Dogs and Children

I got to wondering how dogs compare to children in size and weight.  I guess there are dogs that compare to adults as well - think of a male Bullmastiff at a 110 to 130 pounds.  That weight would be a female human adult at five feet four inches.  Chihuahuas weigh around 6 pounds, so that would be a newborn baby girl (of low weight as newborn weight starts at 7 lbs) and almost 20 inches tall. The average Golden Retriever is 70 lbs so that translates to a 10 year old boy.   Whatever a dog's size, they are willing partners for an outdoor walk in the woods.  We can't be sure what a 10 year old boy would want to do this Saturday. Where will we go to get the best Fall colour experience? The ontarioparks.com website has a Fall Colour Map HERE.  You can go to Algonquin Park right now and see good colour due to cool temperatures over the last few days.  The information includes the report date, dominant colour, colour change and best viewing.  Colour change looks like a percentage colour and percentage leaf fall.  So in Algonquin right now the colour change is 50% and leaf fall 10%. There were no Niagara parks included in the report. So I checked out the Fall Colour Progression Report from this SITE.  The colour change in Niagara is 0%.  Included is Beamer Conservation Area - that's Grimsby's park on the escarpment.  Also covered are Brock's Monument, Ball's Falls and Niagara Falls.  Burlington's Royal Botanical Gardens has its own entry with 0% change.  So we're not yet into the Fall colours here in Niagara. So we'll use the colours of pumpkins for our Fall image today.  This is Hildreth's on Greenlane, a fruit and vegetable stand.

Grimsby's Best Known Door

Grimsby's best known door is straight-forward - it is the front door to the Museum.  The regency-style entrance of the Grimsby Museum was the original doorway from the Marlatat Inn (1855) that once stood on Main Street.  Nothing gets retrieved for Toronto's best known door.  The majority searches bring Doors Open Ontario results from over the years. We can find the world's most famous doors: 221b Baker Street, London St. Peter's Basilica, Rome The Columbus Doors The Gates of Paradise, Florence 10 Downing Street, London We can identify some famous movie doors: The round hobbit door The Wizard of Oz door to the Emerald City Noting Hill's blue door The wood entrance gates to Jurassic Park It does seem unusual that there aren't more articles on specific doors to see.  Doors hold a special place in literature - a metaphor or allegory symbolizing change and transformation. To be given the key to a door is significant.  There are many designs and embellishments to doors over the millennia   The oldest door?  A Neolithic wood door was found in Switzerland that is more than 5,000 years old.   So here's our wonderful Museum front door at Open Doors last week, and then its representation as an ornament on last year's "Doors of Grimsby Christmas Tree" at the Fantasy of Trees. I took the picture and the next day the door ornament was gone.  I guess it was too cute - I thought it was.

Open the Doors to Petal Power

I got to only a few of the stops of Grimsby Open Doors Day on Saturday.  I definitely made it to Van Geest Greenhouses - growers of Gerber flowers for the floral trade. They are located close to the Museum on the western side of town.  I can imagine it would have been farmer fields when they built the greenhouses on Kerman Avenue. The greenhouse dates back to 1890.   This would make it less efficient than today's high-technology operations.  In talking with one of the owners, I found out that their second location is on Seventh Avenue in St. Catharines in a modern facility. That's very close to Brian's Lilycrest Gardens hybridizing field.  It is located on Fifth Avenue. This pretty picture is not the scene that awaited us for Open Doors Grimsby.  I realized it was the setting for a Petals and Plates dinner.  This is an initiative of Flowers Ontario and the Toronto Botanical Gardens.  Gourmet meals from the chef at Grand Oaks were served in 2 greenhouses in Niagara and a third location near Guelph in 2018.  I hope this is something to look forward to in 2019.   You can see that Gerberas are great big daisy flowers - they popular in florist bouquets.  They are showy, long-lasting and come it a lot of colours. In the greenhouse, the plants live about 2 years in pots and continuously bloom.  They are fussy, though, and take a lot of skill to grow. I learned  this when I planted some Gerberas in the garden this year.  I wanted a continuous line of red along the front of the garden bed.  In the shade were Begonias, but they burn in the sun, so I put in Gerberas to keep that line moving.  I knew from last year that they needed a lot of water.  I had them in pots on the outside kitchen windowsill.  Even in the garden I found they needed watering every day.  They wilted quickly whenever water was needed.  And they wanted a lot of fertilizer to ensure a continuous bloom of red flowers. For my colour line next year, I am counting on the red annual Salvia as a good choice. It comes in a brilliant orange-red and is continuously blooming.  That's if I stay with the orange red colour line.

