Oyster mushrooms

Lately we've been getting some oyster mushrooms from the logs that we inoculated back in the spring.

These were from a poplar that lost a huge limb last winter. It was probably a good six inches in diameter at it's largest and probably at least fifteen feet long.

I cut it up into about five three foot pieces. It took about a little over an hour to inoculate all of the logs.

The oyster mushrooms are not as tasty as the shiitake mushrooms are, at least they aren't to me. They are a little harder to clean as well. Still they are pretty good sauteed in butter.

Caught on camera!

Last night I confirmed what we've been suspecting for a while, we have a mouse!

I bought a game camera earlier in the year and it does a good job.

When it senses motion it snaps 3 pictures and in the dark it has infrared. The date and the time is wrong but the temperature is correct. This is the basement. The wire is there to keep the dog away from the furnace, where she likes to lay on top of the plenum when it's cold and chew off all of the insulation.

I'm not sure what I will do yet. He/she is living in the wall in the downstairs bathroom.

We have a cat that would happily remedy the situation in one night but it seems cruel to contemplate terminating something so small.

Permaculture says the problem is the solution, so I'll need to cogitate on this one for a while...

Bushy's home, for a while

Bushy Tail went into the wild a couple of weeks ago. The garage was nothing more than a large cage for him.

I set him out on the deck and after I walked away he was away with his own kind. That lasted for about five days...

About five days ago, around dusk, I found the dog acting weird underneath the deck. After a while, when she wouldn't give it up we went under there to inspect. Sure enough, there was Bushy Tail.

He was sick.

He was dehydrated and needed to come in for a bit. The first day he barely moved at all. Over the last few days he has improved enormously and once again the garage is way too small for him.

Today I took him out on the deck and he took off into the yard and over the fence.

Once you start trying to find one small squirrel out in the yard it's then that you realize there are a lot of small squirrels out there and they all look about the same.

It doesn't take very long for your eye to improve however and you start to notice the subtleties pretty quick. Still, without any glaring features to i.d. Bushy, it's hard to tell who's who. Really the only true way to know is proximity. Squirrels don't like to get very close to people but Bushy jumped onto my shoulder from a tree limb one evening. He knows us better than we know him.

Squirrels are mechanical masterpieces. Their hind ankles will pivot past ninety degrees so that they can go from sitting to hanging down without needing to reposition their feet. When they walk it sounds like more than one four footed creature because their toes are so long that they strike the ground after the palms/heels do, so every foot fall is doubled. It sounds like drumming when they move.

Their front feet don't have thumbs either. Their thumb is just like the first knuckle of our thumb. Only one joint. So when they hold something they press it between the two joints of their pseudo thumbs, where there are only pads. They have the full digit on their rear feet, so their rear foot is much more like our hand than our feet. They are built to climb. I think they lost the thumbs because they either interfered with climbing and it may have been getting caught up on things or it's entirely mechanical and affords more strength to the forearms so they can pull up easier.

When I started going to the gym years ago I noticed the real body builder types, the big guys, never wrapped their thumbs around the bar. It was always on the same side with the fingers close to the palm, "open grip".  I asked a guy one day why he used that grip and he told me that the thumb over the bar works against you. After that I tried it and I've used it ever since.

 I don't know if that's why squirrels don't have full thumbs or not but it makes me wonder. ..

Oh, give me a home...

I scooped this yellow jacket from a glass of beer so he is trying to get all of the Hefeweizen off of his antennas. They really seem to be attracted to German style beer for some reason.

The zoom on the phone camera worked really well. They don't usually stay in one place long enough to film. Pretty interesting little creatures. I know that they built a nest in a hugelbed this summer because I thought they were honey bees and for a minute I got real excited.

After I got closer I saw that it was yellow jackets. I've never been stung by one so I just leave them alone. I only got stung once by a bee and I was messing with them, so I deserved it. On the other hand, wasps have stung me a lot for no good reason. It feels like someone putting out a cigarette on your skin. It hurts, a lot!

Insects don't bother me that much anymore, except for spiders and mosquitoes. There were a ton of big ass spiders all around here last month. I don't see why people put fake spider webs in their yards around Halloween when there are tons of real spiders all over the place. I don't kill them because Jim told Huckleberry Finn in the book that it is very bad luck to kill a spider and the next thing you know Jim got bit by a rattlesnake, or was it a water moccasin. I don't recall. I don't know where those big ugly spiders come from every fall, but they show up like clockwork and disappear just as quickly.

This year I didn't see any snakes, except for one small garter snake under a brick. No copperheads at all. The rodent population is WAY down in the yard now, they've moved on to greener pastures and the ones that didn't get eaten by my cat.

All the trees in the yard are dormant now. It bums me out to see them that way. It seems like they have died. From green to brown in two weeks. It's good to know they'll come back even stronger come spring. But we have already had temperatures in the teens and it's only November. I'm not looking forward to January. It's rained quite a lot too.

