Earth brings us wonders. Mushrooms. Signatures of sleeping elephants. Autumn stealing into the Northland. It is a good home, this earth.
Our first crop of shrooms. We had a singular show of promise from the shitake, but our September sprouting of wine caps was sizable. The ten harvested shrooms were full, lush and heavy. They joined the curry of the chicken I got from the Fendry’ in Lanesboro.
We started urban shroom farming after attending an open house at Herbal Turtle farms in Winona last fall. We plugged a bunch of oak logs with shitake spawn that we brought home. Then we inoculated mulch beds with the wine caps, and made some oyster mushroom sandwiches with poplar logs. Then we waited patiently, and the draught came. Next year.
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An elephant lifted its trunk, then its head, without pushing off and thus saving its sand portrait. Or the sand was perfectly hard but clay like and pliable, leaving a perfect impression from the mass of the great elephant as it leveraged its body against its head and neck to hoist its bulk from its earthen bed.
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Sometimes, in early fall, the Boundary Waters show the grays of autumn yet to come.