Today was the first mushroom walk of the Boston Mycological club's season. The results were not spectacular despite the heavy rain last night, which drenched a lot of people including me. I was quite happy to crawl into bed after that and curly up with the ever volatile M. Fukuoka. This book, called The Road To Paradise, sounds much more serene than it actually is. Instead of spending much time exposing his ideas behind no-till, aka natural, framing, he just goes off the spout about everything from industrial rice growers to Charles Darwin. His idea for a world which has everyone leave the cities and take up their quarter acre to farm their rice, barley, and veggies is so out of touch it's amazing this got through the publisher's sieve.
Anyhow, I hoped to pick up one new tidbit at the BMC walk this morning and I did. The prez, Ellen, told me that the Ganoderma tsugae (the shiny shelf polypore in the picture) I had found was "a very good one and perfect for making tea with anti-cancer properties". Sweet. Shannon is staying at my place for a couple weeks, we're gonna hit that. Can't have too much anti-cancer tea. Other hits of the mushroom weekend were oyster mushrooms at the woods by a graveyard in Dorchester (how is it that Dorchester is like my top place for mushrooming???), and chantrelles on my way home from the BMC walk.
Last weekend, Henry and his infinite cuteness kept everyone feeling good. here he is with a watermelon.
Finally, although I didn't find enough time to really harvest all the juneberries and mulberries that i could have, I did go out yesterday evening to shake a few mulberry trees. I put a sheet down so they'd fall onto it, and got an OK harvest. Well, the mulberries I found yesterday were white ones, which I don't like as much. But, it's fresh fruit and it's free, so who really cares about it. Partridge berries are the same way, except they are even blander. but this got me thinking in the woods today. I'll show someone some partridge berries and they will try them and inevitably sort f shrug and tell me they don't taste like anything. This doesn't make me love them any less though. Cows don't complain that grass is bland. They just stand there and eat, and then sit there and eat again -- ruminate -- all day. We humans, so spoiled, everything has to "taste good". I'm going on a partridge berry campaign to point this out. Speaking of weird campaigns, just learned that President Polk used the poke berry plant as his campaign illustration. Weird. I also found a massive amount of pokeweed over by the oysters in the Dorchester graveyard. Next spring. Finally, I found some wild parsnips out in Littleton or so on the way to the walk today (I pulled over when I spotted their yellow buds). I will make that trip next spring too since i like them so much. I mean, they are no partridge berries, but...
