mushrooms, mycelium & swine flu

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While trees are popping chartreuse leaves at the end of April, after a couple of rainy days and warm nights, we slide our farm clogs on and head into the two little woods behind us to scour the ground for morel mushrooms.



I have to wear my reading glasses so the dried leaves and mushrooms don't blur into one another. With clear vision, I can see how hideously brain-like they look. To one who detests mushrooms - disgusting! To one who adores them - tantalizing!

Don found these clusters of morels hidden beneath brush Friday;
I had gone over the same spot that morning and missed them.

We have never had the luck of some who fill bags and bags with morels. We know a lady who refuses to eat them but will hunt and pick for hours in her woods to harvest them, then give them away with a smile. The most we've found any given year is around 70. Don found the season's first six last week - the ones in the top photo, the biggest being around 2". Then Friday he found the clusters in the photo above.

The season lasts about two weeks, and there is much lore on where to find them (at the foot of an old apple tree, or around fallen elms among them) and how to pick them and not pick them. The clumps of morels Don found Friday were under the jagged edge of the old fallen apple tree. When we picked them, we broke them off and left the base in the ground so they'll continue to propagate.

You can tell real morels from poisonous imposters by their hollowness.

We soak morels in salty water to float out dirt and bugs, then dip them in milk, dredge in flour, and sauté in a little mixture of oil and butter (oil keeps the butter from burning), tossing on some salt and pepper. They are delicious and rival truffles, which sell for hundreds of dollars a pound. (Part of the problem with truffles is that being so expensive, you only get thrifty bits of them in a dish concocted by a clever chef who spreads them out, otherwise who could afford to eat them? And in such small samples, you don't get to really experience their flavor and texture.)

Did you know there are estimated to be one to two million species of fungi? Only about 150,000 of those form mushrooms. Of those, I don't know how many thousands are edible. And of those, only a fraction are cultivated and sold for consumption.

Like humans, fungi "breathe" oxygen and emit carbon dioxide. In fact animals, including humans of course, are closer to fungi in makeup than to plants, protozoa or bacteria.

Beneath these treasures of the ground is a lacy web of mycelium, the root system of fungi. These webs of fibers lie beneath forests and fields all over the planet, and some of them stretch for miles. The largest known living organism in the world is a fungus called honey mushroom, discovered in Oregon in 2000. It's 2,200 acres, that's 3.5 miles across - about 1,665 football fields, yet only one cell wall thick.

In an interview in The Sun magazine, Paul Stamets, author of Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World, and at fungi.com, explains from 30 years of research how mycelia are essential to the survival of our planet.

Stamets explains that mycelia quite naturally clean up pollutants in the soil. They also feed plants. And what is truly remarkable - when coupled with plants, they make them more resistant to heat and erosion. Grasses laced with mycelia are heat resistant up to 160 degrees fahrenheit, whereas without the fungus, they would wither above 120 degrees.

Stamets suggests we should couple mycelia with corn and other crops to make them "naturally" drought resistant, which sounds better than genetically modifying crops, but I wonder. If the fungi and plants aren't naturally coupled, are we messing with something that shouldn't be messed with? Maybe Stamets and other scientists have an answer.



I leave you with an exciting 18-minute YouTube video of Paul Stamets' TED talk almost exactly one year ago on May 8, 2008: 6 Ways Mushrooms can save the world. It is extraordinary and well worth your time to hear about the network of mycelia in the earth beneath you, and how these organisms benefit us, could help clean up our planet and even provide eco-fuel. There is a segment about their use against flu viruses, and I am very curious to find anything on the Internet connecting fungi with the current Swine H1N1 flu outbreak, since he mentions this strain specifically in the video. You'll get the feeling from his rapid speech that he is trying to tell as much as he possibly can about his favorite subject in too short a time.

