Bringing You Up-to-Date

I'm making progress in recovery and getting back to 'normal', while noticing lots of interesting things around town.   I made it downtown to McGinty's Cafe for lunch with my coffee buddies yesterday, so that really made me feel I have recovered, though my voice still sounds sort of croaky.

Although there's another lunch place downtown, The Kitchen, it has no indoor dining, so our group has 

stuck with McGinty's.

                            

We've had lots of rain recently, so much so that I looked out one day and saw the tree trunks were green with moss.  The Redbud leaves seem to hold the raindrops best.

Picking up some fruit and veggies at Goldsmiths, Mrs. F.G. also brought home some bright sunflowers for the dining room table.

And this is about half of her antipaste efforts from the other day.  Antipaste is a traditional appetizer to start Italian meals, often sliced meat and cheese.  But this is a canned mix of veggies, olives, mushrooms and other good stuff that is simply the best thing I have ever tasted on crackers!

We still have Day Lilies blooming, though only a few each day now.

When I go riding along Thompson Street I pass the site of the new Meaford Long Term Care Home.  It's supposed to open this October when they'll begin transferring patients, and admitting new ones.  It's looking like they're getting toward the final outside touches.

They've been using the Rec Centre parking lot to store gravel, and suddenly, yesterday, there are four new piles of gravel or dirt.  I presume they're moving this the block east when they heed it.

Downtown they've painted the orange background for Meaford's new Indigenous crosswalk, a block north of the existing LGBTQ rainbow crosswalk outside the library.  This one will be finished with a pattern of white feathers.

And back on our own front lawn they've painted the fire hydrant bright yellow, one of the first in town to be changed from dark red.  Apparently this follows the new National Fire Protection Association code.  I've seen more and more of these yellow hydrants as I ride around town.

That brings you up-to-date!

Keady Market

Yesterday we headed out to the locally famous Keady Market, where you can buy just about anything under the sun.  Keady Market started out as a livestock market, which it still is, but now vendors can rent space for stalls selling everything from fruits and veggies (which is what we were after) to sunglasses, hats and sheets.

It still is a livestock market, and the auctioneers sell everything from rabbits to cattle, outside for the small animals and poultry (this is the auctioneer) and inside for the large animals.  This is the place to come, whether you're a farmer who has cattle to sell, you want to buy a few rabbits for your backyard or your teenager wants to buy a calf to raise and show at the fall fair.

It was the crowds that worried us.  Driving a wheelchair through crowds is never comfortable, and main street at the market is crowded!  We were both a little anxious about how it would go.

We were here for the fruits and veggies (and a little baking).  So we worked our way down main street and managed to get what Mrs. F.G. needed to make her antipaste, one of our delicious treats.  And we only succumbed to a little baking, a cherry strudel and some delicious Calebrese bread.

There were lots of fresh veggies, but we found the prices absurdly high this year.  This is not the place to come for cheap produce, nor is it necessarily local, though most is.

   

It isn't just fruits and veggies, as I said.  There are several aisles of stalls selling crafts, clothing, sunglasses, hats, and just about anything else.  We deliberately did not drive down any other aisles, sticking to the fruits and veggies.

We passed a couple of busking musicians.  I normally don't take pictures of people, but if they are there to perform in this setting, I make an exception.

Much of the fruit here, especially the peaches, will have come from the famous Niagara area, but if that's the closest place you can successfully grown peaches, then I consider it local.

There were quite a few flowers and plants, though we didn't buy any.

And at the end we drove back through the small village of Kilsyth where my grandparents ran this general store in the 30's and 40's.  Mrs. F.G. and I lived in the family home one summer after my last relative living in the village died.  Great memories!

Going to Keady Market was an interesting challenge for both of us.  I think we were both anxious about finding a place to park and unload me, about riding down the busy main street and about how other visitors would behave towards me.  It was a fine balance between waiting for people to get out of the way and just barging ahead!

The anxiety could easily have been enough to keep us at home, but we went and we conquered it successfully.  I just figured I had as much right to be there as anyone else, and I tried to drive slowly and safely.  I didn't use my shrill horn even once.  I'm finding that there's a huge tendency to become a hermit if you don't make the effort to get out.  Keady was a good reminder that you need to keep getting out and about!

A Late Summer Haircut for the Garden

Mrs. F.G. is a great one for deadheading in the garden.  In theory if you clip off blossoms that are fading  you can encourage a second spurt of new blooms.  It works well with some plants but not others.  So last week the garden got its late summer haircut.

The Lavender was the most obvious target.  The four plants like this one looked purple before the garden shears got to them.  We'll see how much reblooming there is.

Pruning the Lavender left this strip of garden between the patio and deck looking a lot less colourful, but the orange Calendula have taken over and now look quite bright.

