Wisteria
It's everywhere!
of abundance and beauty
shouting, "Spring!"
The rain cleared just in time for the Port Royal Farmers' Market to open this morning.
If you didn't have time for breakfast, you could get it made fresh while you waited.
Healthy eggs (from happy hens), smothered with cheese, to go with homemade bagels. Very tempting.
The hens are happy hens because they are pastured all day, every day, where they dine on grubs, greens, and grain.
It says so right on the sign.
The bird rehabber was back
educating the crowd along with a
very engaging young man with a
barred owl.
I think the
turkey vulture
had his eye on someone's breakfast.
Here is what we brought home: eggs, radishes, kale, cabbage, brocolli, and mixed lettuces.
The purple radishes are really spicy!
An abandoned store and gas station served travelers on Gray's Highway between Augusta and Savannah. Like the attendant who once tilted back on a porch chair and watched the cars go by, now the old station itself seems to lean back quietly and watch the road.
It might have started its days as a store back when the nearest town was called Dixie.
Near the tiny town of Varnville, in its time it provided a living for the family in the house behind it.
Somewhere not very far from this spot, this photo was taken. Anyone recognize it?
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| (Photo from the Internet) |
Yup, the home of Forest Gump!
Although the house was in Alabama in the movie, it was actually built near Varnville, SC and torn down after filming ended.
Since strawberry shortcake was on the menu for Easter Sunday, a trip to Dempsey's farm on
St Helena Island to pick strawberries was in order.
Storms were brewing, with the oddest clouds in the sky.
They looked like mounds of whipped cream.
Kids were out of school for Good Friday
so there were lots of families
picking - and eating - their way down the
rows.
As I was picking - and eating - my way down a row,the Beatles' song Strawberry Fields Forever was going around in my head, maybe because The Writer used to sing it to me.
I always puzzled over what it "meant" and I still don't know, but I like the dreamy confusion.
(I wanted to put a YouTube video here so you could have a walk down memory lane with me. But, Blogsy, the app I use to blog, no longer supports YouTube, so the best I can do is a link.)
So, Strawberry Fields Forever. I hope you enjoy it!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b25wvrdWVcI
Easter was THE day for fashion when I was growing up in the 1950s.
The ladies and girls had new everything -- gloves, dresses, shoes, an Easter bonnet.
Ready for church on Easter morning. I was 2 1/2.
Also popular was the Easter corsage. My dad or my uncle or my grandpa bought the ladies one sometimes, usually an orchid. An orchid was a very delicate and exotic flower in those days.
My mom's was never as huge as Mamie Eisenhower's
but still, it was pretty special.
There are about 27,800 species of orchids,
twice the number of bird species and four times the number of mammal species in the world!
These beauties are blooming at the Coastal Georgia Botanical Gardens in Savannah for the Easter season.
Happy Easter 2016
The main reason we went out to Port Royal Sunday was to see the egrets nesting. I've seen rookeries before but never as low to the ground and as close to people as this one.
We walked quietly along the boardwalk,
came around a bend,
and there they were!
Some were preening and courting, but two or three were sitting on nests already like the two hunkered down on the right.
The nests are surprisingly small and flimsy, made of a few sticks and barely bigger than the bird.
The black birds you see in the trees are cormorants, and at the water level are several coots and two wood ducks. In the trees behind I counted 13 black-crowned night herons roosting. As you can tell by their name, they rest during the day and hunt at night.
Egrets in their breeding plumage are large and gorgeous birds.
They were nearly hunted into extinction for the use of those plumes on ladies' hats in the 1800s.
Wonder how many egrets were needed to make this confection.
Thank goodness they are now protected and it's illegal to hunt them.
(Photo from Vintage Everyday)
We will be going back in about 2 1/2 weeks to see if the first eggs have hatched.
Yesterday was cloudy and rainy in the morning so we waited until afternoon to go check out the heron rookery along the Port Royal Cypress Wetlands Trail.
Wetlands is apparently the new-fangled name for what used to be called a swamp.
The flowers are pink azaleas, which are spectacular this year.
Bald cypress are some of the oldest trees in America. There are some in the water near Mobile, Alabama that can't even be carbon dated because they are older than 50,000 years!
At their base they have these knobby projections that are called knees, cypress knees.
Scientists aren't quite sure of their function but they may serve to anchor the trees in the soft, muddy soil.
In the 1950s lamps made from cypress knees were considered fashionable home decor. My parents brought home a knee from their first trip to Florida and I was fascinated with it, especially its name. I'd never seen a bald cypress tree so I pictured the tree as having legs with knees and ankles instead of a trunk. No one enlightened me so I happily kept this fanciful notion until I was a lot older.
I think my dad did make a lamp from the one they brought home, or maybe it just sat around au naturel on the fireplace mantle or something.
This one is for sale on Etsy as a "vintage" item for $162. Knowing my dad, I'm sure he didn't pay more than $2 for our cypress knee.
I'll show you the main event we came for, the rookery, in my next post.
Posted with Blogsy
