autumn is icumen in
Sep. 21st, 2019 12:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
corviIt is not technically autumn yet, but the rowan trees are full of red-orange berries and happy birds clambering about upside-down to get to them. The crows drop acorns in the streets and wait for the cars to drive over them and crack them open. Fallen fir cones sprout dozens of tiny yellow mushrooms, gleaming in the dew. There are foghorns every morning. The sea is green, and there are maple leaves floating in it, even kilometres from land. We've made crabapple jam, and our pumpkins ripen on the vines.
In a little while, I will complain that the sun rises while I am on the ferry to work and sets while I am on the ferry home, so that other islands receive light, but my home is forever in the dark, and I see it only in memory and moonlight. But right now, everything is shining and silvered, the air tastes of woodsmoke and mist cloaks the mountains, and it is lovely.
Last weekend was the Fall Fair, which is pretty great. My favourite competition is Funniest Vegetable Shape, which is just rows and rows of vegetable butts. Butt-shaped potatoes. Butt-shaped tomatoes. Suspiciously cleft carrots and callipygian pumpkins. All arranged fussily on identical white plates on rows of equally-spaced shelving, and solemnly contemplated by judges who stroke their chins and say "hm," aware of the sacred responsibility upon them, the awesome gravity of the situation. Which is the funniest vegetable butt? Who amoung us truly deserves the vegetable butt blue ribbon?
This I vow: some year I too will have a vegetable butt to enter into the contest! But this was not the year.
I did enter Funniest Egg Shape with a very mildly weird egg, a extra-pointy egg laid by Moustache, our extra-pointy old chicken. It's definitely not a contest winner; I just wanted to enter. Our slightly weird egg:
Other good contests include Biggest Maple Leaf (here's my adult hand with the second-place winner):
Vegetable sculpture:
There are zucchini races, where people grow the hugest possible zucchinis, stick wheels on them, and race them on a downhill track. There are sheepdog herding trials. There's a chicken race, where in theory you put the chickens at one end of a pen and food at the other and the chickens are supposed to race to the food, but every single year the chickens ignore the food and people have to get in there and awkwardly chase them, while the chickens stubbornly dodge the humans and retreat to the wrong end of the track, much to the delight of the audience. There's a raffle where you buy a small square in a pasture, and then they turn a calf loose in the pasture with everyone crowding the fence and shouting, and whoever bought the square the calf poops on first wins a thousand bucks.
It is colourful and chaotic and wonderful.
There are contests for bouquets of poisonous plants, bouquets of plants displayed in rain boots. For best decorated cakes and best tasting cookies.raverdog won third place for their amazing apple cookies! (You can't have any, I ate them all.) Biggest pumpkin. Best scarecrow. Best display of medicinal plants. Jams and home-brewed alcohol. Honeycomb. Kimchi. Smoked salmon. Crabapple jam.
There are ratings for every possible vegetable and fruit (and "other" categories just in case you farm anything really exotic).
For every old fashioned craft you can imagine: blacksmithed items and hand-knotted halters and whittled spoons and handmade books and flint-knapping, dying and spinning and weaving, pottery and leatherworking. For new fangled things: lego sculpture and duct tape creations. Fly tying and knitting and crochet.
There's a giant scotch egg trophy. (A hard boiled egg wrapped and sausage and bread crumbs and deep fried.) Unlike every other food item you can enter to be judged, there is never any uneaten scotch egg left over.
And, of course, livestock. A curious Ayam Cemani chicken wondering about the edibility of my phone. I want one someday; they have a gene mutation that hugely increases pigment production. Their skin is black, as are their muscles/meat, bones, internal organs, combs, beaks, and claws. They lay white eggs, though.
It was painful - mostly in a good way - to look at the goats and sheep. I still miss ours so much. (Also, normal sheep are so small! What the heck breed are Gracie and Cody?!)
Besides a mildly weird egg, I entered a kusudama in the papercraft competition. Kusudama (literally "medicine ball") were traditionally made by sewing together medicinal flowers or leaves into a radiating spherical shape, though the modern form is made with small folded paper shapes sewn together instead. I made a starfish-themed kusudama from a design created by Tomoko Fuse. It celebrates the Secret Starfish Hangoutjuli showed me. When you take the ferry at low tide, after they've lifted the ramp, there's a brief window when you can peer back from the departing ferry and see hundreds of bright purple Pisaster ochraceus starfish clustered on the concrete piling holding up the ferry dock.
This island got hit hard during the 2014 Starfish Wasting Syndrome outbreak. When we first moved here, there were very few starfish. It's fun and hopeful to see that happy bumpy violet mess.
Which was fun, but the thing I'm happiest with is my entry in the landscape competition. I've been trying to do something like this for years, and sort of threw it together in the week before the Fair, unsure if it was going to even be possible. I'm so please with how it came out.
Three layers of cut black paper. Three layers of translucent grey paper. LEDs at the back. Fog and sunrise. It's called "My Home Is You."
I want to make more illuminated papercuts; it worked out very much as I imagined. (juli took this evocative photo of it.)
One of our friends saw the piece at the fair, and said, "it looks like your house!" I didn't quite mean to do that, but she's not wrong. The autumn fog has been curled on our mountain, like a cat on warm laundry in a basket, nearly every day.
Next year I hope to take on the sacred honor of a vegetable butt.
In a little while, I will complain that the sun rises while I am on the ferry to work and sets while I am on the ferry home, so that other islands receive light, but my home is forever in the dark, and I see it only in memory and moonlight. But right now, everything is shining and silvered, the air tastes of woodsmoke and mist cloaks the mountains, and it is lovely.
