Friday, January 17, 2014

What are gleanings?

I love the name of my blog but it is not self- explanatory.
My new in-my-mind-only blog will have a menu explaining the term Gleanings and  have examples.

The new blog may be a while so I'll start here.

Gleanings

pl n
1. (Agriculture) the useful remnants of a crop that can be gathered from the field after harvesting

This is the meaning I grew up with living on a farm. Collecting the missed cobs of corn into sacks for chicken feed after the large harvesters had chopped acres and acres into silage.
Cutting the small broccoli shoots that sprout after the main head was removed.


This sort of thing is now done on farms in an organized way to yield tons and tons of food that would other wise not be harvested.

I obviously take a more creative use of the term!

Yesterday had a spur of the moment gleaning opportunity. There are still piles of broken branches from the recent ice storm sitting curb side.  Spot and I stopped at a pile of curly willow branches and  gleaned  an armful of lovely twigs.
I'm not taking a photo cuz they are outside on top of ice and now covered in fluffy snow.
They look exactly like these

And we plan on using them to decorate the urn at the front door in the spring.  I wonder if they will sprout leaves?

Blog posts need photos right?  So here is the urn still decked out in red before Christmas and all the ice and snow.