier looks nice under a coating of ice.

It's not just a coating of ice, but on some trees hundreds of small icicles formed.


The woods across the road simply looks white.

These are those two Pasque Flowers which I shared a picture of 3 days ago.  Even these will probably recover, 'resurrecting themselves by Easter Monday' - what a great symbol of Easter!

Spring Skies

Up in Meaford the other day I had time to go down to the shoreline in three different spots and get some photos of the beautiful skies over Georgian Bay - a day or two before the freezing rain and ice storm that we have now blew in!

I stopped at Memorial Park first, where you can get right down on the beach.  A strong north wind had the waves rolling in constantly off the bay.

These two panorama pictures seem to capture what my human eye sees more realistically than a regular camera view.  We have such an ability to see both the wide-open view and to focus in on details with our vision.

A slight zoomed in view shows up the waves better.  The distant clouds reminded me of a distant mountain range.

And looking straight out into the bay you might be seeing 100 miles across to the north shore!

I stopped at the main harbour too, and walked out in the cold wind to get a shot of our tiny harbour light and breakwall.

And the view west to Bayview Escarpment and the Land Forces Central Area Training Base (otherwise known as the Tank Range).

The harbour itself is still totally quiet, one fishing tug in the water, and the two Coast Guard ships still up on land for the winter.  All in all a chilly but scenic day on the bay.

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As for today, it wasn't scenic at all!  After yesterday's forecast storm and heavy snow that never arrived, it did finally snow an inch or so overnight.  And then the rain started.  It just formed a crust over the snow, so that wasn't bad, and I was out to take the mutt for her semi-annual grooming in the morning.  But it has continued to rain all day, and the temperature has remained below freezing - the result is ice.  So now the ice is accumulating on the twigs and branches, though so far not to any serious extend.  We'll see how much it continues overnight and what the ice looks like in the morning.  Further south it was apparently much worse - perhaps because commuters don't expect to have to slow down for something like this!

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Fences

In many ways fences just don't seem that important to me, especially old dilapidated ones.  And yet I keep coming across them when I'm out exploring the landscape.  Wire fences, cedar rail fences and stone fences, often quite old and no longer really functional, but they tell you something about this land in the past, and sometimes today.

Sometimes the fence is incidental to my picture - it's maple syrup season!  One of my favourite things; in two or three weeks we'll be going on a maple sugar bush tour just to see the sap collecting and boiling up close..

The pails along this line of trees (with the fence behind) mark spring for me.  We've already started buying our supply for the year.

Other fences I encounter when I'm bushwhacking.  This marks an old property boundary, and still has a very strong strand of barbed wire along the top, marking it as a cattle pasture on one side or the other.

The fence is still there, but neither side of this line has been pasture for 20 or 30 years.

Then there are the ornamental fences, constructed of old cedar rails, but made recently to mark off someone's property - this one a lot higher than it needs to be!

And other fences (or at least the fenceposts) are a work of art, created by the original Cedar tree, and 100 years of weathering.

A foggy but otherwise ornamental fence in our own backyard.

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We've been waiting for the storm that hasn't arrived yet, in spite of the forecast.  Three days ago the forecast said 5-10 cm. of snow today, and 10-15 tomorrow.  Yesterday it said 20 cm. of snow for today, and buckets of rain for tomorrow.  Our region, Grey-Bruce was supposed to get the brunt of the heavy snow.  Today has just been a pleasant, if chilly and grey day with neither rain nor snow all day.  But the forecast still says we'll get snow this evening and overnight.  We've had a 'winter storm watch', a 'winter storm warning', and now it's a 'freezing rain warning'.  The radar does show something coming, a long pattern of precipitation extending all the way west to Wisconsin, moving our way.  I guess we'll know what weather we're actually getting when we actually get it!  And the longer term forecast shows a series of storms over the next week, leading to a 'colder than normal' early April.  Where did spring go?

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Hogg's Falls

I'm taking you back a month or so to a winter waterfalls.  Hogg's Falls is one of the larger and more popular waterfalls around here, right on the Bruce Trail, and very easy to access from the small parking area about a mile east of Flesherton.  Still, people are always surprised when they walk in and come upon the falls for the first time.

It's about a 20 foot vertical drop over the Amabel Dolomite formation, and was once developed either as a sawmill or to generate hydro (I've read both stories) by William Hogg, in the 1870's hence its name.

It's a short 5 minute walk from the parking lot, beside the river.  This is the Boyne River, the biggest tributary of the Beaver River.  It's a popular spot to snowshoe, so it's easy to walk to in the winter as well as the rest of the year.  Apart from the trail itself, there is no other development here - no railings, no protective fence, you simply have to be careful!  I like it this way, so much more natural.

