Driving home from Tutwell...

[bunn]

I had to go to Tutwell.  It's close enough that I could have walked, if I'd had all day, but I did not so I took Helga the Saab.  For some reason I took photos on the way home.


I kept some distance from this, for the hill ahead was steep, the trailer high above me, and gravity was the only thing visibly holding the Big Pile of Earth from falling off the back.

I don't know why these are stored by the roadside, but they are.  I keep seeing people doing... vegetable-herding or whatever it is that they do with these things and a scoopy truck and not quite having the nerve to stop and ask.   At a guess, I'm thinking cattle-fodder.  Could be wrong.  But still a slight mystery that they are in a heap by the road.

Helga Saab home again under a rainbow.

Comments

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

The one behind the truck reminds me of driving around where I grew up!

The picture with the rainbow is stunning!

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

I think the penultimate photo is of sugar beet, for cattle fodder, although I am by no means sure.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

I had initially supposed they were rutabagas (aka mangel-wurzels), since they are also grown as fodder in the UK, but on enlarging the photo those do indeed have a beet-like look about them. (There is a thriving industry in North Dakota making sugar from beets. I have driven past many many trucks carrying beets.)

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

(Actually mangelwurzels are beets, whereas rutabagas are more related to turnips, but you are not alone in this misapprehension: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-man1.htm )

For years I believed rutabagas to be an entirely fantastical vegetable, since my only encounter with the word was courtesy of David Eddings' Belgariad fantasy novels. It was quite odd to discover that they were not only real but boringly familiar. And even now, despite knowing they are just swedes *and* despite knowing that the whole point of the rutabaga thing in the books was as an archetype of common ordinariness, I can't help *still* associating the word with a feeling of otherworldly magic!

It is the opposite I suppose of the effect created by Stephen Donaldson's 'High Lord Kevin' from the Thomas Covenant books. I imagine that was supposed to sound serious and respect-worthy, and maybe it does in the US, but to UK ears Kevin is a name whose associations are pretty much the opposite of heroic fantasy - see for example Harry Enfield's character Kevin the Teenager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_the_Teenager

/tangent

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Aha! I was misinformed! We do not call rutabagas swedes here, I just call them nasty (they are on my list of Vegetables Which Other People Consider Edible). But then we have a rather significant population of people who came from Scandahoovia here in the upper Midwest and "Swede" means something entirely different. ;-)

[timetiger.livejournal.com]

Such lovely colors.

[puddleshark.livejournal.com]

What pleasingly rural scenes! I feel like the mystery veg pile should be mangelwurzels, for tradition's sake, though I dare say they are something far more modern.

And I love the shot of Helga the Magical Saab...

[bunn.livejournal.com]

The name mangelwurzel is a fine and lovely thing.

[dinahprincedaly.livejournal.com]

That first photo is magic, even more magic for me than the rainbow over the Saab :)