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How To Make Lavender Wands

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... A few years back, someone in my handspinning guild brought in a huge harvest of lavender flowers, to share with everyone at the meeting.  I took home a handful, because they smelled so very lovely.  And  I got to thinking about how I might preserve the delicious fragrance of these flowers.  A little sifting around in my memory of time spent in the South of France, followed by some internet wandering led me to try to make lavender wands.  They're meant to perfume clothing, and to deter moths, but I found them so pretty that mine stayed on the mantlepiece since the time that I made them. Lavender wands are incredibly easy to make. You get some long-stemmed lavender, tie it in a bundle, bend the stems around the flowers to form a sort of a cage, and weave a ribbon through those stems.  Simple. But of course, nothing is really all that simple, so here are my observations on how to make lavender wands. What You'll Need Materials are basic: a bunch of lavender, t
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Garlic Harvest

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... After the fiasco that was our leek harvest , I wasn't sure what to expect of our garlic. The time had come to dig up our bulbs. The leaves were dying back, and in fact the plants were putting up flowers, which didn't bode well. The garlic bulbs were neither huge nor puny. They were solidly medium-sized, with a few small bulbs scattered throughout. Considering how poor our soil was when I started this garden, I'm pleased by what we got. I hosed everything off, and stuck the garlic into a wire bookshelf that I had picked up along the side of the road. Everything I read about garlic says that it needs to "cure" but I have no idea what that really means. Perhaps they need to dry out a bit, to keep from getting moldy. I dunno. Today, I peeled off loose outer layer of garlic skin, and removed the roots. I was about halfway through this project, when I realized that I could grasp the roots with my scissors and rip them off the bulbs. I hope I remember this ne
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Fungal Foray

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... Yesterday, I went out on a hike with a group of members of the Bay Area Mycological Society . They picked a park that actually allows mushroom collecting, and -- whoo boy -- were there a lot of mushrooms to be seen! This first one is the Western Amethyst Laccaria, and it's supposed to be pretty good eating. If you click on the photograph, you'll get a larger image, and you should be able to see the little maggoty creature who's ready to start its meal. This is a Blewit, which is also apparently edible. My sister and I photographed a mushroom very much like this , last winter in France. There were loads of Amanita species to be found. This one is Amanita francheti , which has distinctive yellow coloring to its universal veil (the remnants of the sac-like "cocoon" that this particular mushroom emerges from as it grows). We saw some of these that were pure white, with just some remnants of yellow. Mushroom identification is tricky business, and it was great
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