One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter...

Why Can't It Just Stay Spring?

The seasons are changing again, like they do. I really do enjoy autumn, I just have to keep reminding myself that I do.  Back home, it meant cool evenings, crunchy leaves, and of course Halloween and the family Thanksgiving.  I moved to New England six years ago, and here, it just means it's time to get ready to hunker down for winter.  All our family is spread out, so Thanksgiving is small (and it's effectively winter by then anyways), and the area we live in is so rural we don't even get any trick-or-treaters.  Winter basically starts in November and the spring flowers don't show their faces until March at the earliest.  Almost half the year is cold and ice and snow and cold, and cold.  Spring and fall are my favorite seasons (which makes sense, as they're times of transition) but they really seem to just fly by.

There's a giant patch of goldenrod in our front yard, in full bloom.  I love it.  Yellow is such a cheerful color and the late blooms seem like a last-ditch effort to hold on to summer for as long as possible.  I had planned to make an infused oil of it, to try and bring a little bit of summer through the winter with me, but after reading this post over at When Weeds Whisper, I decided to follow her lead and do an infused honey instead.  I bought some local honey at the farmers market last weekend, and I was really excited, planned to do two pint jars.  Then as I'm out gathering, I see all the bumblebees buzzing around the blossoms, and it hit me - these were the last flowers, and the bees needed them more than I did.  So I satisfied myself with enough to just make one jar.  I probably still could have done both - it really is a huge patch of goldenrod, but I would have felt bad.

I don't know what I'm going to do this winter.  Last year's was ridiculous, we wound up with about eight feet on the ground and had to hire a backhoe at one point to dig us out after the regular plow ran out of room to put the snow.  They called it the hundred year storm - as in, the kind of storm you only see once in a hundred years - and it was certainly record-breaking.  But I'm afraid that this year will be the same.  I almost want to move back to somewhere more temperate, but I've really started developing a relationship with the woods this past year and couldn't just leave them.

I'll just have to keep reminding myself - winter has a place, just like everything else.  Death has a place.  It wipes out the green of summer to make room for the pinks and blues and yellows and purples of spring to peek through again.  If nothing else, it keeps the ticks from eating me up too bad.  I'll have to spend some days out in the forest this winter and pay attention to what's going on, besides everything being dead or sleeping.

The Forest Has Changed

The hurricane swept through Sunday.  We finally got power back yesterday afternoon.  I'm not even back to work yet, they still don't have power, either.  So I've been spending even more time out back in the woods.  Most of what fell was already dead, but we lost a huge elm, a pine, and a big limb off a red maple.  I've been trying to clean up the maple, because it landed on a smaller elm and trapped it bent over.

I'm going to keep a slice of the maple for a frame to make a drum, and I've heard that the bark can be used for dyeing.  I also have plans for some wood beads.

Devastation

Apparently the edge of our property is a major drainage ditch for the town, and with the hurricane on the way they decided to come and clean it out...  I came home from work yesterday to find a giant empty patch of dirt where our bushes, honey locusts, black walnut, blackberry, nightshade, and mullein had been.  Just the tire tracks from heavy machinery and strangers' footprints were left, with the odd stray wood chip.  All the way around the side and into the swamp!  They hacked down a big section of the grapes, and the goldenrod was trampled.  It's horrible.  And so stupid.  The dirt's just going to wash out, it's on the side of a hill.  And the road will go right after.

I'm not in a good place right now.

It's not the season for it, but I'm going to see if I can find some wildflower seed mixes to throw out there.  Maybe I can use the cleared area to build something, maybe a chicken coop or a greenhouse or bee hives or a fish pond.  Silver lining, right?

Managing Not to Poison Myself

I emerged from the woods with a pair of treasures: a little bolete mushroom, that I'd originally gone out looking for, and a bonus chunk of chicken mushroom.

I started by peeling the orange off the top of the chicken mushroom, and scraping the pores off the underside from the bolete. It smelled really fantastic.  The taste was a little disappointing, not bad just a little bit sour.  I ate both of them raw, which apparently isn't recommended, but the chicken mushroom was actually pretty good.  I'll have to give our boletes another try, and next time figure out a way to cook them.

