just some garden photos from this summer...

We found a nest of robins in the katsura tree, and they grew so fast and hopefully disappeared before getting eaten.


The blueness of morning glories never seize to amaze me:


The strange weed that had been loving the raised bed over the winter turned out to be poison hemlock ('odört' in Swedish), the toxic plant that became Socrates' last drink when he was sentenced to death.  I watched it grew, flower, and then pressed it in the herbarium press before it could set seed! :)
 


Once again the hollyhocks got attacked by the hollyhock rust fungus.  It just isn't the place for hollyhocks, too bad.  In Swedish, hollyhocks are 'stockros', and I have never seen any sick ones in Sweden. I am telling you, gardening in New Jersey is a kind of warfare againsts pests, vermin, fungi, viruses and bacteria.  I don't remember my parents complaining about blister beetles, stink bugs, late blight or anything like that.  OK, we had that potato disease, I remember that... and birds eating cherries, but nothing like this. The good thing is that I can always bring in every fungal pest to my colleagues at work who really appreciate the addition to their teaching collection of fungal pathogens.


This (Glechoma hederacea, ground ivy, 'jordreva') is one of those purple flowers that turn blue when you take a photo of it.  The sensitivity of the digital sensor in the camera is different from our eye, because this flower certainly wasn't blue.  I have seen the same thing happen with slide film, especially Kodachrome.


This was a really cool beetle in the goldenrod flowers, imitating a wasp. I wonder what it is called?

Stamp of the day: Finding Funky Fungi

It is the season of the fungi, these strange creatures that are actually more animal than plant.... evolutionarily speaking.  I have seen a lot of interesting fungi lately in our wet fall in eastern USA.

(above) Earth stars in the Pine Barrens...  I haven't seen an earth star in many years, so this was fun!

Cobolt crust fungus in our garden, found on an old stick (sorry, no photo, check out the link to see the amazing color)...

Tiny little black specks on a rotten branch was Diatrype, an ascomycete (related to morels)...

and then jelly fungi of course, these jellyfish-looking things that come out of branches as gelatinous exudates...

The stamp of the day is from Taiwan and was one of the few mushroom stamps I could find that had an earth star among it.

Enjoy!

Fuligo septica - dog vomit slime mold

Fuligo septica - dog vomit slime mold, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

The most amazing organisms are sometimes right in front of you and you don't notice them. This slime mold, Fuligo septica, a myxomycete, a kind of fungus, showed up on a lot of recently put down bark mulch.

It rained a lot and then these big patched of white leathery slippery stuff started accumulating, and the colonies were up to 20 cm in diameter (that is 8 inches for you non-metric readers:).

After a few days the white turns into brown and small black dusty things show up on the top surface and then it kind of dissolves and composts itself back into the mulch.

And the name is perfect. Dog vomit slime mold - that is the accepted, correct name, and it sure looks like it. Sometimes this species can be yellow instead of white, especially if there is a lot of heavy metals in the soil.

Today's stamp: Kantarell (Chanterelle mushrooms)

Har du sett herr Kantarell?...uti i enebacken! Han är glader, han är snäll och är så gul på hatten....

(Translation of Swedish childrens' song: "Have you seen Mr Chanterelle? On the juniperslope!  He is happy, he is kind and so yellow on his hat...)

Today's  mushroom picking results: 13 liters of prime kantarells and 3 liters of trattkantarells. (Sorry for the svenglish, guys!) All found in the vicinity of Barking Dog Plaza!

(Update - translation by LS)

Comments during tree decorations

Swedish christmas tree decorations, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

- I bet our tree is the only one in New Jersey with mushrooms on it, says daughter.
- Mom, how can mushrooms grow straight out of branches, says son.
- Because they are endophytic and can grow inside the branches until the fruiting body comes out, says the botanical mom.

