The Farmers Market

It's the best time of year to visit the Farmers Market.  We have a great small market every Saturday over the summer in the village of Flesherton.  We've been going long enough now that I know several of the vendors, and know exactly what we look for.

The best thing about our market is that there are several good vendors of fruit and veggies.  I like baking, and many come to look at crafts, but a market without a good selection of fruit and veggies is not what it should be.

I bought both some new potatoes and some corn today at the market, from vendors I know.

We don't buy garlic though, because Mrs. F.G. grows her own.

And we've never eaten kohlrabi, but we really should be adventurous and try them!

There will be lots more squash as we get into early fall.

Almost every week the market offers some special event.  This week it was a demonstration by the local square dance group.

There are several craft vendors selling everything from paintings to jewelry, from sheepskin rugs to gourd birdhouses, from soap to pottery.  I must admit I don't spend much time looking at those tables, but I was struck this morning by this really colourful caterpillar!  It's about 2 feet long, and 4" in diameter.

And I can't forget the baking.  Sometimes I get the impression that all this 'healthy local food' we go for is actually baking rather than those fresh fruit and veggies!

Among them, my favourite is the pies.  I always stop for a visit with the ladies who bake these, even when I'm not buying one.  It's the social side of the market that keeps me going back each week.  But the fresh fruit and veggies make a good excuse for the visit.

Bugs at a Distance

It`s great when you capture, or see in another blog, those pictures of a Monarch or Swallowtail sitting still on a bright flower, and allowing you to make multiple close-up portraits.  But that`s not how I see most flying bugs.  They`re a buzz and a blur, a shadow or a movement on a blossom.  And they rarely sit still so you can`t get very close.  Here are a few of my bug photos, mostly from today.  A lot of cropping of my images was required to make these viewable!

I finally saw a Mourning Cloak sitting still.  I think there must be some useful minerals in our driveway, I see so many butterflies sitting there briefly.

This Question Mark, another first of the year for me, thought the same thing.

On the other hand, I`ve seen many of these Cabbage Whites.  I`ve seen a dozen at a time, fluttering around the edge of those crop fields I`ve been photographing.  But do they land - very rarely!  This one sat still for 3 shots!

A bee buries its head in a Goldenrod.

And a wasp you don`t want to trouble with.

I was surprised to see this Hummingbird Clearwing, of the hawkmoth family on a tall Obedient Plant.

This isn`t a bug, but always an interesting critter.  This isn`t the first year I`ve found a Spring Peeper high up under the umbrella on the deck.  It had to climb a vertical metal pole to get here!

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A Few August Skies

Today certainly wasn't a sky like these, but a week or so ago I saw some interesting patterns in the evening sky and tried to capture them.

Today's sky's were certainly not like this.  It was chilly and grey, with a couple of quick showers for the morning.  No shorts today.  Then the pressure changed and more blue patches slowly appeared and it actually got warm.  The shorts came back out.  Then it cleared totally this evening, and got cold!  Had to wear a jacket for my walk.

This interesting pattern appeared a couple of days later.  It was early evening when it materialized, but within an hour it had all vanished again.  Can't remember seeing a cloud pattern like this.  I'm enjoying the cool weather, but a lot of things would appreciate more heat!  Including the tomatoes in our garden which are going to stay green forever at this rate.

The Meadow in August

Our meadow reaches the peak of its beauty in August.  Heavy with the blossoms of Queen Anne's Lace and Gray-headed Coneflower, as well as Goldenrod, it's an interesting combination of white and yellow.  Every time I look at it or walk through it, I'm glad I never mowed anything but trails.

Especially in the morning or evening light, the combination of white and yellow is attractive.

This was an old grassy field when we bought it 18 years ago, and apart from mowing these trails, we have done nothing to it - except I did plant a few roots of those yellow Gray-headed Coneflowers in the background about 5 years ago.  Since then they have self-seeded everywhere!

Compare this photo of the same meadow in 2015, dominated by Goldenrod with just a few of those yellow coneflowers, to the above pictures showing that the meadow is dominated by Queen Anne's Lace this year.  I don't know whether this is natural succession occurring in the meadow, or just the variation from year to year.

The biggest component is Queen Anne's Lace, with its very fine white florets.

It took me a while to come up with Gray-headed Coneflower for this one, as we have several different tall similar yellow flowers in the garden.  These started their life in the garden, but it only took a year or two to find out how easily they self-seeded and spread to other parts of the garden.  At first I felt so guilty digging out and throwing away the roots of such a beautiful flower, so I took a few of those roots and planted them far back in the meadow.  From those few plants, hundreds now bloom.  As a native wildflower, this is quite rare in Ontario, blooming only as part of remnant prairie patches in extreme southwestern Ontario.  We no longer allow it to grow in the garden, because it would take over!

There are other plants.  I don't particularly like the rough, coarse Knapweed, but it has a pretty blossom.

A couple of the purple coneflowers have seeded in from the garden, and on the day I was taking these photos, a fritillary was raiding the bloom, an Aphrodite Fritillary according to my guidebook.

We also have a little clump of Cup Plants, a prairie plant that took several years to grow before it first bloomed.  It towers over my head now.

 2015

2017

Compare these two photos of the meadow over two years.  It has completely shifted from the yellow of the Goldenrods dominating to the white of Queen Anne's Lace.

We enjoyed watching the eclipse a couple of days ago.  This is how close I came to getting a picture.  I didn't have the correct filter for the camera but I figure it was safe while the sun was obscured by clouds.  We did have some little eclipse glasses though, and as these clouds blew over, we watched the eclipse very clearly in the gaps.  It truly was amazing to see the crescent of the moon move slowly across from right to left over two hours, and the atmosphere changing to dusk and back.  

Two Waterfalls

The next day we headed off northwest, toward Owen Sound, to check out some of our interesting waterfalls.  It spit rain on and off but we enjoyed ourselves anyway.  And our guest took us out to lunch too!

We stopped first at Walters Falls, to check out that waterfalls.  Only one building remains from the old sawmill, right beside the mill pond, but upstream at the second mill pond, the old water-powered feed mill still operates.  We stopped to step inside and listen to the thumping waterpower as we passed - the last commercially operated water-powered feed mill for livestock in Ontario.

The falls here is broken by a big ledge of bedrock in the middle, and you really only get a view from the side (without a challenging hike).  But I never tire of stopping to view waterfalls.

No tripod that day, but I tried the opposite, stopping the water with a high ISO and a fast speed.

Then we moved on to Owen Sound, and after lunch drove south to Inglis Falls on the edge of town, our favourite.  After Niagara Falls, many people would list this as their favourite escarpment waterfall.

I quickly hurried down the trail to the lower viewpoint, where you get a slightly different angle, and a larger picture of the Sydenham River starting to tumble down the ravine below the falls.

We were astounded at the amount of water going over the falls in mid-August.  Usually it's a gentle trickle at this time of year, but this is one effect of all the excessive rain we've had.

And of course a few more pictures playing with the splashing water.   ISO 800; speed 1/500th of a second.  It was a dull cloudy day spitting rain.

We stopped to read some of the interpretive info about the history of the Inglis Mill here, where my great-grandfather brought his wheat to be ground into flour.  Our guest thought the place was great!