Early Season Leaf Peeping In Plymouth County

It's about two weeks too early, but we took to the streets to see what sort of early fall foliage we could find in Plymouth County.

Southeastern Massachusetts may be the weakest spot in New England for leaf peeping, but New England has the bar set pretty high.

One of the benefits of having a blurry camera is that, if you don't enjoy fall foliage, you can just squint at this picture and pretend that the article is about forest fires.

As you can see, we'll be working in the ROY part of the ROY G BIV color spectrum. I looked pretty hard for a purple tree without success. I may have seen a Magenta tree, I'm not sure.... never had that crayon.

Our basic route for this trip was Bourne to Wareham to Plymouth to Kingston to Plympton to Halifax to Bridgewater to Hanson to Pembroke to Duxbury back to Bourne.

I went down Route 106 after a huge yellow tree in Plympton, but it hadn't peaked yet. This tree in Halifax was up earlier.

I needed orange in my life badly enough to shoot the tree with wires in front of it.

Otherwise, a shutterbug develops  tendency to invite themselves into people's yards without permission to seek better shots. I haven't been beaten up or shot at yet, but it's only a matter of time. I have already forgiven my future assailant.

Fortunately, one of the benefits of  working with a crappy camera is that shooting out the window of a car going 50 MPH doesn't really lower the quality that much when compared to my stand-still work.

Neither of my MVP trees (the giant yellow one in Plympton and a deep red one next to the Middleboro 4H building) were at peak when I drove by.

I should really learn which types of tree are birch, cedar, maple, forsythia etc.... I only know maple leafs because they have a hockey team.

I shoot 100 pics or so, then go through them at the end of the trip. Memory issues come up, and you get captions like "I think this is Kingston."

No foliage here, but I love reflective work.

Don't let the week-old dates deter you on the pictures from Leaf Peeping. My camera calendar is  week slow.

Pine dominates our tree shots, preventing us (along with my camera) from getting those panoramic Vermont calendar shots.

Be sure to tune back in....

Because we'll be doing more of the South Shore....

And we'll also do the South Coast...

As well as Cape Cod!

I'll even drag Jessica along, as she takes better pictures than I do.

See you on the road!

South Shore Foliage, 10/21/15

We rolled out with monster truck force all over the South Shore's interior as we tracked down the places that have already turned over. This is East Monponsett Lake, in Halifax.

This part of Massachusetts (Plympton, Route 106) gets some cool foliage. It just tends to be worked into the proverbial Sea Of Green. No, I have no idea why one tree is orange and every other one is green, that's between you and Mother Nature. I just click the camera and write the captions, friend.

You don't get those Vermont calendar pictures in Duxbury. I have no mountains to look down from, and too many pine trees. At times, I'm reduced to shooting at branches on a single tree.

We were gonna shoot video, but..well, trees don't really do that much. We were ready to turn the video on if a Sasquatch walked out of a South Halifax forest.

Kingston got some licks in, especially in the Jones River Reservoir area off Route 80. We started in Duxbury, then went into Kingston. We essentially flipped a coin as to left or right onto Rout 80, we went right and found this about 100 yards later.

If you take your glasses off, it looks like a tree fire. I should have rolled a smoke bomb under that, or maybe even exhaled a fat hit into the picture just before I clicked.

We got a cloudy day for Rural Exploration, but there was no wind, so we got some sweet lake-reflection shots.

We have mobile photography capabilities, they even come out sometimes.

With Monponsett Lake(s), we're in there like swimwear.

We're just warming up, so we have plenty of more work to do. We may still expand our reach up into the Athol/Ashburnham corridor, they're peaking right now.

We will also be all over the South Coast, South Shore, and Cape Cod. You know were good like that.

Finding Foliage: Maine

"Cranberry County" is a purposefully ambiguous term. While it is technically Southeastern Massachusetts, we can (and will) expand when we need to.

Much like Hunter Thompson said about the code of the west, "Cranberry County" can mean "whatever we need it to mean, in a pinch."

