Green to Gold

Within the space of a week or two the lush green hills around us are turning shades of gold and brown. Partly that's because the weather has turned hot and dry. Also local farmers have started taking cuttings off some of the fields -- some kind of grain, I think. Of course, those grasses had already matured and turned gold, but the mown fields look even darker, almost brown.

The fields had been full of wild red poppies, sort of like the California poppies but bright red. There are some photos of them in my brunch blog. Now we have purple thistles. I went out yesterday to take some pictures of them. The wind was very strong. It was amusing to watch the birds try to fly. If they flew into the wind, it pushed back after every beat of the birds wings, making it appear that they were doing the bird equivalent of treading water. When they turned away from the wind, they were blow quite quickly in the other direction. I tried to capture the blowing grasses and bending trees in the photo above.

This is a close-up of the thistles. The color really is striking.

This photo looks back at one of the two campus buildings. Zirve continues to plant more and more trees and shrubs; in a few years it will be a veritable oasis. They've put in a drip irrigation system; without it I don't see how all this would be sustainable. They also hire village women to weed the grass by hand -- yes, the grass. Actually, I like the idea. It's a job for the women, who can sit around and chat with each other while they pull weeds, and Zirve isn't putting all sorts of poisons into the soil and the air.

One of several flocks of sheep and goats that graze in the hills around Zirve. They are enjoying the last of the green grass before moving on to drier feed.