STOP: HISTORY TIME
Nov. 30th, 2010 09:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beboots EAT ORGANIC, GUYS.
My era supervisor from Fort Edmonton this summer posted a bunch of pictures he'd taken over the season. This was one of them. I was helping out in the fort's garden one day (we grow a relatively small garden - historically it would have been planted surrounding three of the four sides of the fort, outside the walls), and I was pulling carrots for stew ingredients... and I almost fell over backwards when I pulled this carrot up because it was so BIG. It's like, as big as our beets, which were like half the size of my skull. It was purple on the outside, and bright orange-yellow on the inside: not a beet that I mistook for a carrot or something.
We don't use any chemical fertilizers (IF IT DIDN'T EXIST IN 1846 IT IS ANATHEMA TO US), so those who bitch about organic foods not being as good, I thrust THIS example into your face!
As a side note, it was delicious in bison stew.
As a further side note, we also grew kyle, two different types of cabbage (one green, one "red"/purple, each about twice as large as my head), two or three different kinds of potatoes, beets, spinach, carrots (both orange and an older, purple breed), onions, some kind of green bean, scarlet runner beans, and pumpkins. And possibly other things I've forgotten. LOTS OF WEEDING, guys. But in-character weeding.
Here, have a photo of Mr. Ted Harriott in the Trade Store, demonstrating the proper use of a jump trap.
Also, group photo of the Fort interpreters. Note Mike on the far left (you remember Mike, don't you?) posing with a functioning bear trap. We all picked props/artifacts we liked to pose with for this photo. I have a lamp. Ted Harriott (the gentleman in the hat) isn't posing with a barrel of whiskey (though he was a notorious alcoholic after the death of his son (smothered when his wife rolled over in bed, I think) and his wife subsequently went insane and ran off into the woods and, presumably, died as well). He's actually holding a barrel of gunpowder: "XXX" means "danger". It's only because of illegal american whiskey traders coming up from the border, smuggling in moonshine in old gunpowder barrels (sometimes, uh, not washing them out first, so: yuck. Also probably poisonous) that we get the connection between XXX and whiskey. LESSON LEARNED.
One last photo from the Dominion Day parade: Bryce/Kona and I with the Hudson's Bay Company Flag. Note the similarity with what was Canada's national flag until like the 1960s.
(Photos courtesy of Ryan Mullan, Fort Era Supervisor)
My era supervisor from Fort Edmonton this summer posted a bunch of pictures he'd taken over the season. This was one of them. I was helping out in the fort's garden one day (we grow a relatively small garden - historically it would have been planted surrounding three of the four sides of the fort, outside the walls), and I was pulling carrots for stew ingredients... and I almost fell over backwards when I pulled this carrot up because it was so BIG. It's like, as big as our beets, which were like half the size of my skull. It was purple on the outside, and bright orange-yellow on the inside: not a beet that I mistook for a carrot or something.
We don't use any chemical fertilizers (IF IT DIDN'T EXIST IN 1846 IT IS ANATHEMA TO US), so those who bitch about organic foods not being as good, I thrust THIS example into your face!
As a side note, it was delicious in bison stew.
As a further side note, we also grew kyle, two different types of cabbage (one green, one "red"/purple, each about twice as large as my head), two or three different kinds of potatoes, beets, spinach, carrots (both orange and an older, purple breed), onions, some kind of green bean, scarlet runner beans, and pumpkins. And possibly other things I've forgotten. LOTS OF WEEDING, guys. But in-character weeding.
Here, have a photo of Mr. Ted Harriott in the Trade Store, demonstrating the proper use of a jump trap.
Also, group photo of the Fort interpreters. Note Mike on the far left (you remember Mike, don't you?) posing with a functioning bear trap. We all picked props/artifacts we liked to pose with for this photo. I have a lamp. Ted Harriott (the gentleman in the hat) isn't posing with a barrel of whiskey (though he was a notorious alcoholic after the death of his son (smothered when his wife rolled over in bed, I think) and his wife subsequently went insane and ran off into the woods and, presumably, died as well). He's actually holding a barrel of gunpowder: "XXX" means "danger". It's only because of illegal american whiskey traders coming up from the border, smuggling in moonshine in old gunpowder barrels (sometimes, uh, not washing them out first, so: yuck. Also probably poisonous) that we get the connection between XXX and whiskey. LESSON LEARNED.
One last photo from the Dominion Day parade: Bryce/Kona and I with the Hudson's Bay Company Flag. Note the similarity with what was Canada's national flag until like the 1960s.
Yeah, the Hudson's Bay Company was pretty much its own country for several hundred years. It owned more land than what was in all of Europe.
That is all for now. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.
That is all for now. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.
(Photos courtesy of Ryan Mullan, Fort Era Supervisor)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-12-01 05:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-01 05:13 am (UTC)I still don't really "get" the title. But then again, I almost never QUITE get the meanings of pseudo-English titles for Japanese series. ;)
no subject
Date: 2010-12-01 11:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-01 04:03 pm (UTC)Personally, I'm more of a fan of venison than bison: they have different aftertastes. Maybe it's also because bison are protected - the only wild ones around are in Elk Island National Park - and this one was bought from a man who raises them commercially... so after several generations they're more like cows in their fat reserves. They're not as lean as wild venison. Still, tasty!