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first of May and counting

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For a few years now we've had a family reunion we call Farm Day at the beginning of August. Children ride the red 1941 Farm-All B tractor down the hill to the meadow with Uncle Don; adults sit in a circle of camp chairs in the maple tree shade next to the house and gab - or play badminton, ping pong or croquet; guys pull out guitars in a grass circle; and my brother Jim helps grill brats and burgers. However this year, instead of Farm Day, we'll welcome 150 of our friends and family for our daughter Lesley's Farm Day Wedding: three months from tomorrow.

THREE MONTHS FROM TOMORROW!

Don is fully in gear and has recruited farm hands to help clean up the beds. He only pays them chicken feed, but they are enthusiastic and hard working, though sometimes a tad lippy.

Too bad they can't weed out this grass in the herb bed. Oh well, Don will be digging it up anyway to plant a Three Sisters garden. The herbs, tulips, daffodils, lilies and irises - but hopefully not the persistent grass - will get transplanted to some other as yet un-dug bed. (Peter's the digger.)



Notice all the Don Don Don and they they they and busy busy busy? They - those plucky chickens - clucked at me as I lay around on the ground with my camera, "Woman, you are so lazy, look at these grapevines! Didn't you weed them last year? Look at you lying there making strange noises with that black box. [I make strange noises?] These grapes should have been pruned in March, what a mess! You're a pitiful farmer's wife." Khan brrraughed at them to shut up, or else. He knows who writes the checks.



I was slightly offended and felt guilty, but Bishop showed me how to ignore them as they go about their business. Thanks, Bish, you're a real pal.



The thing is, if I keep taking my cues from Bishop, and all I do is an approval here and there of Lesley's wedding shoes and the restaurant taste test for the rehearsal dinner (yum!), then poor Don will have to rely on these ladies, who I think can't landscape the yard or hold a paintbrush.

Awright, awright, you squawky hens, I'm up, I'm up.

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meeting a blog friend

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How long have you blogged?

Do you communicate with blog friends beyond the blogs - in email or online chats?

Would you meet up with a blog friend? Why or why not?

These were some of the questions a Communication PhD student asked in her research survey, which I had mentioned in my post about writing: supply & demand. I was among 20 blogger participants.

The survey was timely, because my dear blog friend Susan and I had planned to meet up the following weekend.

What if she's a pathological killer? Solution: we brought our body guard husbands along.

What if we feel awkward, or our body guards don't talk to each other? What if one or the other of us deems the other an utter dufus and we don't like each other as much in person? Then afterward it's all online politeness. Yuck.

But after hugs, walking through Ann Arbor and non-stop talking over dinner, all that is moot.

Why did I want to meet Susie? We had discovered so many things in common, it was just a matter of time before we would meet up. Our family histories (one example: I was a Hart and she has Harts in her family), we both have 5-acre-farms, chickens, similar worldview (including politics, religion or lack thereof, the earth and sustainability), musical and artistic taste, and too many more to list. We live in adjoining states, so it wasn't unreasonable to plan it.

The one photo I took was in a gallery where some blown glass chickens were begging to be photographed with Susan's reflection in the box window's glass. (Susan and Don found each other's blogs first because of chickens.) See how sweet she is (wish you could see her gorgeous blue eyes) - and warm, talented, smart, steady, common-sensical, a great cook (though I haven't verified that personally), a home arts specialist, a terrific mom and grandmom, an interesting and entertaining conversationalist (her voice is gentle with a subtle southern lilt), and maybe her best trait is her sense of humor. I'm so glad we've met, and no doubt we'll meet again. It will be our turn to drive to Ohio.

Oh, and our body guards cluck-clucked along with us hens.

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sewing box

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After posting about the Fauchon coffee tins, I got to thinking about this sewing tin I inherited from my mom.

As a teenager, if I needed to replace a button or repair a hem, I'd go into my parents' cool second floor bedroom to find needle and thread. Shaded by an old maple tree on our Michigan town street, the chair by the window where Mom did her mending was the repository for the sewing tin, or else the floor right next to it. I'd lift the loose lid and dig for the right color thread and a needle from her soft round red pincushion. My eyes were good then, and I could thread the needle with ease. Mom taught me to double the thread and knot the end with a lick and a twist.