Today, it means Maine.

This was very much aimless rambling, so I apologize in advance for not being like "That's Mount So-and-So." I don't go to Maine much, and the names of places tend to escape me.

I'm very good at SE Massachusetts town names, but Ive been banging around this part of the state professionally for a while. Even then, I just got my first visits in to places like Rehoboth and Somerset during last year's foliage articles.

I don't feel bad about that. A lot of Southeastern Masschusetts is on the If You Ain't From Here, You Don't Come here tip. That's not aggressive, just utilitarian.

Ideally, we'd have waited a few weeks and got into that Currier & Ives stuff, but I'm a busy man.

Maine, as you know, turns their foliage over before Massachusetts does. It gets colder up there sooner or something, I'm not that into tree science for a guy who writes about them as often as I do. I just like to look.

I'm assuming that we'll hit New Hamster about when the foliage is right, we sort of made it Maine when circumstances put us there.

To ensure that we get every last drop out of Rolling Stone writers, I've heard P.J. O'Rourke describe Norway as "God got carried away with the winter recipe for Northern Maine."

We will be moving South from Maine with the deepening of Autumn. We'll be in New Hampshire pretty soon, Northern Massachusetts a bit after that, and we're even trying to work Vermont. I'm not above sub-contracting it if need be.

We may even throw Rhode Island in the mix, I'm not sure if they turn over before or after Cape Cod does.

We won't make it to Connecticut, but if we do, you can almost bet that the pictures will be very Foxwoodsian.

Rural Exploration, And Our Fall Preview

Middleboro, MA

Autumn is here, and we're shifting gears into Fall Stuff.

When I was teaching at a Charlestown charter school, we had a class called Urban Exploration. "Urb X" was a code word we'd use for "our lesson plan got fouled up for some reason, so we're going to take the bus around Boston and show the sights to the kids. Give me lunch money for 8 kids and 2 staff."

To be fair... although I was most likely the one who had the fouled-up lesson plan, credit for the terms "Urban Exploration" and "Urb X" goes to a football coach named Mr. Cawthorne or something close to that. Left to me, the title would have been the less-smooth-sounding "We're gonna take the bus and drive around town for 3 hours," which program directors of charter schools probably wouldn't sign off on.

Some of my better classes were from Urb X, and I tried to incorporate the same spirit into my career as a shabby-website content generator. We did a bit of Urb X yesterday... although, since we went up Route 105 and down Route 106, it was technically Rural X.

As we said, Autumn is here, so we thought we'd trot out a fisherman's platter of what we'll be up to over the next few months.

I'm thinking maybe Lakeville, MA, Fall 2014

We have several trips planned to cover Fall Foliage. Ideally, we plan to catch some late September foliage in Maine, and then move down the coast with it until we are polishing up with Cape Cod after Halloween.

Marlboros costing $4.95 a pack in small-town New Hampshire has nothing to do with the frequency of these trips. Everybody buys 180 packs at once, Officer.

We also have a bee in our bonnet about stealing acorns from New Hampshire, planting them along the Cape Cod Canal, and turning the Canal into the Fall Foliage destination of 2075 AD or so, whenever the trees grow enough to turn Yellow regularly. We'll be pumping that article out after I interview a few experts.

Cranberry County Magazine has road offices in Freeport, Maine, Bow, New Hampshire, and Jeremiah's Lot, Vermont. We're analyzing more spots than Matlock, and we've got this Leaf Game on padlock.

In theory, we'll have a 4-5 fall foliage article run that starts in Maine in late September and ends up on Cape Cod after Halloween. Droughts, wind storms, low motivation and lack of money/free time may screw up this schedule, but we're looking good as of 9/22.

We did go to Maine last week, but saw nothing foliage-ish of note. The locals told me two more weeks or so.

Plympton MA

Massachusetts, especially the part of Massachusetts we work, isn't as known for her foliage/greenery as other parts of New England are. However, you can find some good 1700s stuff if you snoop around a bit and drive down the side streets.

