Heading for the hills - taking my three children away from all they know...

  Some sort of alien object … or corroded time bomb? But it was a healthy reminder that there is more to my meadow than meets the eye, much more. This decaying puff ball was provided a feast for a whole manor of insects and invertebrates. Slugs and spiders where amongst the obvious apex feeders but if only I could pop it under a microscope in thin sections it would be heaving with life.  As an aside I keep trying to eat young puffballs and find they have a bitter after taste. They look so inviting but are better left as a mega feast for mini beasts. 

(… turning the idyll into a playground…) I can’t quite remember how the conversation came up but I was musing on my feral childhood on a farm and said I’d hoped to give my children a ‘rural idyll’. To which Mum casually says… ‘I think the years of the rural idyll are over.’  If some tinkling back ground tune had been playing at the time, a large gong might have sounded or the clash of dustbin lids. I momentarily stopped breathing. Omg is she right? Was I trying to recreate something that doesn’t exist in the 21st century? Did I forget to question the basics… has a rural idle been replaced with a cocktail of glamping holidays, spring watch and MAMILS?  A pipe dream pre the quick fix, WiFi, fast food, sanitised age.  People now need bite sized versions of a rustic reality and it can only be swilled down with a good coffee and then fully savoured later via Instagram? I think she might be right on every level.  I was bought up without the right clothing… no one wore quic...

It's a mighty year for them. They look so inviting and scream antioxidants. Surely they dont only need to be made into gin. I’m on a quest to find a way to eat them and somehow reduce the stinging acitity...without buckets of sugar. Will return with more info.

poor photography... if you can find the butterfly in that picture it's larger and bluer than my first blue. I have two species... TBC

  The beauty of a puff ball mushroom