Only a ‘shroom freak could find this thing I witnessed fascinating.

Apparently I caught a couple of Ravenel’s Red Stinkhorn in the brief first 15 minutes of phallic erection before it collapsed!  It lives in the strawberry patch, where I’ve managed to create the perfect mycelium medium.  The fungus/mushroom has a long thin, bright pinkish-red stalk, and a shiny black bullet-shaped cap, which stinks and attracts flies, who eat the slime instantly.  Then the thing goes flaccid and limp.  You can actually watch it in real-time!  I didn’t know whether to feel excited or horrified!  I tried and tried to catch a photo, but my phone would not comply; maybe it was too shocked.  Who says gardening is boring?

So naturally the only photos I could con my phone into taking were a eucalyptus leaf that had changed color (the plant has turned into a tree!), and the half of the veg garden I had hand-cultivated and sowed with a cover-crop of winter daikon radishes.  First I moved a pile of debris from the back of the veg to behind the trampoline, and cleared that path off.  Then I hoed the remaining loamy compost-y soil into the back half of the veg, a beautiful blank slate for the seeds, and raked and watered it in.  These large tough radishes will bore down into the clay layer and then freeze, leaving the soil aerated and loosened.  Brilliant, if it works!

The weather is still perfect and conducive for getting the last of my fall jobs done.  It’s warm, dry, sunny, and breezy, with leaves gently drifting down to form a natural mulch and winter critter shelter.  Eventually I’ll rake them into adjacent beds for winter mulch and compost.  Nothing gets wasted or thrown away, just as it is done in nature, for good reasons.