Footnotes to a Conversation, June 14, 2021
Summer Fruit
Little Quail Ridge Orchards will be back at the Saskatoon Farmers’ Market this coming weekend with BC cherries – yeah! [Saskatoon Farmers’ Market]
Watermelon seems like such a quintessentially North American summer fruit, but its closest relative is the Cordofan melon from Sudan in North East Africa. Egyptian tomb paintings indicate that raw watermelon was eaten as dessert in 4360 BP in the Nile Valley. “Over 200 million tonnes of watermelons are produced globally every year and is one of the top 10 most important crops in Central Asia.” [Kew Royal Botanic Gardens]
A Botanical Rainbow
One of the highlights of my visit to Kew Gardens a few years ago was the exhibit of botanical illustrations. Here are a few examples demonstrating artists’ ability to capture flowers’ vivid beauty. [Kew Royal Botanic Gardens]
Waste-Free Living
A café in Japan on a commuter route is offering curbside green tea pickup. “Customers purchase a bottle that is pre-packed with green tea leaves. They can then enjoy the tea at the office once they’ve had a chance to add water to the brew. Each bottle can be used three times for full-flavored green tea. At that point, customers return the bottle to the stand and get a new one.” [Inhabitat]
Ant Brew in Lahti, Finland, is making a series of Lost Potential beers to promote the waste-less circular economy. Now, there have been lots of beers made with surplus products (e.g. bread) or locally-foraged ingredients, but this is the first time I’ve heard of a brewery collecting the goose poop that is making a mess of the city’s parks and using it to smoke (in a food-safe way!) the malt to make a stout beer. [Food and Wine]
A Beer in the Loire
Speaking of beer, I thoroughly enjoyed reading A Beer in the Loire by Tommy Barnes. Barnes, a somewhat clownish Brit with absolutely no experience making beer, decides it would be a good way to make a living now he and his wife have moved to France. I laughed out loud at least once per chapter and enjoyed his descriptions of the châteaux and markets of the Loire valley.
Footnotes to a Conversation is a weekly Monday feature covering an assortment of topics that I’ve come across in the preceding week – books, art, travel, food, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
If you share my love of nature, I suggest you also read EcoFriendly Sask that I publish in collaboration with my brother, Andrew. Check out EcoFriendly Sask’s Nature Companion, a free nature app for Canada’s four western provinces (downloadable directly from the website).