(Of course the red and white fly agaric never grows endophytically, only in the soil, but who cares? It is Christmas! And Swedes love to decorate with replicas of poisonous mushroom at Christmas time, :). )

Strange nature - stolen fungal genes inside an insect

Aphids ('bladlöss') are strange creatures.  Not only do these sapsucking insects excrete sugars for the ants that use them as milksugar cows, new research shows that the red aphids of the pea aphid species, somehow picked up a gene from a fungus to produce red caretonids.  I guess this is 'natural' gene modification, and who knows how long ago this happened. Read more here if you like...


Photo by Angela Douglas, Cornell University.

Today's wild harvest

Wild chanterelles are here! Local harvest in Eskilstuna, Sweden, collected by AREA and EH.

Strange is the fungus' mysterious ways

A few days ago when we took a walk in Hutcheson Memorial Forest, I found these strange things on the ground. The little pretty spring flower Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica) was attacked by and covered by this rust fungus. When I came home I googled 'rust fungus' and 'Claytonia virginica' and immediately found out that only one species of rust fungus is known from this species - Puccinia mariae-wilsoniae. After talking to our mycologist at work, I found out that this is a host-switching fungus, so it jumps back and forth between two species within a year. Those orange things are where the spores are produced and spread. It is amazing how many complicated, unusual, and unknown species there are out there in the green mess.

Attacked by the corn smut

This is our corn from our garden - not a very nice-looking thing after being attacked by the fungus called corn smut. The interesting thing is that this pest is a delicacy in Mexico, where the infected large corn kernels are cooked and eaten as huitlacoche. That Spanish words comes from an Aztec word meaning raven's extrement. Nice! You can buy it canned too. Some recipes are here. The infected kernels start out yellow, become large and engorged, then turn bluish, and eventually they blister open and lots of black spores are coming out. People eat them before they sporulate. I pickled them in lab ethanol instead, to use in teaching in mycology and ethnobotany. Oh, all the nice things you can find on your garden. Even if it is kind of annoying that some crops 'fail', it is interesting to see all these unexpected events. I think our garden is a pest-haven after all problems we have had this year, but maybe it is because I refuse to spray with pesticides and fungicides.

Stamp of the Day: Mushrooms!

These stamps speak for themselves - excellent forest food! They are issued by Åland, which is not an independent country, but an island between Sweden and Finland that is partly self-governed. Note the Euro mark on them - does this mean that you can mail letters with Euro stamps from any EU country in Europe that uses Euros now?

Travels in Vermont: Bennington Pottery

PP and I are back from a week long trip to the three wonderful states of Vermont ("The Green State"), New Hampshire ("Live Free or Die"), and Maine ("This is how life should be"). I will blog a little about what we saw and did, but it will be in random order as I sort through my photos and memories. First, but nearly last on the trip, was a visit to the Bennington Pottery, in Bennington, Vermont. It is a small pottery famous for their old-fashioned, handmade items, often glazed in either earthy tones (blueberry, sky blue, ochra, whitewash) or 'flammig' in two opposing colors. We bought new dinner plates in the blue agate series, which is white and cobalt blue glaze mixed together, like this:
On the pottery website, they say this about this glaze, so I guess we are not alone in our choice: " Bennington's signature glaze color - Blue Agate ("ag get") is a thick splatter of deep cobalt on a warm clay underglaze. This glaze color works well with a wide variety of kitchen, dining room, and country home decors. For nearly 60 years Blue Agate has been our customers' favorite pottery glaze choice."

Pottery has been made in Bennington, which is in the southwestern corner in Vermont and about 4 hours from New Jersey, since late 1700s. They used to have great clay here, but that is now all used up so they need to get it from other states.

You can go into the pottery and see them make the different things by hand (well, some machines are used, but most is really by hand). They make only 800 pieces a day and are famous for their pottery. We have several things from them earlier, but after seeing the pottery itself, I have a better appreciation for them. We also got a little bowl in the more turquoise-sky blue color, which became the temporary home for this year's first harvest of chanterelles in New Jersey, on June 30. Sauteed with a little garlic in butter - oh they were good!