04/05/2023 The Blue Haired Girlfriend spotted a couple morels while we were walking down to the mailbox. Delicious! We've never seen morels here before.
03/05/2023 Rumbled! In our defense, if the chaotropic tumblr hivemind had voted for the Eight Foot Tall Jagged Iron Torus, Constructed For Unknown Purpose, Free To Good Home, but we'd been unable to procure it, tumblr might have been Very Disappointed In Us. So I put the poll in while the torus-bearing crane truck was pulling up the driveway.
Details photographed the next day, in fog.
While we were cleaning out the cracks, we found dried out little segments of rose cane, and beneath them, twisty honeysuckle tendrils. Apparently the Eight Foot Tall Jagged Iron Torus, Constructed for Unknown Purpose, Free To Good Home instills in everyone who sees it the intense desire to grow climbing plants on it. Some dark day perhaps we will all finally know and rue the Purpose of the Eight Foot Tall Jagged Iron Torus, Free to Good Home. But in the meantime, it sleeps under a curling green blanket and dreams of blossom and berry, lifting sunwards.
19/11/20 Bleeding Fairy Helmet mushrooms, which seep a red liquid when injured, growing out of the stairs up to the house. I’m sure it’s fine. The stairs are structurally sound and totally not cursed.
16/11/2020 The Accidental Rooster is starting to attempt Rooster Things. Today's plan: 1) find bright coloured berry, 2) feed bright coloured berry to hens, 3) profit.
The plan was not a success. The hens already have bright coloured berries. So they ignore the giant cooing fluffy thing following them around and dropping berries on their heads.
14/11/2020 A Barred Owl has been making Confused Sex Hoots. In the middle of the day. In November, which is the least sexy month for Barred Owls. We found this Mystery Lump in the forest, looking like a lopsided glob of molten marshmallow about to fall off the skewer. Can't be sure at this distance, but I suspect the Mystery Lump is the source of the Confused Sex Hoots.
Consider the Arctic Terns. They live in a world of brightness, crossing the globe twice a year to live on the gleaming ice under the nightless skies of both the Arctic and Antarctic summers. Winter does not know them, and they nod vaguely and politely when you speak to them of night.
Consider the Bar-headed Geese, who have been migrating across the Himalayas since before the Himalayas existed. Their blood is strange with mutant hemoglobin. They cross in a single night, in dark and bitter cold, so the air above the mountains thickens enough to hold them.
And then there's these guys. Scientists have captured, banded, released, and recaptured a couple hundred Barred Owls; none was further than ten kilometers from its starting point. They are the laziest bird.
09/11/2020 Candlesnuff fungus.
The pale sections of this species bioluminesce green, but it’s quite faint. The Ominous Grasping Hands Clawing Their Way Out of the Earth, Shining With An Eldritch Light are only visible on moonless nights.
Or so I’ve read. Somehow this species seems to have evolved to only glow whenever I, specifically, am not around. Sigh. I never get any Ominous Grasping Hands Clawing Their Way Out Of The Earth, Shining With An Eldritch Light.
On a post about the Blue Haired Girlfriend's quixotic citrus breeding experiments, @voidingintotheshout asked:
I mean, if you wanted a hearty citrus relative, why didn’t you just grow Osage Orange? They can grow as far north as Michigan which is surely further north than anyone could reasonably expect to grow a citrus tree. They’re not edible but then hearty orange isn’t either. Osage Orange are so cool and such a interesting historical plant from the Shelterbelt era of American agriculture. Apparently they do smell like citrus.
Now you've done it! It's time for A Very Brief (But Also Insufficiently Brief) History of Twentieth Century Hardy Citrus Cultivation! Growing citrus trees this far north is kind of nuts, it's true, but I promise you it is not even close to the weirdest things people have done to grow citrus in places where the citrus doesn't think it should grow.
A note: This post will written using the Swingle citrus taxonomy system, including things that are definitely wrong. The citrus taxonomic tree looks like that one box of orphaned computer cords I keep moving with me to new houses "in case I need them" except some sort of adorable five-dimensional kitten has entertained herself with them and some of the resulting knots are not technically possible in our space-time continuum.
The powers that be gave us citrus because nothing pleases them like seeing a geneticist cry.
#part three of three#so much doesn't fit in this post#fog gardening#how lemons started the mafia#etrogs in diaspora#citropsis and the african citrus species#we are still discovering new citrus species in oceania!#who knows what we'll make?#and one day we'll scoop up hydrocarbons from Titan's stormy seas and polymerize them and make huge bubble greenhouses filled with citrus#small children will fling squishy citrus at their siblings by the coiled light of Jupiter#which is as it should be#thank you voidingintotheshout for an excuse for all sorts of ranting
07/11/2020 We found a fourth deer skeleton in the woods, but this is the first one we’ve found that still has teeth. I hadn’t really noticed the teeth were missing on the others, but now I have many questions, such as:
- Why are deer teeth so weird?
