Monday, September 10, 2018

She Sprouts in Beauty

Not gonna lie, we've had more than our fair share of rain over the weekend. Since we live high on a hill, no bad came of the inundation, the only casualty being one of those orange-and-white striped marker thingies that keep people from driving off the side of the low water bridge. Of course the bridge was underwater for a couple days. We have an alternate route. So we escaped injury and inconvenience. We were very lucky.

We were also served up an inimitable treasure, which I discovered Saturday morning on the back porch.


What? You don't see the treasure? It's no wonder you guys haven't collected 167 pennies in the last 18 months!



There is Mother Nature's masterpiece. Dead center in the first photo.

I have no idea what's going on here. We've never grown a fungus on the porch, much less overnight. The previous evening, I had tossed the juice from a jar of dill pickles there, and also the brine from a jar of green olives. I usually dump them over the porch rail, but it was raining, by cracky, and I didn't want to melt, seeing as how my sweetness level is out of control.

Surely those fluids had nothing to do with the sprouting of the fungi. The deluge would have washed it all away in minutes. I suppose the conditions in the dirt in the cracks of the porch boards were just right.

Looks like it might be time for Hick (or his minion HOS) to replace some porch boards.

The bright color on such a drab day caught my eye, and made me wax poetic. Actually, it made me was plagiaretic.

She sprouts in beauty, in the night
In rainy times, and starless skies
And all that's best of dark, no light
Meet in her whorls, I realize
Thus risen with no eyes in sight
To party on like all fungis
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HEY! Looks like it's called Dacryopinax spathularia.

And it's EDIBLE! Other links showed that it's sometimes used in a dish called Buddha's Delight. Well. It might have delighted Buddha, but to me, it's a nightmare!

That's not happenin'. I'm not even going to touch it.
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16 comments:

  1. Very pretty, but not a welcome site for a wood deck. Do you know anyone who is handy repairing stuff?

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    1. Where there's a will there's a way. Unfortunately, the will is missing.

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  2. A job for the Hick-ster, for sure! How lucky can you be?

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    1. Not as lucky as when he replaced the three outer boards, under the rail. I might have to wait until these get a hole rotted through them, like those did.

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  3. Replies
    1. Yeah. At first, I thought Hick had dropped some crumbles of foam insulation.

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  4. Hello there, Ms Byron (please tell me it was a take on Byron, otherwise I will feel a complete twerp!). I love the little fungus, it's so pretty.
    Around My Kitchen Table

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  5. It's pretty, but I don;t care who says it's edible... but your palgeretic poem was great.

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    1. I sure didn't harvest it for supper! Don't tell Byron that I plagiarized!

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    2. I won't say a word!!

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    3. Good to know! Loose lips sink ships, and possibly get Val a semi-private room in the Blogger Crossbars Hilton.

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  6. Edible you say. Wonder what it tastes like. I have a friend who lives down the road, she is a taxidermist and she eats some strange things. She knows all about vegetation and she will often scold me on the weeds I pull and dispose of. She swears they are edible and I freely hand them over to her and tell her to chow down. I have enough trouble getting HeWho to accept rosemary and basil in his food.

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    1. I looked at a couple other sites, and one said that most people here don't bother with it, because the taste is so bland. Maybe it's like tofu, and can pick up flavors from something else...

      Sorry, but thinking about "taxidermist" and "eats strange things" makes me a bit queasy. I guess that's some karma for previous posts.

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    2. She is a real pioneer woman. She hunts and traps and puts up enough food every year to feed a family of 12! She just put up 100 quarts of beans. She "cans" deer meat in quart jars. Just the thought of popping open a jar of deer meat triggers my gag reflex! She lives with a guy that I always assumed was gay. He is a body builder who shaves his entire body every morning and takes steroids, but refuses to eat meat. According to her, he is asexual. She confided things I never wanted to know!!

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    3. She's a 2-sequel novel just waiting to happen! With no resemblance to anybody living or dead, of course...

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