What's a road apple?

Google “road apples” and one of the first references is to the 1991 album by The Tragically Hip.  The term is also used to describe a Trojan horse-type of computer hacking.   Farm kids develop their stick-handling using frozen road apples as hockey pucks.  And early 20^th century theatrical jargon referred to touring actors as road apples.  But the real meaning of the term is more prosaic.

We saw a lot of road apples on this cattle drive through southwestern Saskatchewan.  Not to be confused with cowpies, road apples are what horses leave behind.  Fertilizer in the making, something to feed the land that grows the grasses that feed the horses.  An elegant closed system.    

So here we are, on a year-long tour of Saskatchewan, looking for those nutritional nuggets found on or at the side of the road.  Galleries. Grain elevators. Wildlife. History. Quirky places.  Passionate people.  Sheepdog trials. Opera singers.  Barbara Klar. 100,000 lakes.  The world’s largest coffee pot.  Wild rice.  Wallace Stegner.  The blue and yellow of flax and canola in bloom.  And of course Poet’s Corner in Wordsworth. 

There’s lots of fertilizer for the imagination.  Come on along for the ride!