When we eight children cleaned out our parents' big three-storey house and judiciously distributed their belongings, the dining table was spread with a miscellany of items that had little or no monetary value, and we each took what was of personal value. What was left got tossed. By then, I was sick and tired of STUFF after spending weeks sorting and digging through 50+ years of accumulation, and I was disinterested in the dining table assortment. But Don, bless him, nabbed a few pieces he thought were cool. As time marches on, I am more and more appreciative of what he took for me that day. Every passing year I turn more often to my parents for guidance and connection, for what it means to be human in this world.



Any number of people would have tossed this tin, rusted and misshapen as it was, and impossible to get the lid on tight.

Maybe it originally came filled with cookies - a gift to my mother, or grandmother. Did Grandma Olive empty cookie crumbs, wipe it out and turn it into a sewing tin, and then Mom took it from her New Jersey house when Grandma died in 1960? Had Mom as a girl gone to her mother Olive's sunny bedroom overlooking the garden by the New York Bay and dug for thread and a needle, or a button?



And did she too find comfort?

I keep my sewing tin on the floor under my dresser, or on the sewing machine in the den. I've seen it this week with new eyes and noticed for the first time that Degas' ballerinas at the bar would need the same color thread to repair their tutus as Bonheur's horse rider's jacket: blue ice.

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Paris on the farm

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Just about three years ago this time of year I visited Paris on my own and felt welcomed by a special farm display on Avenue Montaigne (designers row) complete with a designer cow parade, and hay bales and pitchforks at Dolce & Gabbana. These charming fellows are bouncers, which they have at all the designer stores. But even they made me feel welcome.

So I'm returning the favor, with a Parisian display at our Michigan farm. Connecting two dots on the planet on Earth Day, n'est-ce pas?
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I had two tins of coffee from Fauchon food store in Paris that I'd picked up a couple years ago to give to my sister Ginnie. When she came for a visit at the farm after Christmas last year she happily brought them to share with us since she hadn't consumed them yet. Delicious.

The tins are beautiful, and I haven't wanted to throw them away. I didn't know what to do with them, until I saw Design Sponge's post with images of pretty cans as flower vessels.



Cut some chicken wire (we have lots, need some?) and fold and stuff it into the can for holding the flowers up, a makeshift frog (brilliant).



Et voila! Paris at home on the farm. Voulez-vous un café?



Now where is that bouncer of mine?


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Some of you noticed (thank you) that I began a small blog. It's called small and is comment-free. It came to me one night (you know how nights can be - all that silence and dark space), just images of small things. I'd love it if you'd stop by now and then and remember that small things matter.

small gift at the restaurant:

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hellebore: the flower I love but never plant because it's best as a surprise

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The plant that may have been used to poison and kill Alexander the Great before he reached age 33 is a joy to me in early spring since I don't eat it. When daffodils, God bless 'em, are everywhere and looking monotonously prolific, if I see these growing in someone's garden I get excited and bend down close to the ground or sit and get that wet spring bum you see on stupid photographers who forget how much it rained a couple days ago.

Oh it was a long week at the university. I always think universities would be such nice places to work if it weren't for the students.

Just kidding! I love 'em! (The way I love daffodils. Beautiful, sort of different if you look closely, but who planted so dad-blamed many?)

But yes, it was a very tiring week, so after work Friday, seeing as Don had an engagement at school until late, I drove from the office to the horticultural gardens to see if anything had sprouted. It was sunny and warm for the first time this spring.

There was a couple talking intently on the rocks by the lily pad pond. Over in the children's garden a young pop was watching his pink toddler entertained by climbing the little stadium seats with a pacifier in her mouth. Then there was me wandering aimlessly, bored with daffodils, which were everywhere and seemingly the only thing blooming. I could see clippings and weeds lying around not yet tidied up from the slave labor of horticulture students.