Last weekend was the Fall Fair, which is pretty great. My favourite competition is Funniest Vegetable Shape, which is just rows and rows of vegetable butts. Butt-shaped potatoes. Butt-shaped tomatoes. Suspiciously cleft carrots and callipygian pumpkins. All arranged fussily on identical white plates on rows of equally-spaced shelving, and solemnly contemplated by judges who stroke their chins and say "hm," aware of the sacred responsibility upon them, the awesome gravity of the situation. Which is the funniest vegetable butt? Who amoung us truly deserves the vegetable butt blue ribbon?
This I vow: some year I too will have a vegetable butt to enter into the contest! But this was not the year.
I did enter Funniest Egg Shape with a very mildly weird egg, a extra-pointy egg laid by Moustache, our extra-pointy old chicken. It's definitely not a contest winner; I just wanted to enter. Our slightly weird egg:
Other good contests include Biggest Maple Leaf (here's my adult hand with the second-place winner):
Vegetable sculpture:
There are zucchini races, where people grow the hugest possible zucchinis, stick wheels on them, and race them on a downhill track. There are sheepdog herding trials. There's a chicken race, where in theory you put the chickens at one end of a pen and food at the other and the chickens are supposed to race to the food, but every single year the chickens ignore the food and people have to get in there and awkwardly chase them, while the chickens stubbornly dodge the humans and retreat to the wrong end of the track, much to the delight of the audience. There's a raffle where you buy a small square in a pasture, and then they turn a calf loose in the pasture with everyone crowding the fence and shouting, and whoever bought the square the calf poops on first wins a thousand bucks.
It is colourful and chaotic and wonderful.
There are contests for bouquets of poisonous plants, bouquets of plants displayed in rain boots. For best decorated cakes and best tasting cookies.
raverdog won third place for their amazing apple cookies! (You can't have any, I ate them all.) Biggest pumpkin. Best scarecrow. Best display of medicinal plants. Jams and home-brewed alcohol. Honeycomb. Kimchi. Smoked salmon. Crabapple jam.There are ratings for every possible vegetable and fruit (and "other" categories just in case you farm anything really exotic).
For every old fashioned craft you can imagine: blacksmithed items and hand-knotted halters and whittled spoons and handmade books and flint-knapping, dying and spinning and weaving, pottery and leatherworking. For new fangled things: lego sculpture and duct tape creations. Fly tying and knitting and crochet.
There's a giant scotch egg trophy. (A hard boiled egg wrapped and sausage and bread crumbs and deep fried.) Unlike every other food item you can enter to be judged, there is never any uneaten scotch egg left over.
And, of course, livestock. A curious Ayam Cemani chicken wondering about the edibility of my phone. I want one someday; they have a gene mutation that hugely increases pigment production. Their skin is black, as are their muscles/meat, bones, internal organs, combs, beaks, and claws. They lay white eggs, though.
It was painful - mostly in a good way - to look at the goats and sheep. I still miss ours so much. (Also, normal sheep are so small! What the heck breed are Gracie and Cody?!)
Besides a mildly weird egg, I entered a kusudama in the papercraft competition. Kusudama (literally "medicine ball") were traditionally made by sewing together medicinal flowers or leaves into a radiating spherical shape, though the modern form is made with small folded paper shapes sewn together instead. I made a starfish-themed kusudama from a design created by Tomoko Fuse. It celebrates the Secret Starfish Hangout
juli showed me. When you take the ferry at low tide, after they've lifted the ramp, there's a brief window when you can peer back from the departing ferry and see hundreds of bright purple Pisaster ochraceus starfish clustered on the concrete piling holding up the ferry dock.This island got hit hard during the 2014 Starfish Wasting Syndrome outbreak. When we first moved here, there were very few starfish. It's fun and hopeful to see that happy bumpy violet mess.
Which was fun, but the thing I'm happiest with is my entry in the landscape competition. I've been trying to do something like this for years, and sort of threw it together in the week before the Fair, unsure if it was going to even be possible. I'm so please with how it came out.
Three layers of cut black paper. Three layers of translucent grey paper. LEDs at the back. Fog and sunrise. It's called "My Home Is You."
I want to make more illuminated papercuts; it worked out very much as I imagined. (
juli took this evocative photo of it.)One of our friends saw the piece at the fair, and said, "it looks like your house!" I didn't quite mean to do that, but she's not wrong. The autumn fog has been curled on our mountain, like a cat on warm laundry in a basket, nearly every day.
Next year I hope to take on the sacred honor of a vegetable butt.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-22 03:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-22 10:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-22 01:15 pm (UTC)Also Connor's elementary school had cow poop bingo as a fundraiser one year. They decided to go back to basket raffles and chicken bbqs after that.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-22 05:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-23 04:51 pm (UTC)Goth botanist high five! (Also cracking up at "But not, like, permanently.")
I'd wanted to compete this year, but my vague plans fell through when I realized that the foxglove was done blooming by mid-September, and I did not do the research to plan an alternate bouquet. We don't have rhododendrons on our property, which is too bad. How great would a Mad Honey bouquet be?
no subject
Date: 2019-09-23 12:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-23 11:21 pm (UTC)Now I want to have an entry for best display of medicinal plants that is something growing in a pharmacy pill bottle with a srs bsns pharmacy label on it with the plant name etc. Also I want to inspect your starfish hideout.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-24 01:33 am (UTC)VEGGIE BUTTS
no subject
Date: 2019-09-26 03:46 am (UTC)And that papercraft landscape is