Mushrooms

We had a long dry spell which lasted through most of January and February. The soil got dry, and not much was growing. March has brought us some rain, and finally the soil is getting damp again. Although the total rainfall for this season is still only half what it should be, there’s enough moisture that weeds are starting to grow in our garden beds, and a few mushrooms have started to appear, sometimes in odd places.

Like this mushroom, probably in genus Psathyrella, which just appeared today, growing up through some rounded rocks spread around one of the memorials in the cemetery:

And this Turkey-Tail, Trametes versicolor, growing on a stump left after the cemetery crew cleared some brush last fall:

The shelter-in-place order in our county forbids us from driving to parks or nature preserves, but fortunately you don’t need to drive somewhere else to find nature. These mushrooms, and several others, were all within a five minute walk of our house. And by having to stay at home, I find I actually have more time to spend looking for mushrooms, flowers, insects, and tracks — I’ve uploaded more observations to my iNaturalist page in the past week than I had uploaded in the previous four months.

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