Stars of the Garden!

It occurred to me that I was entirely too late getting my seeds sowed in the hotbed!  At this rate, my garden will never get planted!  So...this morning early before anyone else was awake, I tried to prepare the hotbed for planting.  I lifted off the window glasses and pulled out any weeds that had grown there in the past few months.  The next step was to rake out the leaves and sticks that had fallen into the hotbed.  There was no use in having too much mulch!  Doing this made me discover two things!  One..the voles had tunneled under and through the hotbed.  This would never do as they will gnaw at the roots of my seedlings!  Somehow, Michael will have to find a way to eradicate the voles or at least keep them out of this area.  Ms. Put is not doing her job!  Perhaps there are just too many voles for one cat!  But now I have to wait until something is done and the planting will be postponed again.  

The second thing that I discovered was that stars had fallen to Earth!  Not really!  But I did find a goodly number of Earth Stars in the the hotbed. Earth Stars are mushrooms.  They are not just any mushrooms, though..they are very interesting mushrooms!  I knelt down beside the hotbed to get a better look as these were tiny, little things.  Earth Stars are related to Puffballs in the way they are a sac full of spores.  They "puff" the spores out a hole in the top!  What makes them different are how they protect those spores.  The "star" part of the mushroom is actually the outer layer.  This splits into wedges and folds down exposing the inner spore-filled sac.  During a dry spell, the wedges fold back up around the sac and protect it from drying out too much.  When the rains come, the outer "star" again folds flat and the spores can be released by the beating of the raindrops or a passing animal.  If for some reason, the whole mushroom gets covered by debris, the "rays" of the star will actually fold back far enough to lift the sac above its surroundings!  This is pretty smart for a fungus!

I pulled a lot of the Earth Stars from the hotbed and realized that the sacs were already emptied of their spores.  I sat looking at the curious things and then that creative side of my brain kicked in with thoughts of how I could possibly use these things!  There has to be some craft that can make use of an empty mushroom!  At least if I find a purpose for the shells, I will not feel so bad about the mushrooms taking over my hotbed!