Monday, October 13, 2008

'shrooms!!!



We have mushrooms! Remember those logs John inoculated back in late March? They're beginning to produce!! Here (above) we have six shitake and two oyster mushrooms, ready to go into a stir fry this evening.

Below, a flush of tiny oysters break through the paraffin that coated the plug of spawn and sawdust. We have regular oysters and blue oysters (so that's where the band Blue Oyster Cult got its name!) -- not sure which these are.



They have a strange beauty -- like tiny alien life forms bubbling out of the logs.



Below are the minute yellow crescents ( not much larger than a fingernail clipping -- I'm really asking too much of my poor camera) of Chicken of the Woods. I've never tasted this mushroom and look forward to seeing these reach eating size.




All these mushroom pictures made me think of the books about Mr. Thallo and the Mushroom Planet. The first one, published in 1954, was my introduction to science fiction. Charming, innocent fantasy about children from Earth visiting a planet where all life is fungoid.

No, it wasn't creepy at all -- it was, rather, a good way to introduce a child to the notion that a being very different from oneself isn't necessarily scary.
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