Harvest

It's started. That madness that eventually follows the scouring of seed catalogues and the planning of the hedging rotation. The fruits and veg, both wild and domestic are indefatigably, exhaustingly, here.
Today I have pulled and laid out to dry all the onions and shallots - enough for a great wodge of the year if drying advances more quickly than rotting. I have beheaded the globe artichokes and produced jars of artichoke bums in olive oil. I've picked cultivated raspberries and tripwire hazard blackberries and the first crumble of the season is in the oven right now. The runner bean chutney glints at me, the colour of tawny cat's eyes. Yellow courgette soup is in the fridge. Field mushrooms sit fatly in a pudding basin in the scullery for tomorrow's breakfast.
It's the start of the wild-eyed frenzy of grey rabbit activity. The hording and stockpiling, the harvesting and salting, the preserving and sweetening. Puddings are back on the menu. Vinegars are to be made. The orchard has to be checked regularly to make sure the damsons, gages and plums are caught before wasps, squirrels and birds ravage the lot. The apple crop is going to be huge, but the bottles and the crushing and pressing gear are all waiting.
We turn from bemoaning the empty shelves to wondering how we can find room for just one more jar. I don't wander anywhere without trug, colander or plastic bag. And the ducks I've been rearing for meat have started to reach the age of freezerhood.

Woodland nymph

There's been playing about in the woods the last few days. Time was getting short for coppicing so it rushed to the top of the list. It's too wet to take a vehicle down, so a barrow was piled with chainsaw, loppers, appropriate lubricants (chain oil not brandy), thick thornproof gloves, and the dogs were called and off we went.
On the way there were various distractions; snow-cracked prone willows had to be cut down to restore the pathways, and I oohed and aahed at the bubbling of the new tadpoles and the fresh flush of primroses.
This Green Woodcup (or Green Elfcup) caught my eye, as it always does. I am a stickler for picking up rogue bits of plastic and twine, so I always check out patches of unnatural colour. Only this is entirely natural, and a pleasure, not a pain.

My best guess.. not for those of a sensitive disposition

I'd said on Friday that I wondered what I'd find the next day...
Well. Here it is. On the huge rotting engine beam that has been taken out of the round house as part of the barn restoration and put in the ram's paddock. The big patch on the right is about six inches high.
First thought: "the ram's been sick".
Second thought (polite version): "the ram has ejaculated".
Third thought: "It could be some sort of fungus?".
I don't think I'm congenitally suited to being an ecologist. Too dirty-minded. Well, it was Saturday morning.

Lichens and fungi

This weekend I have thrown more weighty logs and chunks of tree trunk onto the trailer than my back appreciates. I did remember to bend my knees, but we are talking the equivalent of heaving the weight of hundreds of smallish persons here. Imagine carting every school child and all their teachers at your local primary school, and you just about have it.
I took lots of standing still and admiring the view breaks, and sat in the tractor cab as I drove from one heap of logs to the next for longer than was really necessary. I also gawked at a couple of extraordinarily beautiful specimens of lichen.
The vibrant purple one was hiding at the bottom of the log pile, really damp and dark. I worried that exposing it to light might mean the end of my aspirations to be the next Alexander Fleming, but as I don't own any petri dishes I took a photo instead.



The one that looks like orange ears is some sort of cup fungus rather than a lichen; my hunt for elucidation suggests it might be scarlet cup fungus.





And then there was this nifty little trio; as poisonous looking bunch of fungi as you would wish, all phallic and starting to develop a gelatinous sheen.

In praise of damp

As there is nothing you can do about the weather you might as well revel in it and shrug off categorising it as good or bad. It just is.
The last three days have been very stormy; if I didn't know better I would think I was living in a crow's nest, what with all the creaking and moaning and shivering of timbers, shifting of slates and the whistling of the wind in the chimneys. The rain water is gushing down the lane, brown with clay, creating ephemeral waterfalls that dump their load behind the gathering of leaves and twigs blocking drains and ditches. The lunar landscape of the yard now resembles the Lake District as viewed from a passing satellite, and the field ditches are being swept clean by the deluge.
The sheep shelter behind the feeders and hedges and when the rain softens shake their fleece free of the weight of the water. The ducks churn their grassy daytime sward to sticky clay and quack at the wind. The geese splash in the impromptu stream that courses through the orchard.
The mill leat that runs the length of the north boundary of the farm has gone from trickle to flood, backing up where the wood sits alongside, carrying off the leaves that have collected below their parent trees. The ferns at this northern edge thrive on getting their feet wet, and they grow not just in the crevices at the foot of the trees but high up in the canopy alongside mosses and lichens, a whole ecosystem of green dampness. It is not too hard a leap to imagine Moor Wood as an underwater world, the surface above the tree tops, me and the dogs picking about on the water's bed admiring the whorled and fantastically patterned plant exotica; fungi for coral, moss for seaweed, frogs for fish.

Apologies for the poor quality picture - it was getting dark and raining for Devon.

Friday fungus

An hour's walk in Moor Wood with Fenn on a hunt for the mass of fly agarics that appeared last year was unsuccessful; perhaps they'll emerge later in the season. But there was no shortage of life among the mould and the damp.