Palm trees need a lot of maintenance. The extra fronds must be trimmed about 3 times a year. The brown fiber must be removed, and the trees must be inspected and treated for the palm weevils that have invaded from the east.
They look like a field of day lilies that haven't yet bloomed, but these are sesame plants with pods that are almost ready to harvest. All those hamburger buns and crackers all my life, and I had no idea this is what the sesame plant would look like.
Along most of the Nile Valley, the demarcation of the desert and the green is knife-edge sharp. Near the pyramids of Abu Sir there were a series of sun temples that included valley temples. The ruins of these have often made low points in the desert where moisture collects and plants can grow.
A week old beard and an intent look could make him look rather sinister, but this man spends his days caring for seedling plants and selling trees to farmers. Many men in Egypt like to patronise a barber for a shave and a haircut once every 10 days or so. The shave is done with a straight razor and is astonishingly close. The beard doesn't appear for days.
Date palms are useful in virtually any form. We eat the fruit in early autumn for the fresh crisp dates, but dried or fermented they are available all year round. The fiber of the frond can be used to make mats and baskets while the wooden rib can be split and formed to make furniture like this garden sofa. They don't last forever but they are comfortable and inexpensive. Just ask Geo.
Palm trees are more work than houses. The fronds get trimmed a couple or three times a year, the blossoms must be fertilised, the fruit protected and then picked...and all of this is taking place about 10 to 15 metres off the ground. What's a guy to do? Climb! The harness is made of palm rope and cotton rope and it enables the workers to scamper up the trunk and then, in this case, work away with an axe to chop off the extra fronds and remove the extra fiber. Fronds will be come mats, boxes and furniture while the fiber is woven into ropes.
I never thought of Egypt as a place where one would expect to find mushrooms growing. We now have a lot of mushroom farms and they are easy to find in the markets, but I've always associated mushrooms with moisture. Winter before last I had a lovely crop of horse mushrooms (a larger relative of the commercial mushroom...I grew up mushroom hunting) on my manure pile. This summer with the lawn being watered a lot we've had another variety of mushroom making an appearance. These, unfortunately, are Amanita, which while very pretty looking, can make you quite ill..or even dead...if you eat them.
Cairenes often think of the canals of the countryside with disdain. They are, indeed, the repositories of much debris, although most of it is vegetation that will decompose and simply make the canal water liquid fertiliser to help produce our marvelous vegetables. With prices soaring, farmers are even more reliant on the natural sources of fertilisers. I think of the canals as the Nile Valley's circulatory system on a mechanical end and as the windows of its soul on a day such as this.
Driving into the Wissa Wassef center the other day I found lovely red wool hanging off the palm trees. It must be the season to be spinning and dyeing the wools for their tapestries. They do their own dyeing from herbs and plants grown on the property.
We have large machines that move around the canals cleaning the water hyacinth and other interesting objects out of the canals, but sometimes they need a tidying between mechanised visits. As I was out riding the other day I noticed a man in a row boat steadying the boat near the shore of the canal while a boy scooped handfuls of hyacinth out of the water, tossing it onto the shoreline.
Visitors to Egypt are often taken with a deep red drink that is served either hot or cold and has a tangy citrus taste. It is a tea made from a variety of hibiscus flower and it contains a lot of vitamin C. For years I would look at the flowering hibiscus bushes in gardens wondering if they were the source of the tea, because the petals used to make the tea are heavy and thick. Finally I found this small bush that looks a great deal like a peony and has rather small pink flowers. After the bush flowers, a seed pod develops with thick dark red petals covering it...the Karkade!
This is a picture of a blue sky behind thirty foot tall date palms and rubber trees. Nothing terribly exciting, but I remember being a grad student in Canada caring gently for a variety of indoor plants, including some palms and small rubber trees, to give me some green through the cold white winter. I never imagined that they could grow so big in a friendlier climate.
I had to go to a big shopping mall because Carrefour has much better prices on milk than other stores and my 6 week old filly who has to be bottle fed is going through about fifteen litres of milk a day. Instant bankruptcy! On the way out, we spotted this Christmas tree made up of pointsettia plants. Merry Christmas all.
Christmas trees in Egypt are usually cypress or juniper rather than the pines of North America and Europe. Somehow it isn't quite the same.
This is not what one associates with downtown Cairo at all. But it is there and today as I was looking for the shop that would service a broken Swatch and driving through the hot streets, it was like a glimpse of heaven.
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