- Who or what has been stealing all the deer teeth?
06/11/2020
My name too big
to fit this pome,
in hollow tree
I mayke my home.
wen autum has
a spooky nite,
my tree has bark
I give it bite.
04/11/2020 It is November. The maple trees have lost their leaves. All along the bare maple branches, where sunlight now reaches, the licorice ferns appear. They'll grow until spring, when the new-opening maple leaves will block their sunlight, and then they'll dry out and curl up and wait for winter's return. They are backwards plants, appearing in winter while the forest sleeps and disappearing in the spring when it awakens.
They do not touch the ground. They get water from the fog and nutrients from whatever bird poop and dead moss is on the branches. They create themselves from air.
This is what the forest dreams, when it sleeps in winter: the smell of licorice and ginger, a green like stained glass windows, a light in a high place.
03/11/2020 We found and harvested another lovely Giant Pacific Torus in the forest today. This is the seventh one we've grown; this area is apparently an excellent habitat for this species. Giant Pacific Toruses, like burrs, rely on mammals for seed dispersal - in this case, ethanol-loving featherless bipeds.
Perhaps we should set up a nature preserve here for Giant Pacific Toruses. The thought of them rolling wild and free in packs over the mossy hills brings a warmth to my jaded heart and a single tear to my eye.
01/11/2020 The mild-mannered accountant fusschicken is having an existential crises. Everything leading up to this moment was a lie.
In the heart of the mild-mannered accountant fusschicken, there lives a mighty Sound. The Sound is inexorable and inevitable. The Sound says, We Are Here and All Is Well.
The Sound will not be denied. The Sound will not be delayed.
We are here and all is well. W̴e̷ ̵a̷r̸e̴ ̸h̶e̷r̸e̶ ̵a̸n̵d̴ ̵a̶l̵l̶ ̷i̴s̵ ̷w̶e̷l̸l̵ Ẁ̵͜è̶̩ ̶̞̈́ḁ̶̚r̸̤͝ë̸̠́ ̷͈̓h̴̹̆ę̶͒r̶̟̕e̵͔̊ ̷̭́a̵̲͝ṉ̶͠d̶̥͒ ̴̙̈a̴͕̿l̷̨̿l̵̯̚ ̵͖͠i̵̞̅s̵̰̈́ ̸͈̎ẅ̴̳ĕ̸̪l̶͖͝l̴̫̈́
Welp, I guess that's a rooster after all.
31/10/2020 Cat-themed jack-o-lanterns for the socially distanced amusement of the ailurophile neighbour kids.
The chickens normally disdain human artworks, but pumpkin carving gets their undivided attention. And occasional nibbles.
26/10/2020 When cut or bruised, this milkcap mushroom oozes a Not Ominous At All Thick Dark Red Liquid. We cooked them in butter. The butter turned Red. Butter for the Butter God.
This species is ectomycorrhyzal with fir trees: they have a symbiotic relationship. The fungus makes a network of strands across a large volume of soil, including growing right into the tree roots. The tree uses sunlight to make sugars, and shares them with the fungus. In exchange, the fungus shares water and nutrients its network has extracted from the soil. Sometimes it connects multiple trees, and they can share resources through the fungal network.
It's one of the most convenient ectomycorrhyzal fungi to study scientifically. You don’t have to gene sequence anything; it’s always easy to tell where this fungus is. If a tree is symbiotic with this fungus, the roots will seep Not Ominous At All Thick Dark Red Liquid when cut. The forest bleeds, down there in the dark silent earth.
Not Ominous At All.
25/10/2020 Split stone.
21/10/2020 Of course the forest isn't full of thousands of sleepy ghost cats curled up in the cozy earth with only their luminous bleps visible. That would be silly. Shoelaces just untie themselves.
20/10/2020 Shaggy mane.
You'll be walking in a forest in autumn, and suddenly the birds all switch over to singing the Mission Impossible theme, and you know: someone nearby has picked some shaggy manes and has only a couple hours to cook and eat them before they self-destruct by dissolving into a greenish-black ooze.
The ooze makes a passable ink, if you happen to be mad that your dinner liquified itself and would like to write a strongly worded letter to the shaggy manes, with the shaggy manes. It is quite unsporting to dissolve into ink when someone tries to eat one, after all. Especially if one is a carnivorous mushroom, fond of growing spikes underground, stabbing passing worms, and digesting them.
19/10/2020 It is extremely foggy today.
The ravens are making a lot of noise - maybe they can’t see each other either. But the thick fog absorbs the higher frequencies so they kind of sound like bored humans sitting in trees saying “caw”.
18/10/2020 The trees are having an extremely normal week. Yup. A-OK. All systems nominal and possessed of the appropriate number of formless writhing orange appendages.