Month: October 2024

Helene, mother of mushrooms


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It has been a week since Hurricane Helene brought such destruction to the Appalachian Mountains. Here in the foothills there wasn’t much damage. But the tropical weather than brought Helene has lingered, with warm days, humid nights, and some showers. It’s the perfect weather for mushrooms.

An online site that attempts to identify mushrooms from a photo thinks that the orange mushroom above probably is Amanita jacksonii. If that’s what it is, it’s edible, though I would never eat a wild mushroom. Mushrooms from the amanita family are common here, including Amanita muscaria, which is a hallucinogenic (though toxic) mushroom.


Probably a Chlorophyllum molybdites, a poisonous mushroom. The mushroom in the photo is just a youngster. A day later its cap was eight inches in diameter.

Pumpkins rule! Well, some pumpkins.


In today’s nomenclature, the two pumpkins in the back are “pie pumpkins.” The pumpkin in the front would be an “heirloom” pumpkin.

What is the world coming to? What once upon a time we would have called a pumpkin is now called an heirloom pumpkin. True pumpkins were in danger of being displaced by the large, ugly, inedible pumpkin-like objects that people (for some reason) buy for Halloween. I’m all for jack-o-lanterns, especially if they’re made from proper fairy-tale pumpkins. But the real purpose of pumpkins is to make them into pie. I’ll stop there, because regular readers are no doubt tired of my annual rant about how hard it can be to find proper pumpkins.

I’m about 14 miles from the nearest pumpkin farm. I stopped by the pumpkin farm this morning to get my first fix of fall pumpkins. The lady at the pumpkin farm told me that it was only four years ago that they started growing “heirloom pumpkins.” They sell out, so I assume that sanity is returning to the pumpkin market. People were hauling away pumpkins in little garden wagons and loading six or eight of them into their SUV’s. My guess is that 99.9 percent of those pumpkins will decorate front porches and will never have the honor of being made into pie.

When there are pumpkins in the field, there are acorns in the woods. The acorn crop this year seems to be good. That’s good news for the squirrels and the deer.


⬆︎ “Heirloom pumpkins” on the left, and ugly pumpkin-like objects on the right.


⬆︎ The iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max are the first iPhones to be able to shoot close-ups, or “macro” shots. The lens will focus as close as 1 inch.