Making a Grapevine Wreath

Day 23: It's been donkey's years since I made the grapevine wreath on the left. Seriously, like for thirty years that wreath has hung on my front door except at Christmastime when I replace it with a fake evergreen swag. And almost every year for the last dozen, I've said to myself, "I need to make a new wreath," an idea which invariably got back-burnered until the vines had become too dry to manipulate. Even at the best of times, grapevines are fragile. They snap at the joints if you look at them crosseyed, so making a wreath is an exercise in patience. I usually start with one of the most flexible pieces, preferably one which will form a circle the size I want, overlapping about halfway. Then I add a second one, trying not to force it to bend too much, maybe only crossing the original circle twice for an 18" wide wreath. And that's key: don't try to do a lot of wraps. For subsequent additions of vine, I thread the heavier end through a gap in the first pair until it's about a third of the way through. Then I take it around the pair once (twice if it's behaving), before starting to work on the free (thinner) end. Take the tip of the thin end through the center and, working backwards toward the thick end, gently coerce the wrap to lay close to the original pair. Once you've achieved that without hearing any telltale snaps, take the tip through the center again and repeat the process. Be gentle! And take it slowly. When I am nearly done wrapping the wreath, I will search out a few vines with "curls" for embellishment. Over the years, my old wreath lost all but one of its curls, so I left loads of them on the new one.

Spoolie

Day 22: All signs point to this being a thin holiday season for many families, so perhaps it's time to return to a simpler life. In the era of my childhood, receiving a doll for Christmas was a real treat among the practical gifts of socks and school clothes. Handmade gifts were the rule rather than the exception, and I don't recall one dearer to my heart than Spoolie. This is not the original. It disappeared over a series of moves and was long gone by the time I left home at the ripe old age of 12. This is a modern version, as close to the one my mother made as I could get when I built it over fifty years ago from my scant hoard of wooden spools. That's how much I loved Spoolie. What kid today could put the same emotional investment in something so simple? It may be time to rethink our values.

Lambie-pies!

Day 21: Anyone who's been around me for any length of time will know that I do not like beef, i.e., "dead cow." I eat hamburger as filler in things like spaghetti and Spanish rice, but I don't particularly care for the taste. Steak revolts me. Pork is good, yes. Chicken, yes. And lamb...especially as lamb-burger...absolutely! John Kirkwood has an excellent recipe for "Scotch Pies" (as he calls them) on YouTube. He puts the lamb/onion filling in hot-water pastry, which makes this a fairly easy dish to prepare, although it is more time-consuming than my customary one-pot, five-minute cookery. I was hungry for "lambie-pies," so I invested part of my Thanksgiving dinner allotment in a pound of ground lamb and spread it out in 75-gram portions (cooked) into five pies, each to be topped with cornstarch gravy made from the broth in which the filling was cooked. Even at the current cost of lamb, this comes in at roughly $2.50 per pie, crust included. As luxury dinners go, this is a winner.

Stropharia Season

Day 20: For all of the fact that we've had several drenching rains, the subsurface soil is still quite dry, as I discovered when digging down to the level where I wanted to anchor some gooseberry branches with an eye to propagating by soil layering. That also accounts for the shortage of 'shrooms under Big Doug, a spot which is usually deckled with Stropharia ambigua. As a general rule, Questionable Stropharia sprouts abundantly throughout my yard, and yet this year, I have only found this one. Why "Questionable" you might be wondering? Its edibility has not been definitively determined. You would think that would be a fairly easy thing to sort out, especially if there were a few dead mushroomers cluttering up the landscape, but the jury remains out on this showy species. Some authorities say that it is not poisonous, but also not desirable; others claim that it causes gastric upset. With mushrooms, it is always best to err on the side of caution, and besides, they make such attractive specimens for photography.

In Front of Yew

Day 19: In the thirty-plus years I've lived here, my English yew hedge has only produced berries half a dozen times or so, and always just a few...or so I thought. Sometimes, it pays to look in front of Yew. I don't know why, but this morning I was inspired to walk around to the roadward side and...well, it kinda looked like Christmas. Admittedly, there's only one female in the entire line of shrubbery which forms my hedge, but it was "berrying" like crazy. Yew berries are poisonous, and the oils in the bark and needles can cause skin irritation or other allergic reactions. Birds don't eat the fruit, but one year, a robin nested deep in the heart of the hedge. I've given up trying to keep the yews pruned back. The hedge is ten feet tall and almost as wide at this point.

Gold Leaf

Day 18: If Washington is girt with greens in spring with shades so numerous that thousands have no names, so too is the state gilt with golds in autumn. Warm and cool, dappled with rose and russet, they wait to be studded with silver raindrops to show their greatest glory. The hostas have met with first frost, changing almost overnight, but no less beautiful in their imminent collapse. And if autumn chills my feet, it also warms my heart, knowing that the Earth and Nature are ready for a bedtime story. It is time to rest, renew, reset, there to dream of warmer days and longer light.

Not A Clue!

Day 17: Whatever they are, there are a lot of them growing on the decaying hawthorn stump alongside my prized bioluminescent Carbon Antlers. Something has nibbled the tops of a few caps (mouse, I suspect) and may now be regretting that it failed to heed the most essential advice for mushroomers: "Unless you are 110% sure of the identification, do not eat it." And further, just because another mammal can consume a certain mushroom, it does not necessarily follow that it is safe for a human to eat. Different critters' digestive systems contain different enzymes and can process alkaloids which might be poisonous to a human. For example, deer and elk eat several Amanita species which can cause long-term damage to human livers and kidneys. Some might say that I am over-cautious when it comes to 'shrooms. I remind them that there is a good reason one mycological society referred to its annual dinner as the "Survivors' Banquet."