Thursday, August 16, 2012

Junior Naturalists

Every Wednesday night there is a free Family Nature Night hosted by the City.  I've been meaning to go with the girls since I first heard about it, but didn't make it until last night.  The topic:  bees.


I thought that would mean the species that are natural to our city, but it turned out to be a beekeeper with a hive and a smoker willing to talk about anything we asked.  It wasn't perhaps as focused on the children as I thought but I still found it interesting.  Bees and honey are always interesting to me and the topic of inner city hives came up.  I'd love to have bees, or even just to help someone with their hives near my home.  Having bees in the city seems such a win-win thing that I'm not sure why it isn't legal here. 

Whatever.  The event got us to visit a park we'd never been to, and my friend and I took advantage of the natural area to use the skill she learned at a previous Family Nature Night:  mushroom hunting.  We found a few edible mushrooms and took them home. 

Today we went on a mushroom hunting trip with all of our kids.  We found some interesting things.


 There were two of these puffball mushrooms that looked like someone had left their soccer balls in the grass.  Apparently they are edible, but the insides looked like yellow fluffy insulation and not that appealing in texture. 

 
 Impressive in size though.  Imagine that in your frying pan!


I don't know what these skinny little things are.  This weekend there is a mushroom event at the Devonian Botanical Gardens which might be interesting.  We filled a bag with a few mushrooms that we would like to identify and we'll see if either of us have time to attend.  This has been a good mushroom year because of the rain, so it would be nice to know what we can eat. 

BTW, we did eat a few of the mushrooms in our spaghetti sauce tonight.  If you don't see a new post soon, there may have been some identification issues.  No tingling tongue yet!

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