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Beauty, creation, Fungi, hillside beach manitoba, Manitoba, Mushroom, mushrooms, nature, photography
This has been a wonderful year for mushroom watching. The more you look the more you find – I should write that down!
I thought I’d share a few photographs of this week’s crop. I can’t believe the variety all within our little bit of property.
Where the sun does shine
Such a delicate and apparently chaotic pattern
The stem and the top (notice the technical terms) are so distinct
I really like the delicate hint of pink in the hue of this beauty
I was drawn to the delicate patterns on the top of these
These little guys are really intriguing, reaching up on long, slender stems
The shape of this one caught my eye
Finally this cluster was surprisingly difficult to get into focus, but a lovely family grouping
Tomorrow a little hover craft
You really are turning into a fungi fun-guy, Rod. Be careful what you eat. Apparently the underside of the top is important too. Lots look superficially similar. I have a coupe of fungus reference books for HK and still can’t identify most of them with confidence. Do mushrooms hover too?
Steve directed me to some guides and resources – very daunting! I don’t think I’ll try eating them, just looking and photographing and some basic attempts at identification. See Steve’s comment about the hovering spores – now that would be a nice shot to capture – who can produce one first? Do you see the glove on the ground?
That is quite a variety, Rod. The round ones are puff balls and, once dried out, they blow their spores out the hole in the top for the wind to carry them hither and yon. The ones with gills under the caps drop their spores to be distributed and some send their spores off like little projectiles. Sometimes….giggle…the spores hover in a cloud from the puffball’s blowhole. 🙂
I love photographing mushrooms…they hold still forever, even in the wind. 🙂
Yes, we have seen the clouds of spores coming out of the older puffballs in previous seasons. I think it would be an interesting challenge to capture the moment.
It is wonderful that they are so motionless. But they do require a lot of crouching or laying down in the damp. That’s why I often use the Sony, it has a screen that tilts so I can get the camera on the ground and still see the composition. A little more difficult with the DSLR.
I read the title of this post and had a chuckle. I laughed because firstly I LOVE all of your posts and know absolutely that I’m guaranteed a treat when I read them, but secondly ( if I’m going to be honest) I did think to myself, well If Rod really has had another helping of ‘shrooms then this post is going to be wild!
Fabulous photographs and yes, you are without doubt a fun guy 😉 !
Your wild comment reminded me of the lion-tamer skit in Monty Python.
I imagined approaching these wild mushrooms with a chair and whip.
fantastic 😉
Rod, I’ve just read your latest fabulous post and wanted to leave a comment. I’m not sure quite what the problem is but I can’t seem to be able to leave a comment – it says something like page doesn’t exist. Anyway, I hope that the LIKE box worked its magic and I shall try to leave a comment later. It might well be my slow internet here.
Sorry you had trouble posting a comment on the company ‘do’. WP does seen to act in unexpected ways at times.
Shrooms are quite pretty and you did this “ensemble”proud. Such a variety. At different times you’ll find others to record. It becomes sort of like looking for birds, butterflies, etc. Oh the joy or woe a (perspective here) of having a camera at our disposal. I don’t know about you but I feel an immense satisfaction when I use my camera in what I consider a productive manner.
As far as eating goes I know without a doubt that you and Susan are way too intelligent to even think for a second that you would want to eat any wild mushroom. Many a person has been foolish and eaten the wild ones.
Anyhoo, I enjoyed seeing these photos. Very nice ones to add to your growing collection of nature photographs.
Of slight interest and maybe not. Up to about 10 years or so ago Campbell Soup Co. had maintained a mushroom growing place in Hiilsboro, Texas. Compost could be bought by the 1/2 ton or whatever. Some people transported it down to my town and then it was for sale. I bought a front loader scoop that would fit in the bed of a pickup. I think one scoop filled the PU bed. Anyway that compost was fertilized with turkey manure from another big company and that is how the mushrooms were grown. The growing medium would be replaced with a fresh growing medium, I think yearly or twice yearly.
Sadly, it is no longer available. That compost was the best that I have ever used for my plants.
Good compost makes a big difference. We can’t do our own composting living in an apartment condo – and it’s too attractive for bears and racoons at the cabin. But we have friends who would take our kitchen compostables and add to three compost bins. In mid summer we get a couple of bags of beautiful compost. Our church now offers a compost receptacle for those parishioners who cannot have a composter at home. Then it is spread on the church flower beds. Its quite a remarkable process to watch the egg-shells, cabbage stalks, apple cores, potato peelings etc turn into such rich organic soil.
We have a mushroom plant not for from our town place, don’t know what they do with the growing medium once spent. Not that I have room for much in our balcony flower pots.
It’s interesting that a mushroom plant is near where you live. Campbell’s soup was about 45 miles from where I live. Not sure why the plant was closed.
I think the church composting idea is a really good one. More people should be composting when possible but lots of people view compost with distaste. I agree with you that it makes a difference for growing healthy plants.
Great pictures, and such a variety.
After a dismally dry June and July, Colorado finally had a very rainy August. Which was great for the yards and gardens, but it also flooded the burn scars in the areas damaged by fires this summer and last summer.
It also left clusters of mushrooms everywhere, though the local news did a special on all the varieties springing up, calling them toadstools and warning that many were poisonous. In the park behind our house we find a little cluster of red-topped toadstools with pale yellow stems. I went back to the house, got my camera, and hurried to take pictures, but they were gone. I hope if someone picked them it wasn’t for food.