But no! Wait! What's this? The grey-chartreuse leaves of one drooping hellebore, next to the grey-maroon of another. Ahh, jackpot. I was down on me bum in a flash, know why? These flowers are a bit melancholy if you take them at non-face value. I mean you can't see their faces if you look down at them. They hang their heads - I should have taken a picture from above to show you. You have to get underneath them to see the sun inside.

Kinda like the twenty-first student who walked through my door Wednesday afternoon. I lifted my face, and she lifted hers, and there it was - the sun!

helleborus orientalis, or lenten rose

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writing: supply & demand

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I advise the students majoring in English at my university - 1,000 of them, about 150 of whom are creative writing majors. (Others focus on literature, film or teaching English.) That number is up from just 50 creative writing majors a couple of years ago, and it's a growing national trend according to this guy. They write poetry, short stories, creative non-fiction, plays and screenplays, and the numbers keep growing. Every week a handful of students meet with me to declare that they want to major in creative writing. I wonder if in a couple of years half our English majors will be creative writers?

Let me tell you it's tricky as an adviser, especially in this economy, to strike a balance between encouraging young people to write with a vengeance, and tempering their expectations to become the next Elizabeth Alexander, Cormac McCarthy, Sofia Coppola or Simon Beaufoy because it takes a rare combination of talent, timing, perseverance and who-you-know to succeed (i.e., make a living, not just get famous). Many want to go on to graduate school for a Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing. $30,000-40,000 later, what will they have? Not a teaching job, those are too few - maybe one for every 300-500 applicants. And they would almost certainly need a PhD to be able to teach at university if they are one of the lucky few to get a job.

Our English department has a subscription to The Writers Chronicle (put out by the AWP - Association of Writers and Writing Programs), and when I have time and inclination, I read a piece that catches my eye on the cover. So I was reading an article titled The Rise of Creative Writing & the New Value of Creativity by Steve Healey in the February 2009 issue, and this line stopped me:

"It's true, of course, that readership for traditional categories of literature, especially poetry, is remarkably small despite the growth of Creative Writing programs."

Does that give you pause as it does me? The number of writers grows; the number of readers shrinks. Yikes.

And I immediately thought about blogs in the same light. As bloggers you and I know new blogs are created every day. In February 2008, the Blog Herald stated that it was tracking nearly 113 million blogs in English alone. Of course there are millions in other languages as well - maybe nearly 100 million in China. Has the number doubled by now?

• Have you been to a bookstore lately? How are books selling in your neck of the woods? For every book that is published, how many copies are sold? I've read that the average number of copies sold of new books is 6,000. (Not if you're President Obama though. His 2008 royalties income from his two books Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope totaled more than $2.4 million.)
  
• Is blogging just a free and easy way to publish for those too lazy or discouraged to get published in print? (Thinking of myself here.)
  
• How many blogs are there? How many are actually read? Ever chance upon a really good blog and see 0 comments for every post?
  
• What led to the rise in creativity, especially among young people?
• With all the new writing out there, new thoughts expressed, who's reading it? Will the gap between new writers and readers keep growing? Will we keep turning to the classics instead?

Every so often I ask myself what the value of blogging is? For me here at synch-ro-ni-zing it is:

• writing practice
• creative expression through photos and design
• a salon for sharing ideas with interesting people

And at my Paris blog:

• exploring a city
  

Each blogger has to decide for her or himself if the value outweighs the effort. For me, the effort is the reward too, if that makes sense. I mean I get a lot of fulfillment from the writing and design. Then getting to know some wonderful people from my backyard and around the world through comments here and through their own blog posts is very gratifying.

By the way, I recently received an email from a PhD Communication student at the University of Kentucky who is researching blogs, asking if she could use mine as part of her research. I agreed, and I'll be getting a survey from her soon. I'll keep you posted. I'd like to hear and share her findings.

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