The other day I was walking through my neighborhood when I noticed a pawpaw tree with pawpaws on it! The woman who planted it was on her porch and we got to talking- turns out this is the first time that it has fruited. She's gonna call me when they are ripe so I can try growing the seeds!

Very sunny! Almost all day sun

Spend a while this morning #foraging for trailing blackberry, one of my favorite native berries. Took me a while to pick a gallon- I'm now more certain that I want to trellis some for next year!

Hell yeah, I love it!

Putting the cuttings in my gold fish pond and pretending they weren't there

This one cultivar is a lot fussier than others. Normal willow cuttings have a nigh 100% success rate, I had to try multiple times to get this cultivar to root.

Another weekend, another prairie! This time at Wolf Haven International, helping with the plant walks

Volunteered with Native Plant Salvage today at Prairie Appreciation Day at Glacial Heritage Preserve guiding people on plant walks to show them some of our wonderful native prairie species- but was too busy to take more than a few photos!

Cool plant of the week: Coralroot! This lovely little flower is one of our PNW native orchids, but you might notice it's missing something- leaves! This species is a myco-heterotroph! Aka, instead of photosynthesizing like most plants, it parasitizes fungal mycelium in the soil!

There are off-white shelf shaped mushrooms emerging from a downed log. We're looking at the broken end of the log, with a mushroom growing from the upper middle, with moss dangling down over it

Oyster mushrooms in a baseball cap.

First oyster mushrooms of 2025! I love them, and they're so common around here, and I especially appreciate that most other people overlook their awesomeness. #fungifriends why yes, that is my hat serving as an impromptu foraging basket, why do you ask?

I love it!

That's awesome!

Trilliums are just gorgeous, ok? It's also really cool that their seeds are dispersed by ants, and that the seeds need to go through two winters and a summer before they germinate! Truly one of the joys of spring!

Definitely grape hyacinth (Muscaria genus, there's multiple species and I never learned the differences), and people here do like to plant it under trees, but it can spread on its own to (or with the help of squirrels)

And a lot of people call the invasive kinds, like Himalayan, cut leaf, etc, wild and think they're native when they're not

I'm laughing because my lot was 3/4ths Himalayan blackberry (very invasive, 30 foot canes that climb trees, impenetrable thickets over 10 feet tall, tip rooting, etc). The native ones, otoh, are low growing and not a problem. The cultivars are a lot less vigorous than the multiple invasive species

I haven't seen whatever you're talking about, but there are several non-invasive blackberry cultivars.

The pore surface which is visible rules out elfin saddle. This is just a dead Suillus, they turn black line this.

Nah, oyster mushrooms are delicious. Just be sure of your look alikes, as with any mushroom.

I recently learned my local parks department has a volunteer habitat restoration position, which means I now get to go into this park and remove invasive species like Himalayan blackberries and replace them with native species like blackcap raspberries. It doesn't look like much, but it's a start! 🌱

I totally thought that was a ceramic glaze thing for like half a second. They do have their own appeal, that's for sure

That's such a different experience than my own, here there are so many things that are good to eat and don't require much, if any, processing.

Oh, I'm not getting rid of them (yet), at this point I'm only supposed to take out invasive species. And there's plenty to do in that regard! There is already standing deadwood though, which is good

Oh yeah, I volunteer with them too :)

#nativeplants

Yeah, so that's an interesting aspect of this place- it has some old fruit and ornamental trees, so I was thinking of planting things that like shade under them, along with trees that like to start as understory trees.

(7) yesterday I went out with a mind to pull just one kind of invasive, and it was scotch broom. This is the before and after for just that one species in one small section. There's still non- native blackberries there, and I'm sure others are hiding.