When French settlers arrived here, they brought with them some amazing dike-building technologies. They claimed some rich farmland from the Bay of Fundy (which has some of the highest tides in the world). That farmland is still productive today.
Earlier this year, I visited Grand-Pré. (It’s about an hour from where I live). I took a wrong turn and ended up at the end of a dirt lane right beside the end of the line of dikes. I was able to get out and take photos because it wasn’t fenced off as part of the nearby farms. I also discovered a “use-at-your-own-risk” hiking trail that follows the inside edge of the dikes.
In this photo, you can see the dike on the left side.
P.S. the tree photos you posted are the same tree that I think of as the Ent tree. And I’ve gone back to fix the spelling of Grand-Pré with the proper accent. I apologize.
All but the bottom image would make fantastic jigsaw puzzles – the last one would be torture, though it would have the nice attribute of not having a huge portion as sky.
They plainly had a source of heavy-duty rock! The dikes where I live were initially made by dragging mud up from the rivers, which enhanced the river channels in terms of flow. More recently a mile-long stretch of dikes got improved using the material from a set of dikes that were being removed to restore a few hundred acres to wetlands, which also served to reduce the chokepoint effect of dikes that had served to turn bay-shore mudflats into pastures.
There’s no shortage of rock here. No shortage at all. This may be one of the reasons they went to such trouble to claim farmland from the ocean – and that was in the 1600’s and 1700’s (before the English forced most of the Acadians out).
I’m sure the dikes here have been repaired many times since then, especially after the hurricanes that have travelled up the U.S. Eastern Seaboard and slammed into us. It’s still an extraordinary feat of engineering.
I discovered something last summer that really rocked my brain: I was hiking a stretch of highway that comes straight from a bridge at the edge of the town to the closest point of a different river, looking for something that blew out of the back of my pickup. In several different places there were mole hills with a very light color that didn’t match the soil of the pastureland at all, so I poked at a couple of them and discovered that they were primarily sand! I really still can’t figure that out; my best hypothesis is that the road was built on what at the time was a big sandbar between two rivers.
It does explain how when I was a teenager and biked that stretch it was level all the way between the bridges but now it rolls up and down as some parts subside slowly. It was fine when the traffic was Model Ts, but as vehicles have gotten heavier the foundation has proven insufficient.
(It’s too bad the country commissioners didn’t have that written up as a project when President Obama signed the law with all the stimulus money that went to local projects – putting a modern foundation under that road will not be cheap.)
Well, I don’t really know. I have French Huguenot ancestors on my mother’s side and English ancestors on my father’s side, but I don’t think any of them were in this area. You never know, though!
Without getting to really steep, non-arable parts of the mountains or coastal swamps, no woodland near me is over about 80 years old. A few trees might be, but not any substantial areas.
It doesn’t take many shuffles of the deck to become an indeterminate mix. I’m a total euro mutt with each of my parents’ grandparents a different nationality.
In the woods behind the house where I grew up there were stumps large enough to pitch a couple of tents on, some about twenty feet across. It made us a bit cynical as kids because the woods there were classed as old growth when probably the oldest trees weren’t more than eighty some years old, while on those massive stumps where we could count rings those massive trees had been over two hundred fifty years.
Amanita mushroom tacos. Made with Amanita persicina formally known as Amanita muscaria var muscaria or sometimes A.M. var persicina and also made with Amanita jacksonii and so hopefully I made it right XD. To quote the anti vaxxers I did my own research XD.
A bunch of older books , and sometimes even new ones, all list them as deadly poisonous but there has not actually been any solid cases of deaths in a century and it’s questioned if they ever actually did. Many people who wrote these books later on admitted it was not deadly but that it has very deadly lookalikes though the lookalikes don’t really look alike or that because it took an extra step to prep to avoid accidental sickness or a long 24 hour sleep they just called it deadly but the reality is that if you mess up and eats handful, you’ll just feel sick and get high and get sleepy. But the sickness is supposed to be really bad. But everyone reports symptoms within half an hour and I’ve been well past that and made two more tacos.
My response
I learned online that Sundew eats insects. If someone is near Sundew, can they see this plant eating insects?
@Randy wrote: I think he said it was very humid, in general, there! But I agree-it is often more comfortable when it is drier, for some people. I personally prefer it humid because plants grow so well then.
My response
So you prefer humidity because plants grows so well, what is it about humidity that causes plants to grow well, is it the water in the air?
What causes water to be mix in the air that is called humidity? Is the water and air mixed or in layers when humidity?
How come some areas on earth has humidity for?
What would happen if earth had zero places of humidity?
Well the way sundews “eats” insects is more like a mushroom and not an animal. When an insect gets into the leaves ( the threads ) they get stuck in the sap it produces that looks like water. It’s similar to the sticky stuff we find in okra. The insects get stuck in it which triggers the leaves to begin to curl in. Then the insect dies and begins to decompose and the nutrients gets absorbed by the plants.
A gross image would be similar to if you were buried in a box in a hole. At the top of the box was a hole surrounded by glue traps and you ate by waiting for what was trapped in it to begin to liquify and drip down into the hole which you kept your mouth at.
