08 June 2013

Moisture, mushrooms, mosquitoes

We've had a very damp and cool few days. So much so that I'm beginning to worry about a repeat of the tomato disaster of 2008 for the plants in the lower vegetable garden. In the greenhouse, though, the tomatoes are fine and in the morning they gather moisture in attractive droplets at the points of their leaves.


This morning I found a new type of mushroom. (New to me, that is.) It is really tiny - you can see by the size of the blade of grass that the fruiting bodies are not more than about an inch/2cm tall and about a quarter to half an inch/0.5-1cm in diameter. I've had a browse around fungus-identification websites but haven't seen a photo resembling these yet. [UPDATE: with the help of an Ontario Parks naturalist on Twitter, we've ID'd it as Mycena acicula, otherwise known as Orange Bonnet.)


They were hard to photograph - small things always are. I had to fiddle around with the manual settings on my camera and keep very still to get these shots. Not easy when you're crouching in a damp, shady spot which is also an ideal habitat for hungry mosquitoes...


1 comment:

Carolyn ♥ said...

Ooh those are pretty! Never seen a mushroom quite like that.