Renewal

A quickie today in response to the Weekly Photo Challenge: Renewal – the internet’s been dodgy all day, and there’s another storm on its way, so we’re sure to have a blackout and lose it completely.

Ever since I was a child I’ve been fascinated by silt – don’t ask me why, it was certainly not something we ever saw in my part of the world.  When R and I were in Egypt, I remember speculative conversations about how the Aswan High Dam had affected the makeup of the soil along the Nile, particularly when we were in Luxor, amid eye-high fields of sugar cane.  It wasn’t until recently that I got to see and feel freshly exposed silt, and to see it being exploited by farmers.

On a much diminished, but still growling Mekong at the height of the dry season farmers follow the water down the river banks, sewing quick-growing crops into the still moist silt.   These shots featuring the agricultural aspects of the river’s annual renewal of the soils along its banks fill me with a farmer’s delight.

– these are recently sewn peanut seedlings, already vigorous with life.

Staying in Lao, I mentioned the other day that Ban Lahanam Thong,  the ‘wealthy’ weaving village, was receiving supplies of re-roofing materials while I was there – a shot of these renewable resources stacked in readiness for a re-roofing party.

And finally – a photograph of nature fighting back in a not completely satisfactory manner.  This Douglas Pine plantation at the foot of the Glasshouse Mountains along the road from the Sunshine Coast to Brisbane tells the sorry story of land clearance for the purposes of growing an unfriendly ‘crop’.  We can see how the trees have been harvested as though they were so many stalks of wheat or barley.  I found it interesting though, that the pine trees had self-seeded and had begun to re-colonise the harvested land, and wondered just what the plantation-owners would do about that.

The Glasshouse Mountains are close to my new home in Australia.