Another Pair Of Eyes

Parsnip

May 1, 2009 on 11:44 pm | In Life, Photography | 3 Comments

I’ve had really strange cravings recently. Not just any old cravings either, but the dread ‘green fingers’ drive. I want to garden. I want to grow things, and weed, and tend to plants and stuff.

Yes, it’s true. I have offically become old.

It all started with an unlikely parsnip (aside: do you know that practially no-one in Holland even knows what a parsnip is?) which I found in the fridge after the easter break. This particular parsnip, left for a fortnight in the dark cold fridge, had not gone mouldy but instead had sprouted. It looked a little pale, and the main taproot had, of course, been cut off by the supermarket, but I thought hey: let’s give it a chance. I went outside that very morning and planted it (not very deep, I might add – the lack of any digging tools finer than a small rock combined with the fact I needed to keep my nails clean as was seeing patients that day meant digging a parsnip-sized hole was harder than you might expect).

As you can see, it’s not dead yet three weeks further down the line, which is quite a lot more than I expected. In fact, it’s still going strong – I’m just hoping that it’s managed to grow some roots such that when the parsnip part of it ‘runs out’ it can continue to thrive in the rather rubbish soil. I hold better hopes for my little seedy pepper and chilli plants though, despite them not having germinated yet. Still, I’m glad its doing well for now.

Other exciting news, for me at least – yesterday I blew £80 of savings money and bought a new lens with, wonder of wonders, autofocus. It’s a Tamron 70-300mm zoom, and it’s all big and fat and awesome looking (and also, with the application of dark glasses and a hood, very stalkerish). It focuses by itself. You don’t know how exciting that is. Anyway, I’ve yet to take it out for a proper spin which I will do at some point, but just playing in the garden with it’s zoomy not-quite-a-real-macro mode got me a rather nice close up of this:

The photo is a crop, admittedly, but it’s a big one (when I’ve not cut half the size out for this blog) and pretty sharp. I am pleased =) Hopefully I have successfully managed to make all these photos link to (slightly) bigger versions of them. Size remains limited though: saves on bandwidth and means I keep my originals to myself =D