New Trails

Yesterday, I worked on a new segment of the trail with my dad. Eventually, the trail will be a great loop through the property. We keep it simple, with dirt, logs, and leaf-litter mulch.

While we were clearing the ground for the stairs above, I found this weird burly root. I don't know what it is.

My top 2 guesses:

1. Part of a redwood root system, since the trail was below a large redwood

2. Part of a root belonging to Marah oreganus, the Wild Cucumber, also called Coastal Manroot, because it's supposed to have a massive tuber. It also happens to be dormant this time of year and we do have tons of them on the property, so it's possible.

I put it in a pot, so we'll see what comes up.

There are many rewards for traveling down the new segment of the trail, including

mushrooms red as tomatos,

old alders in a skunk cabbage bog (cabbages dormant),

and cool Polypodium scouleri growing on an old stump.

I won't be working on this trail again for some time. Today I followed my brother and his family back down to Woodland, to find my next step. The cab of my truck is loaded with the bare necessities and I'm on the quest to find a cool place to live and work while I think about graduate school or whatever's coming next. (It's going to be tough to garden without some land.) This week I'll be exploring Sacramento, San Francisco, Davis, and Woodland. If nothing feels right, I may head south. I'm going to wing it for a while.

Big Lagoon

Big Lagoon was my family's inspiration for moving to Humboldt County. I always begin my visits on Huckleberry Lane. The huckleberries were cut back pretty hard earlier this year (to give the cabins a better view of the ocean), but they seem to be doing fine. They look a little boxed in, though.

Then I walk along the street to the lagoon parking lot and onto the dock to see how high the water is.

It's high. And definetly too high for some of the silverweed (yellow) and grasses along the shoreline.

This photo is of a photo on an interpretive sign. Big Lagoon was extremely rich in wildlife. It was good to the Yurok. (There's a rancheria on one side of the lagoon.) I saw a man with a bicycle fishing in the lagoon, but he wasn't catching anything. Birds are everywhere. Especially cormorants.

If you turn left away from the lagoon, you see this sandspit, which divides the lagoon from the ocean. I thought about the ocean, but honestly, I tend to prefer the forest, which is in the opposite direction.

So that's where I head. One of the first plants to command attention is this, false lily of the valley. These berries are still young, with gold specks. I saw many older berries too, which are deep red and translucent.

The forest at Big Lagoon is much different than the one at home. The woods are DARK. It's a Sitka spruce forest that is way too crowded and many of the trees are dying or dead. Still, it's one of my favorite places. It is so quiet and eerie.

And the forest floor is spongy and deep green.

Ah, there's one of my favorite ferns, Polypodium scouleri. They normally grow up in trees, but this may have fallen with part of a tree. It's a good size plant, if I'd wanted I probably could have barely lifted it off the ground. I've often thought that this species might make a nice houseplant, grown in bark like many orchids are.

Speaking of orchids, here are two little Rattlesnake Plantains growing under an orange mushroom.
My camera is good at lightening things up, but remember, it's dark in here.

I can't help but admire the mushrooms. On my way into the forest I saw a couple Boletes edulis and some Wine Agarics. When I saw this one, I was amazed. Evenually I tried lifting it so I could see the underside and realized it was a rusty bottle cap. But I left it there because it's still a wonder to behold.

So was this, the underside of a real mushroom.

And this too. A tiny landscape within a tall forest.

This looks like a nice family.
These mushrooms reminded me of soccer. Some were as large as my hand.

The forest wasn't always so dark, apparently. There are many other trees dead and decaying under the spruces. This, I'm confident to say, was a wax myrtle.

This mushroom had the look, feel, and size of a gumboot chitin. Amazing.

Here's a slimy couple.

Daisy in the pasture.

Sun with radiating twigs.

Perhaps the most beautiful mushrooms were the species below. They were everywhere. They had this ultraviolet look to them and there's something so cool about the fringe around the cap.

I almost always check on my secret patch of Calypso orchids when I'm at Big Lagoon, but they were dormant.

But I did find this objet trouve nearby. It was a lamp.

BIG NEWS:

I may be leaving Humboldt County for a while. I quit my job last Friday (let's just say the business was nuts) and went down to look at UC Davis (in Yolo County). I'm going to be applying for the master's program in horticulture. My brother and his family live in Woodland nearby. I'm looking for a job around here and down there. Davis was nice, but it's a completely different environment (it's in the hot, dry valley). But I'm incredibly excited about the idea of going down there. The facilities look amazing, the people I met were friendly and passionate about what they're doing, and there has always been something about oak trees that has fascinated me.

My parents will still be here, so I'd live close enough to still visit and tend our forest and coastal prairie from time to time.

Well, we'll see what happens.

