an excess of enthusiasm

After spending all last year in an apartment while our house got rebuilt after the fire, we clearly had a year’s worth of pent-up enthusiasm for the yard, the woods, and the lake. So come spring, we hit the ground running. As of today, it’s official, we just completed our last major outdoor job for the time being and it was a doozy—dock repair. Among the long, long list of things we have been doing outside is “sporing mushrooms”. My husband and son have been slowly turning our property into an northern edible food forest using native species only. One such species is the Wine Cap mushroom. It is so easy to spore and grow, that I think it might be every budding mycologists gateway mushroom. We have grown them before; taste-wise they are good not great, but they dry beautifully and we like them in mushroom risotto in the winter. If you want to try sporing your own mushrooms, and haver a shady nook with wood chips—get yourself some wine caps! It really is quite fun.

wine cap mushrooms (Stropharia rugosoannulata)

there’s a pattern being established

These are the fern frond, now dried, that I posted a week ago. I think I like them dried better. Can you see a pattern being established here? I make an assemblage or composition, and then let it hang around for week or two to see what happens. Often, not always, I find the wilted/dried composition more interesting. I also get two photos for the effort of one–but I can honestly say that’s not why I started this new practice. I am simply finding the imperfect, the wilted, the impermanent more interesting. It could be my own aging, or it could be that the subjects objectively are more interesting in these later stages. You tell me!

Hope you all had a good Holiday weekend!

Collection of dried northern fern fronds

daylilies for days

My neighbor has her boulevard (that little strip of land between the sidewalk and the road) planted dense with daylilies–it’s not a bad way to contain them, now that I think about it. She owns 10 acres, so the lot is wide and the daylilies stretch for half the block. They are in full bloom right now, and it is quite beautiful–all that orange against the green curtain of a midwestern summer.

orange daylilies (Hemerocallis fulva?)

New to me garden escapee

I love finding new-to-me plants on my walks. These beauties were trailside, and I was hopeful I had come upon a new (to me) native flower. Alas, this musk mallow is not native to Minnesota. So my feral trailside stand was likely an ornamental escapee. We have seven native mallows in Minnesota, but this one isn’t on the list. The flowers are indeed pink but I did take a little poetic license with my image editing in order to saturate the colors as bit to my liking. You can see I was catching them on the backside of their blooming.

Ohhh, by the way, a painted turtle mama laid a clutch of eggs beside our deck today! We feel honored to have witnessed this. Gestation take 70-90 days, and in northern climates may over-winter. So, tomorrow we will be building a turtle egg cage to protect the area. You can google it if you’re curious :-)

musk mallow (Malva moschata) var. Rosea

why so difficult?

My plan was to remove the fruit clusters from the tops of yesterday’s stems, and make an simple arrangement with them. On my kitchen counter, all the colors looked so natural and harmonious together, I thought it would be easy-peasy. It was not easy-peasy. I was at it all afternoon. The clusters looked shaggy, not interesting. The colors looked more interesting in natural light than they did on the images. Nothing I tried seemed to work. It’s not often I wrestle with a subject for as long as I did with these staghorns trying to make a composition work. After all these years, I still get stymied.

Also, I think there is something about photographing red and trying to get it to stay “natural” on the edited image that might have been the problem. I say this because my book publisher flagged one of my images during the publishing process as having an unnatural red–I forget now what she called it, but she was right, it had gotten over brightened and looked artificial. Any graphic designers out there who can help me understand this and how to avoid it?

sumac staghorn fruit clusters