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October 2004

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[I have been busy and I'm afraid I've let this journal slide for the last few weeks.  The first few entries will have to be brief catch-up, short on detail.]

10-3-04  Spent part of the afternoon gathering Indian hemp seedpods.  By the time I was finished, I had gathered two Wal-Mart bags full and could have done that twenty times over and not harvested all of them. 

10-4-04  Had to take up trapping again.  (The nighttime visitor who has been eating the cat's food.) **Spread the Indian hemp seedpods out on the back deck to dry.

10-6-10  My next door neighbor's maple stump yielded this fungus.  I think it's the one I tried in July that made sheets which looked as if they had been treated with beeswax.  No time to do anything with it, so they went into a Ziplock bag and into the refrigerator.

10-7-04  The Guild's Fall Fair is this weekend.  Went out and helped a friend set up.  While I was there, I gathered four different varieties of shelf fungi to play with later this month.

10-8-04  Even though I didn't have much time. I couldn't resist fooling around with one of the fungi I gathered yesterday.   This one is flat and thin from edge to base, and the backside has hair like structures rather than gills.  (I really, really need to get a book to identify these things.)  There was only a double handful of these, so they all went in to soak, then into the blender.  Instead of fluffing up like others I've done, these ground up into something resembling coarse sawdust.  Not good, and not at all promising for pulling sheets.  The vat water simply poured through, and it was impossible to couch the layer that was on the screen.  I scraped that off, drained the vat, bagged it all and put it in the refrigerator.  I may try cooking and reprocessing it to see if that will change the texture.

10-12-04  If the fungus "sawdust" above is cooked for an hour in plain water and then run back through a blender, it does make a sheet (dried under pressure).  The sheet is weird.  It feels almost like rubber...cold and floppy. 

10-14-04  I finally had some time to play with two more of the fungi gathered during the Fair.  The upper surface of this one (see notes on 10-16-04) looks much like the one I played with on the 8th, but the two are different structurally.  This one is thicker, even at the edge, but more so at the base.  And where the other had hair like structures on the underneath side, the one I worked with today has gills.  I soaked it for an hour or so, cleaned off the leaves that were stuck to it, trimmed the backside where it had been attached to the tree stump and ran it through the blender for about 30 seconds.  The pulp looks almost exactly like cooked (not instant) oatmeal with about the same texture.  Weird!  It pulls easily and forms a bumpy sheet that presses and dries flat.  It's suede-like soft and white with a slightly grayish tinge.  The other shelf fungus was a thick white one.  The upper surface was bumpy and the lower side was covered in pores rather than hairs or gills.  (For size reference, the largest of these is about fist size.)  Soaked and washed these, then cut them up (much like cutting tough, thick rubber).  This, too, processed into oatmeal, though whiter in color.  It takes about 1/4 of a cup of the pulp to make a 6"x9" sheet.  This one is whiter than the other, but the two feel just alike, soft, suede-like and somewhat rubbery.  I have one more fungus from the Fair, but no time to do it today.   This is a shot of it at the base of the tree where I found it (note shoe included for size reference.) 

10-15-04  This little fellow came to visit during the night.  Even when they're small, they have a large mouth and enjoy hissing and showing off their teeth.  He now has a new home in the country with plenty of room to roam...well away from my back porch and the cats' bowls!

10-16-04  Yet another visitor to the back porch.  **Gads!  Identifying fungi is difficult, far more difficult than, say, weeds or wildflowers.  There is so much variation between the individual plants, both in color and shape, and they change so much in appearance during their life cycle!  I would feel really bad about having trouble IDing these things, except even the experts have problems.  I have a couple of books ordered that should help somewhat, but in the meantime, I've been poking around the Internet checking out various educational institution sites.  I think I have identified (at least with reasonable certainty) the first fungus I worked with on the 14th.  Initially, I speculated this was a turkey tail (Trametes versicolor), but those have pores on the bottom side, where this one had gills, or what I thought were gills.  It appears to be Lenzites betulina (no common name).  This is classified as a polypore, even though it has gill-like structures.  Here is yet another picture and another.  (See what I mean?  All these pictures look so different, yet they are supposed to be the same plant.)  I have a feeling all I'll be able to do as far as identification is to place these plants in a general family, but for my purposes, this should be close enough.  Now, if I were planning on eating these things, it would be different...way different! 

