More Growing Things

For some reason, I had a hard time getting the next set of pictures to insert into the post. Here are some more pictures of things growing...but not in my garden.

I have had a fascination with mushrooms ever since I bought my first 35mm SLR camera. You know, the oldie that you have to adjust your aperture and manually focus. They are really fun to take picture of. No two mushrooms are the same. 

Small Mushrooms



Fairy Ring




Boletus

 The Fairy Ring is a bunch of mushrooms which grow from previous mushrooms growing in the area. What happens is, one mushroom will drop its spores from the cap and seed the surrounding area around the mushroom. Then it happens again with the mushrooms that grow from those spores. Again and again it happens and makes a circle of mushrooms. I was tickled to see it happen here. That pile of brown straw is actually decomposing chicken manure. It's not hard to figure out where the spores came from!

The small mushrooms I almost stepped on. I don't know what kind they are. I just liked them because they are in a little bunch.

The Boletus is a type of woodland mushroom. It grows like crazy in my yard, here in South Carolina. I don't mind all the fungus because they're interesting. They have an orange and brown cap. The underside looks like sponge, as you see above. This particular Boletus is not an edible mushroom. See the little black spot on the top of the cap? This is what happens when it is bruised. I pinched off a bit to see if it changes color. Because it changes color, it is not an edible Boletus. It is really fun to pull these apart because you can watch them turn color right in front of your eyes.

REMEMBER!!! Do NOT eat any mushrooms you find in the wild. They can be poisonous.

Take care.