Sep 24 - Open a Grimsby Door circa 1788

It was at Open Doors Grimsby on Saturday.  Grimsby is an interesting town historically. It was the site of Engagement of the Forty.  "Forty" is Forty Mile Creek and it is known as a landmark "engagement".  (An engagement is a small-size combat, often part of a battle.) This plaque was presented by the Historic Sites and Monuments board of Canada in June 1955: Here at the Forty Mile Creek, on the 8th of June 1813, American Forces, retreating after the battle of Stoney Creek, were bombarded by the British Flotilla under Sir James Lucas Yeo. Indians and groups of the forth and fifth Regiments Lincon Milita joined in the attack and created such confusion in the enemy ranks that they abandoned this position and retreated to Fort George.  I was at Nelles Manor on Saturday and took a picture of the couple who restored it over 43 years and had it designated as a museum in 2013. They are Barry and Linda Coutts.  I stood at the second floor bedroom window looking north and imagined the view to the lake that would have been.   You can see the video of the Nelles Manor story HERE.  Barry and Linda are active and avid historians and  have many stories about the area. The reason Nelles Manor is so important is that this is the oldest house between Kingston and Niagara-on-the-Lake and was built 1788-1798. The original Nelles property was 3,000 acres.  That would have covered from Main Street to the Lake, and then over to Forty Creek where Robert built a mill.   Nelles came here from New York because the the American Revolutionary war, being forced to flee in 1783. This explains the timing of building the house.

Apple - a Genome Winner

Apple - the fruit - is considered one the world's healthiest foods.  It is cultivated worldwide, having originated in Central Asia.  Its wild ancestor, Malus sieversii is still found there today.  Consider that apples have been grown for thousands of years in Asia and Europe, and came to North America by European colonists. Golden Delicious was used to sequence the complete genome of the apple - there are about 57,000 genes, the highest number of any plant genome studied to date. It has more genes than a human (about 30,000).   This from Wikipedia:  The center of diversity of the genus Malus is in eastern present-day Turkey. The apple tree was perhaps the earliest tree to be cultivated,and its fruits have been improved through selection over thousands of years. Alexander the Great is credited with finding dwarfed apples in Kazakhstan in 328 BCE. Winter apples, picked in late autumn and stored just above freezing, have been an important food in Asia and Europe for millennia. Of the many Old World plants that the Spanish introduced to Chiloé Archipelago in the 16th century, apple trees became particularly well adapted. Apples were introduced to North America by colonists in the 17th century, and the first apple orchard on the North American continent was planted in Boston by Reverend William Blaxton in 1625. The only apples native to North America are crab apples, which were once called "common apples". Apple cultivars brought as seed from Europe were spread along Native American trade routes, as well as being cultivated on colonial farms. An 1845 United States apples nursery catalogue sold 350 of the "best" cultivars, showing the proliferation of new North American cultivars by the early 19th century. Today there are considered to be 2,500 varieties of apples grown in the U.S. There are 7,500 varieties grown throughout the world. It is market day in Grimsby, and perhaps I'll see the beloved Honey Crisp Apple available.  This picture shows Grimsby farm Silmaril on the escarpment a few years ago.  It has a distinctive combination - chickens, apples, and labrador retrievers.

