Saturday, August 23, 2008

Fungus Amongus

Or Humongous as the case may be.

According to a recent CBC article, there are an amazing amount of fungus that are around the wilds of New Brunswick. It is thanks to all of the rain that we have had in the past month. Copious amounts of rain that has made the ground boggy. Rain that has made the septic system at the lake... suspect. Rain that has encouraged blight among the tomatoes. Rain that has encouraged the deer to come out of the (usually) boggy ground and snack at our garden. Sigh.

The neighbour that has been very vigilant at keeping the deer out of our garden ( and there by his own) has just sold his house to my brother and his fiance. For some reason, I doubt that my brother will be able to keep the deer out as well a our retired neighbour. Too many cows and other critters to keep an eye on where Eli had only his back 40 (less than an acre) to look over and if the deer stayed away from our garden, they were less likely to snack at his.

I've heard of many different things that discourage deer. Like marigolds, or scarecrows, or (can you imagine something called...) deer nets. Actually the deer net lends a rather wonderful picture of reeling your net in after a hard day defending the garden from the deer and finding a deer or two suspended in the net just struggling to get free. The mind boggles at the type of net that could catch a full grown deer. What a mental image!

In any case the wet summer has been a boon to the mushroom pickers in the area. And as we found out, it is also a boon to the mushroom naturalist in the area.

There were many new and interesting species to be seen in the wet, wet woods of New Brunswick this summer. What are their real names? No clue. But we shall call them the "brown circle",

yellow puff ball.


ugly thingie, to name a few.



There were also some rare sightings of the "white rose"



and handsome humongous.


Quite a few of the humongous sightings actually. Several with sneaker "to show scale".

And a few that were not necessarily nice. At least that is how we perceived them. Or at least how Mira ( living in a house with one bathroom, three boys, and an open door policy) named them.
"Look! This one looks like a penis!"

5 comments:

tanita✿davis said...

*snort*

I like my shrooms as much as the next person, but suddenly... not so much.

A deer net does sound fun! We used to use Ivory soap shavings and hair trimmings stuffed into a nylon to make a lumpy and bizarre scarecrow to battle the deer. That, and a rosemary border discouraged them; NOTHING but a six foot opaque fence keeps them out. If they can't see where they'll land on the other side, they won't jump it.

Christine said...

I've heard about hair trimmings to keep squirrels out, but I didn't know it might work for deer too.

KansasA said...

Would that be a "famous" penis? ;) lol

Unknown said...

hey, i just saw those white rose mushroom flowers a few weeks ago and wondered what they were so i did a web search and found you.. did you find out what these are??

Anonymous said...

Indian pipes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_pipes