Bolete Homework, Part II

This is my second attempt to follow along with Ms. Graveyard Dirt's mushroom lesson.

We had a decent rain Sunday night, so I set back out on Monday to hunt the wild bolete.  I did some reading after my first expedition, and discovered that the neon yellow fungus I'd decided couldn't possibly be edible was in fact chicken of the woods, so I planned to make my way back to the other end of the woods where I found it, and hoped it was still there.

I found a lot more mushrooms overall this trip, but almost all were the regular gilled mushrooms, and most had been made meals of by the time I got to them.

Late to supper.

I started off looking around in the area where I'd seen that first bolete a while back.  What I found instead were what I think are puffballs.  After no sign of the elusive bolete, I started making my way back to where I saw the chicken mushroom, keeping my eyes on the ground.

Can I eat this?

Lichen?  Fungus?  Lichen-covered fungus?

Up the hill, through the oaks, down the hill, through the stand of birch and maple, passing under the thorny vines that hang over the old path along the edge of the marsh.  No boletes.  Lots of little brown mushrooms, little white mushrooms, most half-eaten.  I was beginning to get discouraged.  The good news is the chicken mushroom was still there, and it had grown.  I took one of the smaller fans from the side, and decided it was time to head back.

So of course, after I gave up, after I'd stopped bothering to even look for them -

Gold!

Bolete Homework, Part I

Ms. Graveyard Dirt gave her readers an assignment: Find a bolete!

I had heard of boletes before, but my earlier enthusiasm for mushrooms never really got very far.  And back home, I never managed to find one.  I saw my first one this year, actually.  It stuck out at me because I'd read about them but never seen them, so when I finally did I was excited like I'd found some mythical creature in the woods.  But I left it alone, because it had been awhile and I didn't quite remember how safe they were.

So of course, a few days after, there winds up being a whole lesson on mushroom hunting in my RSS feed, with instructions to go find one.

I went back to where I had found that first one, but it was dead, black, and shriveled.  And even though I looked all through the woods, I had no luck finding any other boletes.  I did manage to find some other fungus, though.  There were a few gilled mushrooms, and some kind of bright neon yellow lumpy thing on a dead log.  Nothing that color could possibly be edible, I thought.

I think it had just been too dry for mushrooms.  I didn't come back completely empty handed, though.  I found a beautiful yellow feather, and a glass bottle that was broken in just such a way that I think it'll make a nice candle holder once I've washed it off.

Hope

Seeing Fairies

 

I was a day late, but I went out midsummer and gathered fern spores.  They're so tiny, like dust.  Managed to get quite a few - filled a gallon ziplock bag with the branches, from a few different species.  I left even more behind, along with a small blood offering to the mosquitoes.

Rubbed on the eyelids, the fern spores are supposed to grant the power to see fairies.  Of course, it's supposed to be male fern, which I couldn't find, and it's supposed to be midsummer's eve, when I was working both jobs, but we'll see how this does.  Maybe they just don't want to be seen, and arranged everything against me.

Time is a Non-Renewable Resource

The changing seasons got me thinking... for each year, there's one spring.  One summer.  One fall, one winter.  At most, I'll probably live eighty- or ninety-someodd years.  Living in New England has given me a new appreciation for spring and summer, and I've already let pass about a third of all the ones I'll ever see.  That should probably spur me into my various projects with renewed vigor, but all it does is depress me.

On a lighter note, I'm envious of all the herbs growing around where I work.  There's a big patch of broadleaf plantain, yarrow, ground cherry, Queen Anne's lace, lamb's quarters, mullein, skullcap... but I don't dare use any of it, because I work at a garage.  Going to see if I can harvest some seeds, maybe, and get some of this stuff growing around the house.  Not with my luck with seeds, but maybe I can disperse them and cross my fingers.  Of course, even if they grow they won't necessarily do me any good.  A lot of those I have growing in our yard already, but my husband mows them down!  Need to get better at cultivating, so I can transplant and have them all in a little plot to mark off limits to the mower.

