Halle’s Smooooth Words o’ Wisdom

After a surf along the northern Oregon coast Tuesday I found my first Chanterelles of the 2008 mushroom season: 

They were exactly where I found my first patch in 2007 only 2 weeks or so earlier.

I couldn’t pass up this moment:

It was more than a moment actually and definitely more than 6 minutes that these 2 tangoed. As a gardner it’s somewhat reassuring to see these Hemiptera(the order aphids fall into) chow hounds getting busy in your yard. I hope that they were hungry and feasted on aphids after.

Later the same day this moment was hard to miss on the shelf above our kitchen sink:

We keep this Venus Fly Trap near our fruit bowl and it captures many flys. Not until recently did I see the plant snap shut on a spider.

Claudia and I visited a favorite spot recently and came away with many mushrooms!

We saw a fair number of moldy ones:

Autumn in Oregon means many things. One of my favorites is chanterelle hunting. From the Oxford American Dictionary:

“chan•te•relle | noun. an edible woodland mushroom with a yellow funnel-shaped cap and a faint smell of apricots, found in both Eurasia and North America.

ORIGIN late 18th cent.: from French, from modern Latin cantharellus, diminutive of cantharus, from Greek kantharos, denoting a kind of drinking container.”

There’s nothing quite like picking your own chanterelles then frying them up the same day with unsalted butter, shallots plus a touch of soy sauce, sugar and creme before tossing the fresh-from-the-woods golden sauce with some pasta. Yum. I love eating chanterelles although the stumbling through the deep and dark woods might be the best part.

It’s raining hard here and the leaves are turning and beginning to drop.

After 3 years in the ground our espalied pear tree finally bore fruit:

It did actually put a few on last year but, following instructions from a friend, we cut the fruit early in order to focus growth on the roots. Here’s to growing your own and not letting the dogs get to the goods before we do.

This is a fine piece of guerilla gardening.

These 2 pictures were shot in a friend’s Portland garden three days ago with assistance from Mark Clawson. The flowers were lit with sliver and gold reflectors held very close to the flower.

This picture, shot at a private local garden, will be used for fundraising efforts as part of The Berry Botanic Garden’s 30th anniversary celebration this spring.

Last weekend I needed to transplant some Blue Fountain bamboo(Fargesia nitida) from a smallish container to a slightly larger one. The terra cotta one near the upper righthand corner received the new bamboo.

I prepped the pot with a bit of styrofoam to make it a tad lighter when filled with bamboo and potting soil.

Pulling the root-bound clump from its home was a bit of a chore.

Talk about root-bound!

We’ll see in the next month or so how well the clump has taken to its more spacious home. It should be fine.

This is a non-invasive clumping bamboo. After 2 years in the new pot I will have to find a home for it in the ground somewhere around here.