Orchids and apples

It's pretty cold this morning, and the next three or four mornings are supposed to be cold too. When I got up this morning, I looked out the north window of the loft and I saw sparkling lights through the trees. At first I thought they might be some kind of reflection in the window glass, but I couldn't see any lights in the house that would be causing reflections. Then I realized that the owners of the vineyard had set out smudge pots to protect the vines down below from freezing. I hope for them that the pots are effective. See Walt's blog for photos.

Depending on how much frost there is a kilometer out west from our house, these orchids might be finished for the year. I'm not sure how frost-tolerant they are. I stood between the orchid pictured above and the rising sun so that I could get a photo of it in shade.

The photo above gives you an idea of how small the orchids are. They are wild, so they aren't planted in a bed but are spread out in a long strip of grassland about a hundred meters long next to a vineyard parcel.

I'm posting all these photos now rather than spreading them out over several days. I'll go out for my walk with the dog and inspect the place where the orchids are growing to see if they've survived the frosty morning.

Bright sunlight at sunrise makes for very high-contrast photos.

Remember that you can click (twice) on the images to see them at full size.

In my title today, I mention apples. About every other year we get a bumper crop of them from the four trees in our yard. We spend days and days raking and picking up fallen apples so that Walt can run the lawn mower under the trees. This morning's freeze may take care of that problem by killing the blossoms on the trees. The same thing happened on April 17 a few years ago. We'll see.