Well of course it goes to the Morel which suddenly appeared at the back of the polytunnel. A quick tour around the internet – (my books only say what it is) – suggests that firstly it’s fiendishly difficult to grow artificially and secondly that it may be in a mycorrhizal relationship with the row of apples growing a few feet away. I just thought that it was a wonderful and serendipitous gift from the wild gods which will be joining some shop-bought distant cousins in a risotto tomorrow. It’s one of the rare spring fruiting fungi and I’ve never seen it before. The other spring fungus is the St George’s mushroom which we’ve gathered and eaten in the past but these days we’ve given up foraging them . In fact a couple of friends have developed strong allergies to them after many years.
An allotment update
Elsewhere on the allotment, spring seems to have sprung after a couple of false starts. While I was feeding the polytunnel strawberries which are already in flower, Madame picked an armful of rhubarb. The autumn raspberries that we planted last year are poking through their sheeps wool and wood chip mulch, and the top fruit trees are all very close to flowering – which may be a problem because we had our second real frost of the winter last night – so we hope they keep their flowers cosy and wrapped for a while yet. The soft fruit too is growing away fast, and my rescued blackberry cultivar is at last showing signs of outgrowing its infant problems. The Tayberry is, as always, growling with excitement.
After the recent wet weather the pond is full to the brim once more and the other surprise today was the amount of flower on the clematis which has sulked for five years and seems to have got its roots down at last. Notwithstanding the label it looks very like a Clematis montana to us.
The Equinox is next week and then the builders are coming to connect the kitchen and bathroom vents to the outside world – that’s after ten years of black mould and constant letters. I was beginning to wonder if we’d live to see the day!