The large Daisies have also been trimmed;  I'm waiting to see if we get a second flush of blooms.

Of course other plants have simply ended their season of blooming.  These are the twisted stems of one of our fine-flowered Clematis.

Other plants like Hostas keep providing colour all summer long, even after their flowers have gone, because of their multi-coloured leaves.

I do wish we'd had more Cleome blooming; I'll hope for more next year.  This one is entirely gone now.

We do have a small number of Day Lily blossoms each day, but they are tapering off rapidly too.

The Zinnias are the flower of fall, and they're coming on strong now after a failure of germination earlier.   We've decided that the bright red ones are the ones we prefer.

Monarchs!

 We've been watching two Monarchs emerge from their chrysalis.  Makes you glad you let the Milkweed stay!  And it's yet another look at the miracles of nature.

Although the caterpillars lived on the Milkweed, they moved off and found a very different pot to transform into a chrysalis.  One we found on the back of a deck chair

We didn't stay watching the entire time, so we missed it breaking out, but here it is.

It hung on to the outside of the chrysalis for a bit before moving off.

And when it moved it didn't move far.  This was the last we saw of it.  It fluttered its wings and off it went.

The other caterpillar took itself off to a tall bean plant in the far corner of the garden.  Mrs. F.G. captured a bit of the bean plant and draped it over plants on our deck so I could see it well.

Terrible focus here, but you can clearly see the wing pattern inside the chrysalis, just before the butterfly emerged.

Then it was out and hanging there while its wings dried.

Soon it was stretching out its wings to their full extent and after 10 or so stretches it lifted into the air and was gone.  A fascinating process to watch!

Covid!

 I escaped it for a long time.  But 12 days ago I headed for emerg at out small local hospital, and it only took one swab for them to admit me with Covid.  I hope you noticed I've been missing in action for 12 days now.  I wouldn't wish this on anyone!  The first day wasn't bad, but days 2 and 3 were horrible!  I was in hospital, in isolation, for a week and have been home now for another 5 days, so I'm on day 12 and no longer infectious.

To make it even worse, Mrs. F.G. caught it at the same time, though her case seems to have been musch milder.  Still, once I was home guess who was my caregiver!

I came home to our continuing colourful garden; here are a few pictures.

Nasturtiums

Bright red Zinnia

Butterfly Weed

Yellow coneflowers

Liatris

Another volunteer sunflower

The view from the deck.

I'm so glad we have a small local hospital only 3 blocks away.  That makes a huge difference for us, as does our colourful garden where I can sit out every morning!

More Colour in the Garden!

The other day I posted some of the Daylilies in our garden, but today I'm sharing some of the other colourful flowers you can see just now.  It certainly feels like you're surrounded by colour when you are sitting on the patio!

    These brilliant red Crocosmia are straight out the window by my computer and I love the colour!

Another personal favourite is the Cleome.  We only have a few plants this year, but I'd like to see more.

Such a delicate bloom, with incredibly long stamens!

The hostas are always beautiful and we have dozens.  This is a bloom I can actually get close to.

There are a number of Zinnias in bloom now; I like the red ones best.  If it were me I'd only grow red ones!

We also have a single Monarda, a beautiful pink/purple colour.

These are petals of a Sunflower shining in the morning sun.

And dominating it all are the Echinacea, in shades of pink, yellow, red and purple.  Altogether a very colourful time in the garden, unfortunately for only 2 or 3 short weeks.

Emancipation Day!

Emancipation Day is a federally recognized day to celebrate the end of slavery in Canada and parts of the Caribbean.  It is held on Aug. 1st as that was the day the Slavery Abolition Act was passed in the UK, ending slavery in the British Empire.  The parallel day in the U.S. is Juneteenth, on June 19th, the anniversary of the announcement of freedom for slaves reaching Texas after the civil war.

The Emancipation Day Picnic here in Owen Sound is the oldest continuously running such event in Canada, but the Caribbean Festival in Toronto, formerly Caribana, is undoubtedly the largest.  All such events are a celebration of freedom.

The Slavery Abolition Act opened the doors to American slaves, where freedom only came after the Civil War in 1865.  The potential freedom here led to the Underground Railway, a network of safe houses that assisted black slaves as they sought their freedom in the north, so for 30 years blacks escaped to Canada and took up a new life here.  The black settlement in Priceville is one evidence of this.

Even though slavery ended in Canada before it did in the U.S., that doesn't mean there was no slavery here.  Before 1833 there were about 4000 slaves in Canada, of whom more than half were indigenous peoples.  In fact more black slaves arrived in Nova Scotia than in southern Ontario during these years.  But those years did leave a legacy of racial discrimination that is still with us today.

You can learn more about slavery and freedom for slaves in Canada by googling the Canadian Government's website on 'Emancipation Day - August 1st',