10-17-04  Last night's guest.  Relocating these things is getting old, but I think this is the one that has been causing the problems, at least she's big enough to have done it.  **As I said, I've been poking around mushroom sites on the web, trying to identify the varieties I've been using.  There are two sites I especially appreciate for the solid, readable information they offer.  The first is Tom Volk's site.  He is a professor in the biology department at the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse.  (Don't let the initial harrum scarum appearance of the site put you off.)  I truly appreciate one quote from Volk regarding identifying fungi:  "Things get complicated... err... tricky when we try to place names on specimens -- the fungi just don't read the books like they should to know what they are supposed to  look like."  Yes, I can relate to that tidbit.  The other excellent site is Mushroom Expert (sorry the link to this site is now dead).  The primary writer for this is Michael Kuo, a professor of English and an amateur mycologist.  His writing is flawless, smooth, informative and definitely not boring.  He has a delightfully subliminal sense of humor that makes reading information packed text a pleasure.  **The refrigerator still had a bag of the fungus pulp that made the wasy, see-through sheets, so I got that out to use up.  (Hint - Don't store uncooked fungus pulp, at least, not for any length of time.)  The stuff pulled, but the drain time was dramatically increased by storage.  It held onto water like you wouldn't believe, even after couching.  I pulled sheets of different thicknesses, and there was so much water in the thick ones, that they distorted when they were board pressed.  Not good.  I knew it was happening the moment I stepped onto the boards, but I wasn't about to scrape the pulp off the couching sheets and repull the stuff.  Drain time was too long, and besides, I was sick of the odor.  At best, fungus pulp smells musty.  This stuff was closer to at worst than at best.  I also pulped and pulled sheets from a deteriorating shelf fungus I had found on a pine stump.  This one was so far gone, its identifying points were all lost, but it was such a nice color (a deep, rich, rusty brown) that I wanted to try it anyway.  It didn't fluff up in the blender, but rather processed into very fine pieces, and when I pulled it, the water whooshed through the screen.  If there had ever been any fiber in this particular fungus, it had disappeared during rotting, because there was nothing to hold the pulled sheet together.  By being very careful, I managed to dry a sheet in one piece (gorgeous, right?), but it held together only because of pressure, not because of any fiber content.  This is what happened when I folded it.

10-18-04  Lately we've had a problem with an underground plastic drainpipe that leads from a gutter downspout out to the sidewalk.  It has been backing up and overflowing.  Now we know why.  A few days ago JimT dug the pipe up and pulled this out of it.  (No, that is not a huge fuzzy caterpillar.  Its a solid wad of very fine red maple roots.)  JimT's question was, "Can you make paper from this?" (This man has never pulled a sheet of paper in his life, but he has a well integrated, papermaking mindset.  You have to  love a man like that!)  I looked at it closely, and the roots were fine enough that I though it might be possible to break them down with lye.  I cut them up yesterday, washed out all of the roof grit, cooked them for three hours and rinsed.  This morning I took a close look at what I had in the pot.  I had started with enough to make a beater load, but cooking reduced the mass by about half.  The "bark/bast" was goo, and the lye didn't break down the inner root.  I ended up with a mass of stuff that the blender simply couldn't handle.  It was a nice idea, but one that didn't work out.

10-19-04  I'll be AWOL for a few days visiting friends and playing basketmaker.  If you have time and enjoy fine basketry, you might want to take a look at these gorgeous ones on the Smithsonian site.

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