Massive Mushrooms

It's actually getting warmer and the temperature has risen to 9 degrees Celsius, however with the dark days looming, I still like to spend more time indoors.

On several past occasions, I have tried to grow mushrooms but finally gave up as I can buy them much cheaper than I can grow them.

I particularly like the flavour of the brown mushrooms and on occasions you get a box that still has some manure on the base of the mushroom and people don't like to buy it.

However I do. I find it keeps the fungus fresher and they continue to grow a little too. Hence after a few days, these have become weird looking monsters.

Tonight I had just two mushrooms with some tuna, fried up with some eggs and cracked pepper. Yummy.

To be more Social

Social networking has become a major part of our online lives, and an important form of interaction and notification.

To allow you keep up-to-date with this site and comments by contributors, I have setup a few more social notification and interaction pages that you may wish to subscribe to that are already used by over 1000 users.

Networks include:

 MySpace
 Facebook and Facebook User Group
 The RSS Feeds
 StumbleUpon
 Twitter
 Plurk
 MyBlogLog
 blogcatalog

More will follow, and will be accessable from each page.  Also, if you have any social networks you may want added sooner, please let me know.

The current full list of tools and networks, can be found here.

Thank you.

Barry

Mealybug Infestations

Well the frost has arrived from the Arctic and last night everything turned white with a fine layer of ice and the temperature dropped to about -4 Celsius (about 24F).

So apart from a quick run around during the short light hours, I have been sweeping up and making lots of piles of leaves. It's raining now and the rain is like ice so I retreated indoors, and have taken no pictures.

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During the Summer I noticed a white fungus like problem on one of the Orchids.

Thinking nothing of this, I sprayed it with fungicide and left it to it's own devices. Big mistake.

The fungus spread to other orchids and I noticed a mite like creature on the backs of the leaves and inside the flower heads. This was a very hard creature to identify as at that time I did not realise it had a wax coating.

Pseudococcidae is the bug. I have discovered it likes rotting vegetation and as I had missed cleaning up some dead material and added fresh materials, the bugs had got into the house and liked the environment. It also spread the fungus intentionally and seemed immune to household insecticides.

The solution was to isolate the plant, remove all soil, wash the roots and remove most of the foliage. Then I submerged the entire plant into a solution of imidacloprid (Provado, a Bayer product) for 30 minutes to ensure all parts of the plant were treated.

The plant was replanted into Perlag to help with the drying process and left in isolation for 5 weeks.

It did go a bit yellow for the first few weeks, but has now recovered and is doing well with new leaves sprouting and no more signs of infection.

After the Storm

After the unusual storms of early november, the gardens were a mess with almost every tree stripped of leaves (excluding the conifers) and some damaged.

The main garden is not hit too bad as it's sheltered on all four sides by hedges, trees, walls and the house to here it's just in need of a good make-over to remove the debris that has gathered over the previous few days.

In the south garden, here you can see the extent of the leaf stripping, where only the Japanese Maple has retained it's foliage and since the storm has turned an amazing fire yellow occar.

This is also the case for it's older brother in the for it's older brother that was planted in the front garden some two or three years earlier.

Actually the front of the house seems to have taken the worst of the storm and I suspect it's going to take me a while to gather up all the debris.

Although I really think the colour of the Acer in the front is more vibrant and really does remind me of my trip top Japan last December.  I guess Japan could look beautiful right now, but I'm not going to be there again until January so perhaps I'll get the Winter views.

One good thing about the approach of December is the Oranges in the south garden have begun to change colour and there is a definite shade of yellow forming on the sun bathed top.

I remembered discussing with some readers some time ago about the survival of the Orange planted outside in all our extreme climate conditions.  However the temperature has already dropped as low as zero Celsius (48F) and the tree shows no sign of weathering.

Finally for today, the little pine tree I saved from a terrible death has developed well and I intend to make it this years Christmas Tree ^^