Almost Free Food.

There is a sense of satisfaction, perhaps even smugness in growing your own fruit and vegetables. There are no air miles, the produce is fresh and if you forget about the expense of time you are ending up with very cheap food.

Even better is food that literally pops up of its own accord and all you have to do is kneel down and pick it. I am fortunate that my garden throws up a wide variety of edible fungi every year. Most I consume fresh but when an over abundance occurs I then resort to drying them in the lower reaches of the trusty aga.

Mushrooms haven't been the only free food from the garden this August. I have four or five wild cherry trees growing along one of the marches and I was able to pick just over four pounds of fruit from their lower branches. Unfortunately cherries do force you to work a bit. It takes a long time to pick four pounds of the small wild fruit and then there is the effort of pitting.

 

 

Bracket Fungus.

 

It must be five or six years since I cut down a rather recalcitrant bough from a sycamore tree at the bottom of the garden. The wound to the tree healed over quite quickly and I forgot about my venture into tree surgery. This year a bracket fungus has appeared around what I thought was a clean and antiseptic incision. Perhaps I should have applied a tar wash. The tree still looks vibrant and verdant so hopefully the fungal growth is not the preface of arboreal death. I wonder whether I can now crop this fungal growth?

Although I have various books on mushrooms and other fungi I find it very difficult to identify garden specimens with any degree of certainty and of course certainty is rather important with fungi if you wish to eat them. I, "think," that this specimen might be a polyporus of some description, but then again I may be totally wrong. Anyhows I don't think that mushroom risotto is on the menu.

 

Autumn Berries

 

Autumn has arrived, We might prefer to think of it as late summer but the heavy dews and shortening hours of daylight can't be ignored. Goodbye summer.

It isn't all bad news however. Autumn provides free food with only the effort of picking to set off against the value of nature's bounty. I paddled around the unkempt corners of the garden today and picked some of the early blackberries. They have now been consigned to the lower recesses of the freezer.

I espied a few mushrooms beginning to thrust through the wooded areas. I expect that I will be able to pick a few pounds within the next week.

 

To eat or not to eat that is the question.

Reports of strange giant fungi caused me to amble along a local road this morning to view the cause of this rural excitement.

 

There were four of them growing in the verge. One appeared to have been kicked by a passerby and was looking decidedly the worse for wear. Another had turned an orangey colour and was most definitely past its best. The remaining two had just about reached maturity and were unscathed save for a few nibbles from some long departed slug or snail. They looked a bit like white, cyclist's helmets that had been tossed into the grass and they were about twelve inches across. It would seem that they might well be giant puff-balls in which case they provide a lot of good eating. If they are not then I suppose the worse case scenario is death by poisoning!

 

I wonder whether I should return to their secret location and pick them?