Green Salve

I just finished making a cut, scrape, bite, and burn salve. It's jojoba oil infused with wildcrafted plantain, yarrow, and curly dock, lavender and tea tree essential oils, with vitamin E and some aloe pulp. This is my third salve, and
so far they've all turned out pretty good, if I do say so myself. My mom used to make a version of it all the time - I think she added comfrey, but I didn't have any.

For some reason I was always intimidated by the process. I imagined bizarre alchemical equipment and timing and instructions that had tobe followed to the letter... Looking back, I don't know where the idea came from that it had to be difficult. I mean, I watched my mom do it. But it couldn't be /easy/, could it?

In fact, I wouldn't even say it's easy. It's trivial. At least my experiences so far have been.

It's just a base oil, plus whatever other oils, with some beeswax.

I got started with it because I have a friend who's allergic to all the over-the-counter antibiotic creams. I figured, she needs some tea tree oil! So I did some research on making a tea tree salve, looked up recipes, and whipped her up a batch.

I had fun making it, so I had to go and get fancy.

I infused some lavender and sage in olive oil for the second salve, as just a smell-good hand cream. The lavender scent didn't really seem to take very well, although I may have just been impatient. I only left it in for a couple days, but I also tried heating it on the stove for about a half hour... eventually I just added lavender essential oil, and then some vanilla extract. The smell is green and sweet, a little kitcheny but without really smelling like food.

There is kind of a trick to the oil infusing - you have to make sure all of the herbs are completely covered by the oil, because if the air gets to them they'll rot. (You also have to not forget about them.)

At some point I should probably start measuring my ingredients...

Attempts at Gardening

I have a horrible black thumb.

Every year I try to grow something, and every year I've met with repeated failures. The plants that I've shoved out in the lawn and left alone - a few crocuses, some daffodils, and a blueberry bush - have done fine. Anything I've tried to grow from seed and nurture? Withers. Rots. Gets knocked over by the cats.

Last year I had a brief glimpse of success - I had planted a pumpkin, too late in the season. I had it in a pot out on our deck. It flourished, flowered, and then froze.

This year I decided to try acorn squash, thinking that would be no problem since the pumpkin had (almost) done so well...

I started a seed in a little peat pellet indoors, then transferred it to that same pot the pumpkin had been in real quick once it sprouted. Real quick because the only places inside that are safe from the cats don't get enough sunlight, and I've had plenty of baby plants spend all their energy stretching for the light, and winding up all long and weak. Too quick because the next day, it was crushed. A bird, a squirrel, a stray twig, I don't know. However it happened, no more squash.

So then I tried planting a seed directly in the container. I'm not sure why I thought that would work any better. I waited and waited for it to sprout... then gave up and popped a few more in peat pellets. Right about the same time that the ones in the pellets came up, there was a sprout in the pot on the deck. I thought all was well and shoved the peat pellets outside on a ledge and forgot about them.

I was so proud of that little squash. It grew its first real leaves, got bigger and bigger, and I kept checking on it and taking pictures. I'd started it early enough, not too early (I live in New England) and everything was going to be great. It was a funny looking squash, but it was my squash and I loved it. Amazingly, the sprouts in the peat pellets were also still alive and growing. And they didn't look anything like what was growing in my container.

To prove it to myself, I poked around in the dirt until I found it - the little, unsprouted squash seed. I evicted the volunteer and replaced it with another of the peat pellet sprouts. 

Not a squash.

 Then, we had a few days of heavy rain. I wasn't worried, because I made sure there was plenty of drainage in the container, and my squash made it through all right. Then we had a couple of hot days, and the poor thing dried up to a crisp. Its brother sprouts in the other pellets had drowned in the rain, so I'm back to square one.

Luckily I live in a fairly rural area with a lot of native herbs for wildcrafting. I also bought some mint that's survived so far.

But I feel a deep need to be able to eat something that I've grown myself from seed. Even better would be a second generation, grown from seeds I harvested off a plant I grew. I still have some peat pellets left.

I'll let you know how it goes...

(I should probably go check on the mint!)