All of the pond plants have died too, except for some grasses we planted. The floating plants are all but gone now, I don't think they'll make it. The fish seem to be just hovering near the bottom, not really moving very much. Leaves are in the pond and are down on the bottom and it's too cold to try and fish them out so they are staying until it warms up enough to deal with them. The fish seem to use them as cover and it may be that the decay process generates some heat. Aerobic decay does so I would assume anaerobic decay would as well. It will be good compost come spring.

Saturday night we went to a bonfire a little ways out in the country. It was a nice event. It's been a long time since we have done anything like that. Sure, I've built fires in the yard many times but that's just us. Being around a fire with a lot of people doesn't happen very much, actually not at all in the city. A lot of kids were there and they weren't brats either. They have a vibrancy that livens the atmosphere in a certain way especially outdoors when they are free to roam. There were no "timeouts" or tantrums or bellicose parents yelling nonstop. It was pretty awesome to experience. Fire is a primordial, hypnotic thing for young and old.

I'm not ready to go back to rural america, yet. But I'm thinking about it a little.

"Lively up yourself and don't be no drag!" - Bob Marley

New Coop

Tractoring the chickens through the yard gets tiring fast.  Especially when the weather turns cold. And chickens get big fast.

So we've had to come up with a permanent coop location for the girls. Zone 1 is the perfect spot if you can do, because you will probably be making at least one trip to the chicken coop per day.

We've identified a place on the west side of the house that will probably be ideal since there is a door there as well. The exterior wall of the house where it is joined by a fence gives us two walls already in place. It's a pretty big area that is already fenced in and not really being utilized, so it's the best solution.

All of the materials are re-used from other projects, except for two posts I had to purchase for $16.

Inspection

At present, the coop is only about 4'x6' but eventually we will extend it to the left in the photo. So it will likely be about double the area. I am also going to put in a screen door so that we can access it.

Not a whole lot phases the chickens. They put up with the dog fairly well, but sometimes they let her get themselves upset. But not too much.

They hardly even move when you want to shoo them to another place and then they come straight back to where you moved them from.

Now they are about 4 months old and they cluck. So I guess that their gizzard is formed now. I'm not sure how much they've needed it. All the green in the yard has died off from the cold. They pretty much stay near the coop all day.

Nearly complete

The coop has water and a food dispenser now and so hopefully I won't have to make as many trips out there as before.

A couple of months from now they should begin to lay, so we are really looking forward to that.

If you want to buy some chicks, go to Meyer Hatchery.com.

They will send them through the mail in only a couple of days. It's seems a little weird but it's completely safe and the best way to go outside of physically going and getting chics locally.

Touchdown!

The European Space Agency landed a probe on comet 67P this morning.  Congratulations to them!

The mission has been ongoing for ten years but the satellite just woke up this summer.

It's called Rosetta because astronomers have the erroneous belief that comets are primordial chunks of ice left over from the formation of our solar system.

In the past two months of orbiting 67P they've detected no ice or water and they are not going to. It's a huge rock.

Astronomers believe, since the 1950's, that comets are snowballs, sublimating as they approach the sun.

It's the kind of theory a sixth grader would pose, since physical phenomena are all that they know. If it were sublimation you wouldn't be able to see it and the comet would "melt" on the first orbit. Lots of people have known for years that the theory is bunk but they get relegated to the basement.

A comet is a negatively charged body and as it approaches the sun, which is positively charged, it begins discharging and sputtering the nucleus into space. The process is used in industry here on earth everyday.

Electric Universe theory states that the dominating force in nature is electricity.  Now we will be able to observe firsthand what a comet consists of from the instrumentation aboard the probe, Philae.

They made a pretty dam cool video about the mission though they do continue to drone on about theories that don't hold up to scrutiny, nevertheless it's a good vid.

Halloween gets cold

Wild Child w/Demon Dog

On Halloween night we left a party and on the way home it was snowing!

Tonight it is suppose to be 28 degrees.

Cold records are falling all over the south.

Winter is coming..

Bushy Tail is nearly grown already. He hasn't eaten enough food to be as big as he is. Other energies are feeding him, things we can't see. This is what Rudolph Steiner talks about and Mollison. We receive these energies too, but our ability to take them in starts to wane as we grow older. As Thoreau put it, "Though the frost is nearly out of the ground, the winter has not broken up in me. Perhaps we grow older and older till we no longer sympathize with the revolution of the seasons, and our winters never break up."

"Cosmic and solar energies impinge on the earth, and life intercepts these flows to make them available for life forms..."- Bill Mollison

I think if the sun goes out it won't take 8 minutes for us to know it. I think we will all wind down almost immediately. That electric spark that powers us probably has to do with the sun. The world would be dead right away, except for the machines, which would run until they were out of gas.

A woodpecker flew into the kitchen window today and died. With as many lives as we've received we've buried just as many. This is the way it goes, I suppose.