Justfolk's photos

The City has installed in our neighbourhood some speed bumps and this radar thingey. It is part of its effort to reduce dangerous and loud driving on what are otherwise quiet streets. Last night I watched the reported speeds for a few minutes and found that most cars stayed about five km/hr below the legal limit (fifty km/hr). However, most motorbikes stayed about ten above it. Some bikes travelled past the radar thingey at speeds of 75 km/hr. This fellow was staying right at the speed limit.

Today it was uncommonly warm and humid, and that brought out large numbers of hoverflies and wasps and bees, all searching for a free florid meal. I counted three different hoverfly species. This was one of one of them.

Last winter the chickadees at our feeders planted a small proportion of the sunflower seeds they were given. And being the kind of passive gardeners we are, the sunflowers that sprouted this spring were given their own pots and sunny spots to grow in. Grow they did, and we even let them go to seed. Now the chickadees are picking seeds from the seedy flower heads, from the sunflowers they planted. Smart birds. Nothing prodigal about them. And who's trained whom? They have domesticated us. They are the active gardeners. This picture was just as the sun was going down this afternoon.

I am a kind of passive gardener. When edible things appear, I take advantage. But I like the old proverb "Nut trees are gifts from the past; plant them as gifts to the future," so I do set things growing that have little chance of doing much for me. These are gifts along those lines. The three garlics came up in my community-garden plot this year, left invisibly by last year's plot holder but already coming up when I got the plot in June. The two apples are the first pickings this year from an old tree at the fence in our back yard, planted there, perhaps accidentally, sixty or seventy years ago.

Out in the rain this morning, with my windshield somewhat steamed up, I stopped at a traffic light behind this City truck. Methought: this would make a good addition to my indelicately-clept Trucks' Arses series. You don't have much time at a traffic light to pull a camera out of your (zippered) jacket pocket behind the seat-belt, and none to make the proper adjustments. So the picture was badly over-exposed. But it was nonetheless there.

We spent a few days at our home-away-from-home. Some of that time was spent looking up at the sky. Over our clothesline, past an aeroplane and a couple of satellites, here is the Milky Way. The EXIF data says it was a thirty-second exposure. But I covered the lens after about seventeen seconds to reduce star movement somewhat.

Day Moon: nearly its third quarter, with clouds scudding across the sky.

Today's sitter in the back-deck studio.

By the time Hurricane Earl reached us, it was a "post-tropical storm." But that downgrading did nothing to reduce how much rain we got in the two or three days of Earl's visit -- over 200 mm of it (uhh, like seven or eight inches). And the winds were pretty high. So the windows are covered with all manner of chopped leaves, fragmented bugs and spatters of mud. And the scattered snail. I'm not sure who the guy is in the reflection.

In the remains of Hurricane Earl, the bluejays that come to our door begging are soaking wet. This afternoon, when I took this picture they'd started to dry out a bit, but they are still pretty wet. This one seems to have suddenly become the King Jay, chasing all the others away from the peanuts, which he's been helping himself to.

This summer produced a bumper crop of hops on the old plant outside our house in Ganny Cove. Maybe this is the year I start making beer again.

Well, I know it's an allium. But beyond that I don't know what it is: onion, or whatever. It came up unbidden in my community garden plot, a gift from last year's user of that plot. I've pulled others like it and they appear to be shallots. However that may be just the stunted growth of the bulb as a result of having gone into proper flowering and seeding mode.

I wasn't paying attention to the two people outside the fence, picking black currants at the community garden. I was pulling some shallots for supper. Then I looked, and they looked, and we realised we were old friends: I've known F since she was a student 25 years ago, and met R soon afterwards. I ate some of their black currants and they were delicious. So were the shallots.

Not quite friends but, despite carrying different passports, at least sharing the same sunflower on our deck: a honeybee and a bumblebee.

We keep dozens of potted plants in pots when they really should be in the ground. We moved some day-lilies five or six years ago, or longer, and several ended up sitting in little ten-cm-wide pots. This is one. It sits out in the open in summer and in a dark corner of the garden in the winter. And a few weeks ago I noticed it had started blooming. So I brought it up on the deck where it has continued to offer a bloom every few days. Here is today's bloom.

This summer it's been warmer than usual and the wasps seem to be everywhere. If I had this thing hanging off the hem of my gown, I might be praying too.

My father planted what his father called "The Orchard" next to their house just beyond the outskirts of Town in the early 1930s. They got a few apples and pears but, Dad told me, by the time I was born "the rabbits had eaten all the trees." I wasn't sure whether to believe him that the trees had produced. But there were a few stalks of pear and apple trees taller than me there when I was young and every year they produced a few weak leaves. No fruit. In my imagination, based on what I could see, only tiny sour crab-apples grew around here. I was an adult before I saw full-sized apples grown hereabouts. I was surprised. But of course they grow all over the place. Even in downtown St John's. Here, on the right, is a Gala from the supermarket, ultimately from Chile. On the left are two downtown Townie apples growing on our ca-sixty-year-old tree, flourishing by our fence line, in the shade of much bigger trees. Same size apples. With a bit more rain, warm weather, and sunshine beating through the upper trees, they may get to be just as ripe as and perhaps even bigger than their Chilean cousin. By the way, I don't know what variety ours are. I used to think they were Yellow Transparent. And some of our apples do look like Transparents when they are ripe. But others are redder with a few line-markings (like on the Gala but less so). Last year, I ate a bunch of them and they were crisp like a good Gala, almost as sweet too, and they seemed to keep much better than Transparents do. I don't know what the historical antecedents of the Gala were, perhaps Honeycrisp and others like it, and maybe that is what got thrown as a seedy core into the fence sixty years ago.

And then all hands smiled.