Fall Alert

We have an extra day of summer this year - the Equinox is at 9:54pm on Saturday September 22nd.  It can occur any time between September 21 and 24.  The full moon is September is called the Harvest Moon because of the tradition of farmers bringing in the harvest around this time.  Equinox Facts from Reader's Digest: "There’s a long-standing tale that you can stand eggs up on end during the first day of fall because of the unusual gravitational pull the sun exerts that day. According to the Miami Herald, brooms can be balanced on this special day as well. And, in fact, it is possible to balance eggs (and brooms) on the first day of fall, or on any other day of the year—an astronomer named Frank Ghigo tested it and published a paper in 1987 explaining that certain eggs balance more easily than others". "Once the Bastille had been stormed and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was passed, French revolutionaries tried to make some radical changes to the day-to-day workings of society—they wanted more rational systems that did not depend on Christian traditions. They implemented the metric system, using decimals to break down kilograms and meters (replacing the non-standard measurement systems that made trade inefficient), and in 1793 they started using the French Republican Calendar, which broke down each of the 12 months into three 10-day weeks. They back-dated the beginning of the year to September 22, 1792, the day after France had been declared a republic—that first year was meant to be “year one” of the new era. Napoleon took the country back to the Gregorian calendar in 1806." A look at the Mackinac Bridge today - doesn't that look like Autumn weather to you?

Liza Fuller - Grand Prize Winner in Home Hardware's Canadian Garden Contest

We had our Trillium Award Celebration evening this past week.  I get to do the presentation.  It consists of a picture of each front garden (viewable from the street), and then a commentary About a notable feature of their garden and of garden design.  They receive their Trillium 'stake' from our Mayor - Bob Bentley.  At the end we take a group photo - a panorama that I piece together of the whole group. One of our Trillium winners this year (and most years) is Liza Fuller, who lives at 472 Wolverton Rd in Grimsby.  This is on the escarpment and is a very large rural property with a central pond with gardens surrounding it.  It is very notable from the road - it has the Wow Factor that we look for in Curb Appeal. Liza has won the grand prize of the Home Hardware Canada's Backyard Garden Contest.  There were more than 500 gardens entered from across Canada. Yesterday Raymond Carriere, the Founding President of Communities in Bloom presented Liza with her first place award - $1,000 - at our Grimsby Home Hardware.   Liza thanked us for our Grimsby Garden Club website and Facebook coverage of her award. People stopped in all day yesterday to congratulate her and see the garden.  Here's the Communities in Bloom link to the contest HERE.  It doesn't show the awards yet.

Origami in the Garden

Origami in the garden was the theme of the artwork at the Minneapolis Arboretum Garden.  This was the most beautiful of the sculptures.  Set in a pond, it was isolatable so can be admired with the hint of the garden that surrounds it.  Buddhist monks carried paper to Japan during the 6th century.  Japanese origami dates from this period and was used for religious ceremonial purposes. Origami butterflies were used during Shinto weddings to represent the bride and groom in the 1600's. Our picture today shows cranes in flight.  Cranes are the best known design.  The crane is auspicious in Japanese culture.  Legend says that anyone who folds one thousand paper cranes will have their heart's desire come true. The thousand cranes is a poignant story of the 20th century.  A young Japanese girl, Sadako Sasaki was exposed to radiation of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.  By the time she was twelve in 1955, she was dying of leukemia.  She decided to fold one thousand origami cranes so that she could live.  She saw that other children in her ward were dying, and she realized that would not survive. She wished instead for world peace and an end to suffering.  Her thousand cranes are said to have been completed after her death. There is a statue of Sadako in the Hiroshima Peace Park:  a girl standing with her hands outstretched, a paper crane flying from her fingertips.  Every year the statue is adorned with thousands of wreaths of a thousand origami cranes.

A Day to Remember

Today is a special day in the United States.  But my post isn't about that event on that day. It is about our drive to Minneapolis. On our way to Minneapolis, we travelled on this road located along the east coast of Lake Michigan.  It is considered one of Michigan's scenic drives for its over-reaching trees that often form a tunnel.  It has its own Wikipedia entry HERE.  In is description is "Note the lack of centre line".  This is part of what makes it a scenic and enjoyable experience. This is considered one of the top 10 motorcycle rides in North America.  I didn't find it in the top 10 drives in America. Ot didn't make the top of the list of Michigan - Woodward Avenue in Detroit did because of a car rally each year.  On the other hand, the roads that did make it look wonderful.  Here's the thrills article HERE.  So we might want to look up the top 100 drives to see if it is on the list.   Our second picture is the vineyard of the winery along the drive.  The entire vineyard was covered - it made it look like a water fountain