Some pics of this seasons Summer harvest

So as you can tell, once again this year we are terrible at posting to the blog. Rest assured we have been gardening our faces off! Here are a few of the fruits of our labored so far- more to come!

Spring Happenings at Bluebird

Plants are making their way into the garden, admittedly the season is just beginning so we are being cautious and only have peas, onions, and garlic in the ground so far. We have a round of lettuce and kale starts waiting for their big day as well, and I think that will be this weekend when we install them in the 4x4 garden bed with the cold frame over it. A few pics of the action..

The Bluebird is not dead- it's only getting stronger..

This is a simple montage of recent pics of goings on around the Garden.  Expect a more organized post soon with details on the improvements we made to our cedar planting boxes as well as our plans for the vegetable garden for the coming season.

Rosie and Jabarra Jr. sharing the nesting box

 Yard birds in the yard

 Cornflake, Green Lantern, Jabarra Jr, (back), Henrietta

The girls from the last pic, plus Rosie (foreground left) and Hidey, (Silver Lace Wyandote)

 Flint and Lilly love visiting the bunnies- as, apparently does Rosie (inside to the right)

 Come in and play with us!

 Flint is preparing to help "exercise" his little pal Jimbo. This consists of what you imagine it does...

 Teaser pics of our planting boxes, now mounted with wheels and filled with soil for the coming season!

 Fresh soil is so full of promise!

These are just a few of the pics of the weekend project of "Pimp my Planters".  I will post more  photos of the project soon, as well as some pics of the planters with their first crops in them as soon as they go in later this week. Our own improvements to an already solid planter box will really help us get the 2012 growing season off to a great start.

Spring Porcini Hunt with Dan!

tI know I know, I promised a mushroom hunting post like two weeks ago, sorry.  Petunia and I made some weak attempts to hunt mushrooms while on a recent vacation to Southern Oregon, but came up empty.  Although she had "hunted" mushrooms for fun as a small girl with her father Phil, it was always purely for fun and they never harvested them for fear of accidental ingestion of something toxic. I have never even tried to pick a wild mushroom before so this was all new to me. We didn't look long enough, or in the right places.  I think we may have been way too high in elevation at 4000+ feet, at least at this time of year, and where we were looking.  Dan was sad to hear we had failed to find any choice mushrooms while on our trip, despite having given us some pointers ahead of time.  He decided to share some knowledge with us, and invited me to come hunting with him that weekend. Dan and I headed out last Saturday morning to redress our failure and learn how to hunt for them a bit more advisedly.  

Dan tells us a little about Lookalikes.

Scary scary "Puffbal" Fungus.  Not edible.

Spore cake inside  (Yikes!)

The porcini proved elusive, with Dan and I searching for quite some time (over an hour)  before finding our first real specimen.  Once we found it, there was no longer any doubt in my mind as to what I was looking for.  What a mushroom these are!  Large, stout, firm things, they look like just the sort of mushroom you'd like to make your home out of, if you were two inches tall and blue from head to toe..  We found one huge rotten mushroom, which was an encouraging sign, but had to bumble around for another half an hour or so before finding the specimen you see below:

These mushrooms can be well hidden.  Specimens like this that are just breaking through the crust of moss and dead pine needles are often fresh and worm free.  Often, but not always..

Boletus rex veris in the flesh


We used walkie talkies to keep in communication, (really helpful!) and spread out our search pattern a bit wider.  I decided to return to the area where we first discovered the porcini pictured above.  I figured that where there's one, there should be more nearby.  Eventually I met with success, finding two mushrooms all on my own, not far from the first site!  These mushrooms had "Primordia" on them, which are actually baby mushrooms getting ready to grow! Had we left them in place, perhaps there would have been more mushrooms in that spot in another few days or weeks.  

A fat specimen, these are few and far between in the spring.

Encouraged, we redoubled the search, taking the car a mile or two further into the area we were exploring, and continued to seek the prized edibles.

                     

The haul.  These would prove to be an even more modest harvest than anticipated.

The growth on the bottom of the stem is called a Primordia, and it's a baby mushroom getting ready to grow.

Dan and I spent several hours in the forest that afternoon, but only came away with a handful of mushrooms for our efforts.  We were not disappointed though, as Porcini have be an elusive prize this the spring. According to Dan the season has been poor overall due to weird weather patterns and late snow in the mountains.  Worms are also a constant possibility when dealing with mature Porcini mushrooms, and sadly you may find you have to discard what you thought was a prime specimen upon discovering these little guys on board. We eventually came to find out that quite a few of the mushrooms had indeed been corrupted by worms already, and had to be discarded.  The remaining few mushrooms (All of which Dan was kind enough to leave with us!) provided just enough material to be the star attraction in a homemade pesto pasta dish I prepared with Petunia.  It was delicious, and I look forward to hunting for these wonderful mushrooms again in the fall, when I hear they are far more plentiful.



 This terrible pic, was supposed to illustrate the evil worms that had infested so many of our precious mushrooms.  Obviously, it didn't work very well.  I'd delete it but the blog editing interface is bugging so badly today, that I can't delete it without losing half my post.  Command-Z to the rescue.

 What was left of the mushrooms after the "wormectomies"

Petunia's homemade Pesto made a wonderful base for the Porcinis, no leftovers were to be had.


Heading out of the wilderness on our way home, Dan and I paused to admire the view:

 We were rewarded  with one of the best Mt. Rainier views I've ever seen on our way out of the forest.

One of the prettiest mountains in North America, in my opinion.