Tis the season for driving along country lanes and finding apple trees loaded with fresh fruit, never picked. Kind of sad those trees that grow forgotten along the road. Once they would have been picked, the apples used in pies or eaten right off the tree. Now people just drive on by and only notice them in passing. Yet those are our history, our heritage.

Next time you see an apple tree stop and pick a few. Some may be bug eaten, but some of the brown patches are only places where it rubbed on the tree branch and not anything you can’t just peel away. It may be the best apple you have ever had, if you give them a chance. Of those I picked almost all were edible, not bug eaten as I expected they would be. One was especially delicious. It’s a shame I don’t know what kind of apple tree it came from.

Would you grow an apple from seed? Have you ever grown a plant from seed? Why not try one, even something tropical or exotic and have it grow by your writing space. Keep your seedling company and let it inspire you with something fresh and growing where you work.

I looked at the photos of barns in this post. To me, most of them are inactive, not actually abandoned. They are still maintained, enough to not be falling down, don't look salvaged for barn boards, etc. So, they didn't really seem abandoned or derelict. Probably someone else would consider any barn not actively used to be abandoned. I guess it is all perspective. Are you someone using a barn or someone photographing it, looking at it for history, art, or industry/ agriculture or architecture?

I have not (so far) found a link to the photographer, John H. Busch or his fellow explorer, Mary Lynn Busch. There are good points in the post about exploring, history and photographing old places in Ontario. I've copied and pasted parts of the post, not in order so I can keep topics, like photographing the barns together.

Tips for Photographing Abandoned Barns

It’s interesting how you can photograph the same subject several times in one day and capture a different result each time, depending on the location of the sun, cloud cover, and location of the point of view. I learned through experience that my best colour photos are taken on cloudy days, but it is hard to exclude sunny-day shadows for good contrast.

I have shot and compiled a selection of these abandoned barns. For various reasons, it’s sometimes difficult to get the proper perspective while photographing these structures. Some are set far back from the road; there is often the presence of trees and foliage; and sometimes the time of day isn’t ideal. I believe some of my best photos of these barns were taken during the winter months, due to the absence of foliage, but ironically some of the best colours were during the summer months. Most of the barns are plain and unpainted, but a few are painted “barn red” while the odd one is white or green.

The Beginning of the End

The barns with missing boards or ones that have had part of their metal roofs blown off are the ones I refer to as doomed. Once this process begins, the barn will collapse relatively quickly. A year or two of rain on the dry hardwood beams, coupled with an entry for the wind to blow through, often speeds up the process. Gravity always seems to win in the end.

Another factor that contributes to the disappearance of these old barns is economics, including property taxes. Once the landowner realizes that the barn, which is often completely empty, is costing extra money in tax assessment, an excavator is brought in and the barn is dismantled quickly, often leaving the original farmhouse as the only building on the property.

To this day, terms such as “top plate, girt, corner post, brace, bent, mortise and tenon” still come to mind whenever I see different barns.

Source: Readers Digest: Abandoned Barns of Southwestern Ontario | Our Canada