Walking Wordless Wednesday

City of Bridges

7 k of such beauty

Natural and built

Beaver dam on river’s edge

The Weir, pelicans & train bridge

Stately houses showcased in Meewaswin’s building

Bernie

And so it begins…

And so it begins but I am hopeful that with some planning it will have a better outcome. Not a passive hope but one I have put some thought into.

On a Post

It’s a “real thing”, honest. The prescription is simple, “Post photos of fences on Fridays.” That’s the only rule of the Fenced Friday  group thst started on Flickr and moved to Instagram. The creator of the group said he didn’t like the “stringent and exclusive” rules of other groups, so he made it dead simple.

So here are some of my fresh off the post captures from this spring.

Thoughtful Thursday meets #What’s on your plate

My earliest memory, the winter I was 3, involves a cold winters night. I was bundled up and went to the barn to “help” dad milk cows. In reality I was probably driving my mother crazy and so she sent me outside which was standard practise. Single ligjt bulb from the middle of the barn. My dad hunched against a cow and the sound of the milk hitting the pail. The steam rising from fresh cow poop. And a cow calving. My response to dad was “I wondered how dat was going to get out of dere”.

Fast forward a few decades and many many farm visits with our children. They were lucky enough to see a few new calves being born. Three more decades later and we are repeating the process again.

The calf in front of Annabelle (lying down) was about an hour old.

The opening paragraphs and accompanying photo might seem like a weird sequel into a what’s on your plate blog challenge and a thoughtful Thursday post but hang in there and keep reading.

Because I want to talk about the correlation between eating and food. As a farm kid you know that most animals become supper in the fall. We spent time ensuring that our children knew where the food came from and now the grandchildren. Besides the animals each generation has/have been vegetable gardeners and so every child grows up knowing that carrots taste the best straight from the garden.

Raspberry picker in training. At this stage she eats more than hit the container but that’s ok

But back to the what’s on the plate, which this time is just rhetorical rather than physical. Which is how it meets thoughtful Thursday. I just want to encourage readers to think about eating local. I totally recognize that this can, up front, cost more than grocery shopping at Walmart. But, and it’s a huge but, the cost to the climate is smaller. Local fruit, veggies and meat in season taste better, support local agriculture and have a smaller environmental impact. Challenge yourself to look at your food footprint.

A really great book on this subject is by a local Saskatoon food writer. It’s called Prairie Feast: A Writer’s Journey Home for Dinner by Amy Jo Ehman. For an entire year they ate local like her grandparents would have. Kind of like how I decided to make “Cacciatore” because only 2 generations ago food was scarce, the dirty thirties were having a huge impact and most food did not come from a store.

A totally “outside the box” #whatsonyourplateblogchallenge. I often climb on a soap box and I’ve done it once again. I definitely have strong opinions about eating local and as anyone who has read this blog for a while or who knows me in person knows that I actually walk this talk.

What’s your favourite local food? Hands down for me it’s saskatoons. Fingers crossed that there is no frost and no crazy wind to blow off the blossoms like last year.

A certain little someone also loves them!

Bernie

May the Flowers Be With You…

Wordless Wednesday words

Flowers force flowing freely

Purple passion post

White crocuses in the golden glow

Crocuses and cow poop!

BC

Old school indeed

I wanted to make a fancy daily journal but didn’t find the items I had been looking for. So I went old school. Like as basic as it gets as I don’t even any gold stars like we got at school.

No Floral Scent

#SundayStills challenge is a real challenge here where not much is blooming at this time of year. So I decided to do a bit of a retrospective floral show with a bit of a surprise twist at the end.

An Apple a day…

I ate an apple today. It was cold, crisp and slightly sweet. Not at all like the apples of my childhood lunch box where they were warm and soft. The number of times I carried the same apple to and from school is probably fairly high. A work conversation from two school lunch packing dad’s let me know that this sort of thing is still going on. But back to my apple.

Didn’t Finish It Friday

It’s another one of “those stories”. The kind that makes other people shake their head at me while I’m busy being annoyed at myself.

A Long Rabbit Hole

So “it’s” been on my list since I retired 3 years ago. 3 years and it took us 3 evenings to accomplish the task. “It” and a few recent events have sent me down a rabbit hole inside my head so bear with me as I twist and turn.