Way back – might have been nearly a year ago, but time is funny in these plague and post plague years – my friend Alison found a mushroom identifying course to be held in Galloway in September of this year. So we decided on that same day to book it and work out the details…
Things that move too fast..
Yesterday I went down to the small wood alongside Clara Bog, a sort of palate cleanser after supermarket shopping to stretch the legs and try to air out the headache out of its squat in my brain. I wasn’t really expecting to be very engaged in those circumstances, but as it turns out there were…
River swimming
I came across an article today, linked on twitter. Written by the Irish Times it tells “Why Irish rivers urgently require more swimmers in them” and it cheered me up in a day full of less positive articles. The gist is that anything that has “bathing site status” has to get regularly tested and this…
Small experience
In National schools all over Ireland when I was a kid (there were no dinosaurs) we used to have to write “What I did on my summer holidays” type exercises. We were gently prodded to find more interesting ways to say things like “I went to my friend Sheila’s house and then we went to…
Scarlet Elfcups or Moss Cups and some Irish mycological history
I had occasion to sweep down through my last several years of google photos and the passing of every photographic year is dead easy to spot, regular as clockwork every winter/start of spring stands out because I take a load of photographs of scarlet elfcups, presumably not quite in the same wildly over enthused state…
And cut and peeled a hazel wand..
A while back, in autumn, a storm blew in earlier than I anticipated, probably because I hadn’t paid quite enough attention to the forecast. I was out in a small wood nearby, one largely surrounded by open fields and bog land and the trees hadn’t yet shed all of their leaves. The wind piled through…
Yew, the Tree of Artefacts
I have literally just stopped myself running down yet another rabbit hole of related things because “it might be important and I have to try to give a complete picture.” Nope, I don’t. In fact I physically can’t, there is far too much for one modest little, madly meandering blog post. So I have hauled…
Groundhogs and orange peels
First the unsurprising news: Lockdown continues to be a drag and I am not enjoying it much. I had the very creepy feeling of “wait, didn’t I buy those a couple of weeks ago?” in the shops the other day looking at Easter eggs; never has the sensation that my sense of time and where…
We interrupt this outdoor series..(shiitake mushrooms from a kit)
..to bring you a little indoor news. I’ve been waiting for the “you’re all effectively locked down again” news for a while. I am not especially happy about it, any more than I was last time, but it at least seems like a decision which is better than the weeks of speculation, gossip and backbiting…
Martinstown House and the Blue Roundheads
There exists a venue usually used for what I imagine are quite spectacular weddings, the very lovely Martinstown House, home to the cutest trio of inseparable little white ducks I’ve ever seen and Iggy, the somewhat irritated turkey. I wasn’t there for a wedding, but for glamping, being fortunate enough to visit before our now…
dryadzen.com 