Of course you can hear the falls long before you can see it, and then suddenly, there it is as the water drops over the cliff down into the gorge below.

In the summer it is possible to do some easy rock climbing and get down to the bottom for a different view, but in the winter that would be treacherous, so I took numerous views from the trail, trying different camera settings.  I liked this one about the best, a 1/4 second exposure with a neutral density filter to control the light at that speed.

The gorge down below is beautiful, especially in the winter when spray from the falls has coated the nearby trees.

I caught this one view through the trees which I thought was interesting.

Here's a summer view from below, just for comparison.

   I took a little video to share as well.  Last time I posted one, almost all the commenters said it worked fine, though I know it probably won't work for some of you, if like me, you read this on an ipad.

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The Garden in March

The first day of spring arrived here yesterday, and I was out in the garden for several hours after lunch clearing out last year's dead plant stalks, which we leave standing for the birds.  We actually have our second flowers out, the Pasque Flowers, just in time for Easter.

The Pasque Flowers seem to be spreading; there are a lot more blooms to come, and they'll survive even when they get covered in snow.

There's another patch of Snowdrops just emerging from the leaves; they were our first blooming flowers this year.

It will be a long time until the Peonies bloom, but they're fast emerging in the flower garden.

And in the wilder part of the garden, there's a tiny circle of closed fiddleheads at the base of the Christmas Fern, just waiting to unfurl.

Even the moss on the boulders in the fencerow was bright green yesterday, shining in the afternoon sun.

I had to go over to a neighbour's place to see these Aconites, but there's a small patch I watch for every year.  They're feeling a little chilly today, and with slightly warmer temperatures will be fully open.

In spite of those little bits of spring's promise, the garden as a whole is pretty dull these days.  It's just dull brown.  I've cleaned the standing stalks of last years flowers off here, but still not raked up those lying on the ground.  But soon this will be bright patches of green emerging to look like a real garden.

The afternoon sky was just so beautifully blue I tried another panorama shot with my iphone.  I like the appearance of these, capturing what we really see out back.  The garden is in the lower right.

But this is the same view this morning.  We woke to an inch of two of fresh snow, another typical March view of the garden!  And a good deal more is forecast for Wed. and Thurs. this week.  I'll let you know if we survive!

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The Grain Elevator

I had reason to drop in on a farmer last week, to chat about hayfields he leases from the Bruce Trail Conservancy.  But most of our chat was about the grain elevator and storage operation he runs on his farm!  Having taught in the agricultural college, I was fascinated.

He let me take a few pictures, and told me about their basic operation.  They receive and store grain from local farmers, primarily corn, wheat and soybeans, the most popular cash crops around here.  Then they ship it off to the different mills that will ultimately use it to make flour, oil, or other products.

With the shift in agriculture away from small mixed farms where every farmer grew a little grain to help feed his cattle, to greater specialization, you now find huge fields of grain grown for sale.  This grain has to be stored (and sometimes dried to a specific moisture content first).  Not many of these sorts of farmers have their own storage facilities.  So this farmer provides a service by storing it here, and shipping it when it's needed by the purchaser.

While I was there a truck pulled in for a load of soybeans, and they quickly had things set up to load it from a nearby bin.  These bins are enormous!  A different world from the small grain bin a few feet square that my uncle had in his old farm barn 50 years ago!

The beans were simply loaded with a tractor-pulled auger bringing them up from one of the big bins and dumping them into the truck once the tarp on top was pulled back.

And here are the soybeans slowly filling the truck.  Within a few hours these will be in a mill in Hamilton, being milled into soybean oil.  In effect, these huge grain storage bins are one way the old general purpose barn and small silo has been replaced with something modern and very different.

The trucks they use are huge!  Most mills want the grain delivered at the last minute just before they process it, which is one reason for the spread of these on-farm storage operations.  During the harvest season they try to move the grain through and out as fast as possible, to keep making space, but last year they ran out of storage space and farmers had to hunt elsewhere for facilities that could take their grain.

I'm always fascinated by all the pipes connecting some of these huge bins, including the drying machine.  They enable the grain to be unloaded, shifted around between bins, dried, stored, mixed and loaded again as needed.  You just see the pipes, but inside there might be grain moving if the elevator is working.

In contrast with this small on-farm elevator, this is the huge grain elevator on the harbour in Owen Sound, which I have shared before.  This is a MUCH bigger operation, and serves both as an import and export facility.  Here grain is imported to southern Ontario if needed by ship from the prairies (via Thunder Bay), and might also be exported from southern Ontario to market, including overseas markets.

Since grain elevators now serve the grain storage function of the old small silos on mixed farms, I'm sharing this on:                                                                                            The Barn Collective.