Chris Skinner's Countryside PodcastsEpisode 2.90 - Fairy Rings and Giant Puffballs
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On a fine mizzling mid-September morning at High Ash Farm, Chris Skinner and Matthew Gudgin begin in the farmyard and notice that September has lived up to its name as the changeling month. The swallows have vanished almost overnight — more than a hundred young sent south after a successful season — while a handsome young cockerel struts among the nest boxes and a robin still sings. The pair then set out on a fungal foray.
At the base of an oak they find beefsteak fungus, a rich red bracket that “bleeds” when scratched. Chris explains how cabinet-makers once rubbed its juice onto other oaks so the heartwood would stain a prized deep orange-brown. Nearby, a velvety Ganoderma bracket is already shedding spores. In the horse paddocks they test field mushrooms by peeling, smell and gill colour, then walk fairy rings — some perhaps three or four hundred years old — where a single spore has spread an inch a year, burning the grass in a circle and releasing nitrogen that darkens the turf. Inside another ring they gather horse mushrooms, identified by their aniseed scent, peeling cap and lack of yellow staining.
On the Anglo-Saxon cemetery field in Caister Park a giant puffball has appeared in two or three days, still snow-white and the size of a small football. Last year’s dried specimens release clouds of spores that the wind can carry as far as the Continent. Along a damp lane, water mint has flowered again after the council mowed the verge, filling the ditch with its scent for a late buff-tailed bumblebee.
Listener letters bring nightingales singing beside a Berlin beer garden, a visit from listeners who travelled from Western Australia, the first fieldfares of autumn, a polecat-ferret on camera in South Wales, and news of hirundine flocks and pink-footed geese passing Spurn Point.
This episode is a rich harvest of autumn’s hidden harvest — ideal for savouring the strange beauty of fungi, the sudden switch from swallows to fieldfares, and the simple pleasure of gathering a safe supper from the fields of High Ash Farm.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432378/episodes/19826686-episode-2-90-fairy-rings-and-giant-puffballs.mp3?download=true
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