Edible Tulip

Freshly Picked Beetroot (otherwise known as "Beets")

It's beet season where I live. The beet greens are robust and yet still tender while the beetroot is long and elongated like a stubby carrot and filled with sweetness. Beets at a supermarket tend to be old and bitter, existing in a small concave world hidden behind a rough and granular skin. Newly picked beets have none of this weary world traveler syndrome: they are sprightly and perfect, best eaten boiled and then coated in butter.

While watching my mother boil and then 'skin' the beets I could not help but view these ridiculously red vegetables as sea creatures molting out of their dead flesh. New beets shed their soiled skin very easily. It's a matter of boiling them and then pulling back the skin to expose a glimmering and succulent interior. Absolutely beautiful.

The leaves can be used either raw in salads or slightly steamed like chard or spinach.

Growing Green Peppers

Due to a very cool and wet summer season (as well as less than ideal gardening conditions at the cabin I live in), I'm pleased to present the first bud of growth in my planters - tiny, thumbnail size green sweet peppers. I like growing peppers because unlike some vegetables where the quality is just as good at a local farmer's market or grocer sweet peppers are truly a different species when plucked from a stalk. They are mild, sweet and their skin is crunchy and thin as opposed to the thick rubbery roughage of a supermarket green pepper that often induces dull stomach upset. In the case of a capsicum their skin IS their flesh. Because once you bite into a pepper (I eat my green peppers often like apples) the interior is mostly air sprayed like the night sky with glittering tiny seeds.

Some simple ideas for using sweet peppers, both red and green , follow below.

The Giant PuffBall Fungi

I was walking my parent’s dog on the Bruce Trail this afternoon when something big and white caught the corner of my eye. Underneath some wet leaves and beyond a link of fallen fence sat this gigantic orb. I went back for the camera, ran into mom and dragged her out too. She noticed two more “puff balls” in the woods before running into the original one I had spotted. Fungi like to stick together. You may have noticed several fungus growths on the side of a rotten log and they usually form a line. Well giant puffballs sometimes create something referred to as a "fairy ring" and it involves a vast circle of these giant fungi. A little surrealistic to come across on a peaceful forest walk but very fascinating.

Puffball is the common mycological name for a fungis otherwise referred to as Lycoperdon. Apparently the mature fruit emits a flurry of brown dust-like spores when a mechanical force like the weather, animal interference or curious food forages like myself make a hole in its flesh hence its name: puffball. While the fungi is still young and white (before spores have developed and the interior flesh remains pure white) the mushroom is edible but after it develops brown and yellow spores it should be avoided. My puffball was about 3 feet in diameter but they can grow up to a metre.

I didn’t have a sharp utensil to break open one of the puffballs to photograph its interior but after doing a bit of research I can see that it is very compact and fleshy and not like the usual fissures of tissue found on the underside of a morel. I found an interesting web site of someone who knows all about puffballs and has some interesting ideas of how to put them to use if you find them in your woods too. (Although you do wonder if some of these scientist types get a little LONELY perhaps? When I came across the puffball in the forest I really didn’t consider it a newfound friend however charming its random appearance in the woods was.)