What took me so long on my walk

Last week I took the camera with me on one of my morning walks. The 30 minute walk too 45 minutes, when I observed the nature and picked some mushrooms for lunch as well. Here is what we ate:





Blogger wants to show this one on its side, but it doesn't matter because I had picked the mushroom before taking the picture. The whole group of this kind of mushrooms has the Finnish name tatti, but their Latin names begin with boletus or suillus or leccinum. Boletus comes from the Greek word bolos meaning a lump; suillus is the Latin word for hog-like; and leccinum is the Italian name for one of these mushrooms. The Italians are great fans of these; any amount of our Boletus edulis could be exported there. The tatti mushrooms are easy to use, I just cleaned and chopped them and fried them with chopped onions. Yummy!


This picture is showing a very different kind of fungi, the orange coloured little haarakas, a member of the ramaria family. It is soft and branched and looks rather exotic.

These are in Finnish tuhkelo (from the word for ash) , their Latin name is lycoperdon from the Greek lykos meaning wolf and perdomai, to break wind. Both names must have been inspired by what happens when the mushroom is ready to spread the spores: there will be a little hole on top, and when you touch the mushroom, the spores come out like a little dark, bad-smelling cloud. Melanie and I had some email exchange last week about the mushrooms and their names, and she mentioned puffballs. This is our version of them. There are others, often to be found on lawns and not so many together; they are very nice to eat when they are fresh and not puffing around!

These are just some brown mushrooms I didn't recognize, but there are lots of them.

These are another species, and around them the little green twigs are lingonberries. I'm sorry they don't look like the pictures in my mushroom books and I can't identify them. I should have looked at them a week earlier!

My walks are getting easier day by day. I have learned not to think about going, I just go. The bad knee gets better because there are some muscles growing to support it. It doesn't hurt at all during the walk, only in the evenings a little. I hope the weather will stay fairly dry, it is a lot nicer to have a walk when it is not pouring. The walks do me good, I spend too much time sitting and sewing or sitting by the computer.

This is supposed to be a sewing/craft blog, and so I need to show a little peek of my secret project. I have been working on these for a couple of weeks already. They are my Stitcher's Angel swap projects, an armchair caddy designed by Helen of Hugs and Kisses, with a pincushion and pockets for threads and needles and scissors; and a little tote bag with the Blue wrens designed by Natalie from Cinderberry Stitches.

I have finished the caddy by now, but as it is supposed to be a secret I will not show it before the swap is over.

P.S. I started writing this on Saturday, so blogger insists on that date. It really is late Sunday afternoon my time already.