A UVM blog NR009 Blog

Saturday, July 15th. The weather is rainy, and the air is very wet. It is a bit cooler today at 74 degrees F.

• today everything is very wet
• more than any other colors, I notice greens. It’s as if the other colors which are usually present are being drowned out by the overwhelming greens.
• a few of the flowers have been weighted down by the weight of the water droplets on their leaves.
• over at the herb garden, the spinach plants seem to have reached the end of their production season. I wonder when and under what conditions spinach grows best for producing its leaves. 
• the kale on the other hand is doing very well it seems. Its leaves have great color and there are many. One thing that is worrying is the small holes in some of the leaves. I wonder if they are from bugs or something else.
• I spent some time looking around for small mushrooms which sometimes come up after rain. I could not find any, even around the edges of the yard, in the shady spots. 
• there is a large fungus growing out of the rotting stump of an old tree. It’s cool that the fungus is colored nearly identically to the tree stump

I am curious about the small holes in the leaves of the kale. From a brief Google search, the information I found points to caterpillars as the culprit of the holes. Interestingly, when a plant senses that its leaves are being eaten by pests, it sends more antioxidants and nutrients to those leaves to help fight off the pest. This makes those leaves that are effected more nutrient dense.

Photos

I noticed that similarly to sketching, searching for a subject for my photos allowed me to spend more time looking around my site. On the contrary, shaping a photo is much quicker than sketching, so you end up spending less time observing the subject.

The date is June 22, 2023, I am sitting here in my friend Zach’s backyard in Boulder, CO at 10:05 AM. Currently, it is bluebird skies, not a cloud in sight. The sun is beaming and it is a comfortable 70 degrees. It is also a bit breezy.

My surroundings include a shaded patio with furniture, some potted plants, and a lawn. There is also a chicken coop complete with 5 chickens. I notice that the grass is slightly long for a backyard, it hasn’t been mowed for a bit, and the lawn has many small white flowers.

There is also a garden of to the left of the patio, I am unsure of all of the plants but it has kale, lettuce, tomato, some herbs, and chilis growing. In the chicken enclosure where their coop is, there is a small tree that provides them with a great deal of shade. Along one of the fenced edges of the lawn, there are a few small white-capped mushrooms growing just below the surface of the grass. Around the chicken enclosure, there are many more flys than the rest of the yard. They seem to like the smell over there, it smells of chicken poop. While there are no large trees in Zachs yard, in the surrounding yards there are a few. These trees are where the birds are living. I can hear them but I cannot see any.

Question Marathon:

1. What kind of mushrooms are those small white ones?
2. Are they edible mushrooms?
3. Are they harmful to eat?
4. How did the mushrooms start growing there?
5. Do those mushrooms prefer shade, they are in a spot that stays shaded most of the day.
6. Why are there only 2-3 mushrooms?
7. How do they reproduce?
8. What are all the plants that are growing in the garden?
9. What type of conditions do they prefer to grow in?
10. Since they are all in full sun, is this their optimal light exposure?
11. Do birds actually like bird baths?
12. I wonder how often the bird bath is used? it seems to be quite close to the house.
13. Would birds be more likely to use the bath if it were further away, in a more private part of the yard?
14. Are there kinds of plants that can grow in the North East more easily than in the dryer climate here?
15. How old are the tomato plants?
16. When will they produce fruit?
17. How often do they need to be watered?
18. Is this environment a good place for bees to live?
19. What kind of tree is growing in the chicken pen?
20. Is it a flowering or fruit-producing tree?
21. Why is it so small?
22. Are the tree’s roots limited by the surrounding yards and houses?
23. How old is this tree?
24. What is the preferred habitat of chickens?
25. Why is there no grass growing in the chicken pen?
26. Did they eat all of it?
27. Is it because the pen is mostly shaded from the tree?

Research: The small white mushrooms

Are the mushrooms edible? It is likely that these are harmful to eat.

How did the mushrooms start growing there? These mushrooms lay dormant under the soil and will appear in the right conditions.

Do the mushrooms prefer shade? Yes, these are growing next to the fence because it is a shaded area. They likely appeared very recently due to the large amount of rain we received last night.

These are likely either: Candolleomyces candolleanus or Chlorophyllum molybdites.

Sources: https://leafyplace.com/lawn-mushrooms/ https://www.allyourlandscapingneeds.com/blog/what-do-i-do-about-mushrooms-in-my-grass

This concludes my first entry. It was nice to take some time to focus and observe. Next time I would like to see if any more of those mushrooms sprout up. It would be interesting to see how fast they grow.