Thanksgiving gifts

We are being particularly blessed this Thanksgiving! Yet another blessing to be thankful for!!

Our mushroom journey

Evan found this the other day...



I forget what the scientific term of it is, but it's common name is the Parasol Mushroom. I was talking via email with a mushroom expert, and come to find out it is edible (we weren't brave enough to eat it then, but if we come across another, we may)

Here is the bottom showing the gills


...and the top


There is a poisonous mushroom that tries to mirror image this one. Here are the things we learned to compare...
1. the poisonous one will turn dark yellow when the stem is rubbed or when the meat of the mushroom is exposed to air. The edible kind will not turn.
2. In the edible kind, the ring (see in the pic of the gills) slides freely and is not a part of the stem.
3. The gills are open and fully formed
4. The location is important as well. With the edible, you typically would find it along the edge of woods, and slight composted material. They do not grow on logs, but from the ground directly.
5. This is the most crucial part...


They call this the spore print. You turn the mushroom onto a glass or saran wrap and let it set for a couple of hours...the longer the better. I put a black piece of paper under it on one of the pics to get a good contrast. If it were of the poisonous type, then the spores would be a green color. With ours, it is quite clear that the spores are white.

The specialist I talked with and showed pictures of my progress confirmed that we had the go ahead to consume. :D He said it was a valuable find and that it would be awesome if they came back year after year.

Here are links...
poisonous
http://cms.jcu.edu.au/discovernature/fungicommon/JCUDEV_017203
non-poisonous
http://www.mushroomexpert.com/macrolepiota_procera.html

Our own wheel

*I* think it is the most beautiful wheel out there...but I may be partial ;D

Florida Snow

Isn't this beautiful? I think this is the prettiest cotton field I have seen.

I dub it "Florida Snow" :D. I just wish you could have seen it in person. When we drove by the next week, they had the cotton piled into 21 truckload bundles! That's ALOT of cotton!

When the cotton reaches maturity, I believe they spray it with a defoliant to remove all the leaves. It sits for a couple of weeks until the get these big combine looking creatures/machines and sucks up(I think) all the cotton. It gets bailed into HUGE retangle shaped cubes...3/4 the length of a semi trailer, but just as wide.

Here's a close up of it. If you don't know what you're doing when you pick it, you will have bleeding fingers in no time. The part of the plant (would you call it the hips?) that holds the cotton on the plant has sharp burs on it.

To learn more about cotton, go here...
http://www.cottonsjourney.com/Storyofcotton/default.asp
and this one...
http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/clothing/cotton.htm