Tag Archives: #garden

2321 – Sunday Digest: The Week in Review

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2321 – Sunday Digest: The Week in Review

Baseball (and soccer) season is here. Not the pros, I mean for my kids.

Last weekend was spent following my daughter’s ‘Queens of the Diamond, tournament in Brantford. Man has she gotten good. Stellar defence and a beast (I’m sure she’d love the description) at the plate with four homers and a bunch of hits.

She makes me proud as both Team Ontario and Team Canada are scouting her to play for them. I don’t know how she does it. The time she spends practicing while maintaining grades in the high 90s.

Then there is my little guy. He is seven and plays t-ball and soccer. With my excellent guidance, he has the hardest and most accurate throw on the Cubs. Sometimes scarily so, it’s house league t-ball so there are a bunch of kids who have never played, can’t throw and can’t catch. When they are warming up or he’s making a throw to first I’m afraid he might maim one of them. Now if I could just get him to pay attention playing in the field. The dirt and gravel are like a magnet to little boys and girls and at any given moment 4 or 5 of the rugrats are playing in the dirt.

Between various kids sports, I managed to get my herbs planted and take a pile of garbage to the dump. The vegetable garden will have to wait until next week. The damned bushy-tailed rats a.k.a. squirrels have already dug up the parsley to bury nuts or something. They are a menace!

Another podcast listing week but I did find a great relaxation album to play at bed time. It includes the natural sounds of the great Dan Gibson. Gibson was a Canadian Environment Sound Recordist. His Solitudes series of recordings have sold over 20 million copies worldwide. Some contain the pure sounds of nature and others include relaxation music with the sounds of the natural world. A naturalist who turned his passion into a very successful business.

The week in review…

Fine and Dandy
Susan at Sillyfrog’s Blog gives us a tale of a grandson who unwittingly ends up in the middle of a row between his grandparents.

How I Almost Skidded Off the Path of Dreams
A reflection on how life has an uncanny knack of putting us right where we need to be written by Rockstar Girl at Is It Real or Fantasy.

Elixer
A fantastical trip into the world of wolves and magic and wolf by Paula at Light Motifs II.

By the Beach
Sadje at Keep It Alive gives us a poem that is a beautiful manual for life.

Was It You?
Fandango at This, That and The Other passing gas for our reading amusement!

More highlights from Greg’s Blog…

T-Shirt Wisdom Wednesday | The bi-weekly feature poking fun at selective hearing this week.

Green Mountain Gold | Written for Chel Owens Terrible Poetry Contest for May 2023. Still one of my favourite WordPress challenges.

Around the Blogosphere…

Winner of the Terrible Poetry Contest | Lots of cheesy, and I mean that literally as this month’s theme was Vermont Cheddar, poetry hosted by Chel Owens.

Next week…

Five Word Weekly, Four Line Fiction are on tap plus the launch of a new monthly feature. Have a great week everyone,

Credits and Additional Information

Hibiscus Syriacus (Rose of Sharon)

With the unofficial middle of the Canadian summer just days away the blooms from three Rose of Sharon bushes that line the right boundary of my backyard are bursting to life with stunning colour and beauty. It is early days for the flowering plants that will continue to bloom and dazzle into the fall.

It is fascinating to watch as hundreds of tightly wound buds push their way through the green pods that have guarded and nurtured their beautiful secret since beginning to form in early spring. Now they fill the yard with the flowers of purple, pink, and creamy white pictured above.

Even the spent pods are beautiful in their own way. See the surviving remnants of last year’s pods at Greg’s Blog post, New and Old from spring of this year.

Images were captured in July 2022 in my backyard in Waterloo Region, Ontario.
Equipment: Canon EOS 60D, EF70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM
Setting (Clockwise from top left): 1) 190mm, 1/8000 sec. at ƒ/2.8, ISO100 | 2) 200mm, 1/1250 sec. at ƒ/2.8, ISO100 | 3) 190mm, 1/8000 sec. at ƒ/2.8, ISO100 | 4) 182mm, 1/350 sec. at ƒ/8, ISO100 | 5) 110mm, 1/60 sec. at ƒ/8, ISO100
Additional processing via Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop.

Copyright 2022 Greg Glazebrook @ GMG Photography, All Rights Reserved.

As Local As It Gets

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As Local As It Gets

With summer has come a lot more time outside and less spent on the computer blogging or organizing and editing my photo archive. I am certain as the seasons turn I will return to the screen again to find a treasure trove of great content posted by all of those I follow. Until then I will be in the garden, at the diamonds, fields, and swimming pools watching the kids, or riding my bike around town and along the riverside trails. I will drop the occasional post when the mood strikes (like today) and both my photo series Backyard Beautiful and Queens of the Diamond will continue to update.

When you live in the Great White North summer is fleeting and the growing season too short to maintain a year-round garden. Most of the fresh food we consume comes from far-off places like California, Mexico, and South America. Of course, the war in Russia and government pandemic spending practices have sent fuel prices sky high and driven inflation upwards at a pace not seen in decades. The cost of food has not been immune to these upward pressures and is becoming unaffordable for many around the world.

Continue reading →

Yellow Flowers

It seems the colour of choice in the garden right now is yellow. From the day lily to the blooming vegetable plants the garden is yellow everywhere. The blooms images from top left are Butternut Squash, Daylily (which are not true lilies), Zucchini flower, and finally a true Lily from the genus Lilium.

Images were captured in June 2022 in my backyard in Waterloo Region, Ontario.
Equipment: Canon EOS 60D, EF70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM
Additional processing via Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop.

Copyright 2022 Greg Glazebrook @ GMG Photography, All Rights Reserved.

End of the Roll

Back in the day, Bushboy’s Last on the Card challenge may have been called Last on the Roll. Film cameras and the silver halide strips we put in them are pretty much relics from a bygone era. I have a huge collection of both negative and positive (aka slide) film packed away along with two Minolta and one Pentax cameras. The task of converting the volume of film into digital files will be monumental should I ever get around to it.

Today we take pictures from our phones, by the hundreds. All of today’s camera systems take images using a charge-coupled device (CCD). Believe it or not, this terrific device led to Eastman-Kodak’s Steve Sasson inventing the first digital camera in the early 1970s. The images were stored on magnetic cassette and would be available to view on any television screen. When he presented the technology to the company they were less than impressed. Sasson discussed management’s reaction to the invention in a New York Times interview years later:

“They were convinced that no one would ever want to look at their pictures on a television set. Print had been with us for over 100 years, no one was complaining about prints, they were very inexpensive, and so why would anyone want to look at their picture on a television set?”

Kodak was the dominant U.S. photography brand and they didn’t want to cannibalize their own film business. A shortsighted decision that prevented them from filing patents and when they did make the switch to digital eighteen years later it was too little, too late.

Continue reading →

Lamprocapnos Spectabilis

The Bleeding Hearts are in full bloom in the back garden. The luscious pink brings splashes of colour to dense green foliage. The second image is a multi-exposure composite of five bleeding heart images superimposed to create the abstract form above. The images were captured shortly after an early morning fog had lifted leaving the tiny droplets of water you can see on the foliage in the third image.

Images were captured in May 2022 in my backyard, Waterloo Region, Ontario.
Equipment: Canon EOS 60D, EF-S18-135mm f3.5-5.6 IS
Additional processing via Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop.

Copyright 2022 Greg Glazebrook @ GMG Photography, All Rights Reserved.