This is beautiful

Turn the light off and put it on full screen and enjoy.

Ocean Sky from Alex Cherney on Vimeo.

Quote from Tolstoy on Ultimate Purpose

A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the bee sucking from the chalice of a flower, and says it exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A bee-keeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it exists to gather honey. Another bee-keeper who has studied the life of the hive more closely, says that the bee gathers pollen-dust to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that it exists to perpetuate its race. A botanist notices that the bee flying with the pollen of a male flower to a pistil fertilizes the latter, and sees in this the purpose of the bees existence. Another, observing the migration of plants, notices that the bee helps in this work, and may say that in this lies the purpose of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted by the first, the second, or any of the processes the human mind can discern. The higher the human intellect rises in the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious it becomes that the ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension. All that is accessible to man is the relation of the life of the bee to other manifestations of life.

Tolstoy in War and Peace (First Epilogue ch. 1)

So what is the ultimate purpose of man then? Procreation – to further our gene pool? Human Progress – to make the world better? Enjoyment of life? Or is there a higher purpose that is beyond our comprehension that might include all of these purposes and add a lot more besides?

A crocodile called Terry.

A 7-year-old Australian boy has been caught on CCTV breaking into a zoo and feeding small animals to the zoo’s crocodile, Terry. A news report from reuters, and some tv news reports below:

My initial thought was that this was a funny odd story – after all, crocodiles eat meat -right? HOw different is this to feeding chicken to a cat? And the croc has a funny name.

However, thie difference is this. the boy seemed to take delight in killing (the report decribes him as ‘bludgeoning’) some of the small animals before he fed them to Terry. It is not out of necessity for him or for the crocodile, which, I presume, was well fed by the zoo. And the boy killed some endangered species. The zoo’s staff don’t seem to be pleased.

Abundance and Thankfulness

Maggi Dawn on abundance and thankfulness in respect to harvest and the cycle of seasons.

“Now you can buy berries, cherries and all manner of exotic fruit and vegetables all year round, yet while we have more to eat we seem to have less enjoyment of it. We eat fast food, we eat too much, too quickly, and don’t seem to have time to savour the taste. Abundance seems not to make us more appreciative; instead it makes us dull and fat.”

Vegetables

Two Beetroots and one straight carrot – the first of our crop of root vegetables grown in our small back yard!

AppleCam

As you can see one of the plants has recovered after it’s cat incident. I transplanted it into a new pot with new soil. The leaves that the cat had chewed off are still visible, but there are new leaves coming in at the top (slightly lighter green). The apple tree is is now being kept safely out of the cat’s reach. The other plant is still alive but struggling after it spent a few days on the floor without any soil.

AppleCam

Disaster!

Well, we went on holiday for a week, and what does the cat get up to? It appears he has knocked the pot onto the ground – possibly chasing a fly -  leaving a mess, and upsetting my apple small trees. I have since repotted them in separate pots, but it looks like one is not going to survive. The other (on the right) might do.

Since taking this photo the naughty cat has chewed off the top two leaves of the good plant. Hopefully it will still live though.

AppleCam

Two seeds have taken a firm root and are going strong. The third died away in the last week. It’s probably about time to transplant these two into separate pots.

AppleCam

After a week away, thanks to some good weather, two of the three apple seedlings are growing well. The other is struggling a bit, possibly due to the bit of dirt on top of the leaf. I’ve just removed this.

AppleCam

I just read this on a gardening website:

Can I plant and grow an Apple tree from Seed
The simple answer is yes, but…….

The ‘yes’ is because you can plant an apple tree seed and there is probably a 30% chance of it germinating and growing to full size. That means if you plant 10 apple seeds you are likely to get around 3 which grow. You can select the healthiest of the three and let it grow to full size.

The ‘but…’ is that you will have to wait for 6 to years to find out if it will produce edible apples – the chance of it producing an edible apple is about 5%. The chance of it being even remotely a tasty edible apple is very, very small. It certainly will not resemble the apple from which the pip came. This is because modern apple trees are a cross between two or more varieties. Further, you will not know which apple tree pollinated the one you have.

Ah well… lets just continue and see what happens.