Between flowers and foliage and even us stumbling through some dude's farm, we'll try to go out among the reapers now and then.

The harvest, formerly the occupation of just about everyone, is barely important now to anyone but farmers, craft fair hosts and the media. However, there is still a primordial recognition in most humans for the harvest season. At worst, it is perhaps the most powerful omen for the change of seasons that we have.

I feel it, and I can't even grow old properly, let alone grow cranberries. We're looking at late October for the hard color pics.

Speaking of which...

Buzzards Bay, MA

Another thing that we intend to pound into the mat is the local Cranberry haul.

The mighty cranberry is in the title of this website, so you know that we're going to represent hard at the harvest.

The compound in Buzzards Bay is just across the street from a cranberry bog, so we should be able to get this one done just by walking the Shorty out to the bus stop.

The possibility of us going inland and upstate to pursue non-coastal cranberry harvests is there, although I shouldn't need to drive any further than Carver or Hanson.

I'm a hack photographer at best, but even I can get some Ansel Adams work in if I snap enough shots at a cranberry bog with the sun shining overhead.

There is also talk of scooping a few buckets of cranberries out of Mann Farm's vast pile, dumping a few bags of sugar into a big pot, cooking/chilling, and then seeing how much cranberry sauce I can eat in one sitting. The goal would be to turn my skin burgundy.

Billingsgate Farm, Plympton MA

You know we'll be talking about pumpkins, player!

Pumpkins figure heavily in our harvest season, even more than the more ubiquitous cranberry. They are the premier decorative item for both the harvest season and Halloween, to the point where a great majority of the people who buy pumpkins have no intention of eating them.

We'll use pumpkins for photos, articles about visiting pumpkin patches, articles about decoration, Thanksgiving pie recipes, Halloween vandalism talk, and even excuses for doing vintage D'Arcy Wretzky image searches.

One thing we're kicking around is the idea of gathering (via a lot of Rural X, or from Facebook friends) a collection of pictures featuring the better Halloween displays. We'll do the same for whoever we see over-lighting their house at Christmas.

Halloween is important to us, and we also plan to run our Expand The Bridgewater Triangle article during this season, and perhaps explore a few haunted locations in our coverage area.

We also want to blow up a pumpkin with whatever fireworks we can gather up on our Foliage trips. This, and my idea to do a Diet Coke/Mentos experiment that involves tossing the bottle off of the Bourne Bridge onto the bike path below, is pretty much as deep into Science as we get here. I also have a great desire to film a pumpkin being shot by a high caliber weapon.

We actually are in preliminary discussions with a gun-range owner in Texas about re-creating the JFK assassination with pumpkins.

Me: I'm thinking that you get a pumpkin, fill it with Zar-Ex, put it in a suit, drive it around in a convertible and shoot it from 6 stories up out of a moving limo.

Them: Huh?

Me: Don't worry, I'll pay for the ammo, the pumpkins, the Zar-Ex and lunch for the shootist.

Them: How do you plan to do this?

Me: Don't worry about it. I can also provide the Kennedy accent for the doomed pumpkin. My girlfriend can do the Jackie O screaming. She's French, it'll be seamless.

Them (from TX): What's Zar-Ex?

Duxbury Beach, MA

We also will have the photographers embedded for any nor'easters that may come up once October comes around.

September and October have hosted some of our worst storms, including the Halloween Gale.

If we get our ship tightened up some, we'll try to get into some other towns for our nor'easter photography. I've always wanted to do a storm in Scituate, the Outer Cape, and on the Grey Lady.

I do have a press pass that, if I presented it to the cops and they called it to verify my vocation, would ring up my own phone. That should get me on the block.

It goes without saying that, should we get the opportunity to shoot a nor'easter, it will most likely be caused by weather conditions that will effectively cancel the rest of our foliage articles.

That should carry us through Thanksgiving...