Boletes edulis

Found another edible. Boletes edulis. Actually, my coworker, Bill, found it. He followed me home to take some plant cuttings (mostly of Ribes sangineum) and to look at some of the mushrooms on the property. (We found many cool ones including a couple of huge black/purple ones.) We said goodbyes, he drove down the hill from our house, and then called me on the phone. He had found the largest patch of Boletes edulis that he had ever seen. In our yard! For more info about B. edulis check out wikipedia.

I've chopped them up (and cut away a few maggot-infested stems) and have them ready to sautee up tomorrow with a couple of wine agarics. I'll probably eat the mushrooms with pasta.

I promise to blog soon about something other than mushrooms. Probably Frank Lake's dissertation.

Fungi Arise!

In the spirit of All Hallow's Eve, strange mushrooms are popping up in the yard. We have...

Eye balls

the Yellow-fanged Bolete

Pumpkins in the Patch (of thyme)

Bride of Frankenstein hair

Ghostly Hordes



And the Gilled Mutant Monstrosity

(diabolical laugh)

Happy Halloween....

First Edible Mushroom

Momentous occasion!

My first edible: the wine-colored agaric. Right in my backyard. I brought one to work today and Bill confirmed it. The wine-colored agaric has a ring, pale rosy brown gills, fibrous stuff on its stalk, and dark streaks on the top of its cap; features you can see below.

(I cut off the stalk, as opposed to just pulling the mushroom up because of some advice I'd read.)

Bill recommends cutting the mushroom strait down the middle to see if bugs have worked their way up from the stalk into the cap. Um, yes. But you know I'm eating them anyway. They're my first edible mushrooms and the damage isn't that bad (and the bugs are pretty small). Don't look too closely, though.

So I chopped up the two caps, washed the pieces in warm water, and left them to soak for a while, hoping that any lingering bugs would exit.

Whoa! Look how red the water stained after soaking them for a half hour or so. I don't know if this is the reason it's the wine-colored agaric, but it sure could be.

After they were sauteed with a bit of butter, they shrunk down quite a bit, into these black slug-like things. But they tasted good. Like an over-cooked button mushroom, but with a deeper flavor.

When I'm not cooking for anyone else, I tend to go for the bare-root sort of meals. Poached eggs and toast it is. The drink in the cup is warmed up unpasteurized (illegal!) apple cider from an unnamed apple orchard. I'm probably not the first to realize this, but an easy way to make it into hot spiced cider is to add a tea bag. Mine's ginger.

The black specks on the eggs are bugs from the mushrooms.

No. It's pepper.

Et Viola. A very satisfying meal.

A note on the top prize (golden chanterelles): A few days ago I found some mushrooms that I thought might be them, but Bill said that they were false chanterelles. Their orange was too bright and their stalks were too skinny. But I'm still deteremined to find some on the property.

Mushrooms

Here in Humboldt County, when mushroom collecting is mentioned people giggle. Ah...what kind of mushrooms?

Edibles

I'm interested in mushrooms I can eat without hallucinating or going to the hospital, so let's set the record straight. So last night I attended the Humboldt Bay Mycological Society meeting with my coworker, Bill, who knows his mushrooms well, to have a look at table displays of various fungi.

These are oyster mushrooms. They grow on dead and dying alders. Could be in our yard...

These are Golden Chanterelles. They have ridges instead of gills. Bill found gallons of them around where he lives, and is making up a big batch of cream of mushroom soup (and he's bringing some into work). He tends to find them growing near spruce trees under evergreen huckleberry and sword ferns. Could be in our yard...

Below are "Lobster Mushrooms." The red color is actually a mold that grows on other mushrooms and I guess it makes them taste good. You just have to be sure that the host is an edible mushroom! Don't know where these grow.

Bill regularly collects about six species of mushrooms and the only one besides the ones above I can remember him collecting is the Chicken of the Forest (sorry, no picture). This is a bright orange frilly shelf fungi that grows on hemlock and doug firs. Only the tips of the frill are soft enough to eat.



Other tips from Bill: Wash wild (and edible, make sure they're edible) mushrooms well under warm water and cook before eating. Steer clear of mushrooms with white gills and rings.



Inedibles



Well, I know these are in our yard.



From left to right: Strobilurus trulisatus, Pholiota terrestris, and the last two are some species of Lepiota. The scientific names of these are sketchy because the handwriting on the labels were pretty bad. (I brought in the mushrooms and had them identified). The Photinia was growing in the coastal prairie. There are also tons of what Bill calls LBMs or Little Brown Mushrooms (not easy to identify).

Well, hopefully tomorrow I'll have a chance to scrounge around the forest to see what I find. Top prize: Golden Chanterelles!

Resources:
California Fungi