Cubits and Shrooms and Rain, Oh My!

All the rain we've had recently in Central Kansas has the rich prairie soil sprouting mushrooms everywhere, and it has ProfessorRoush "diving down a rabbit hole" regarding the exact dimensions of a "cubit".  I've lost track of the total, but over 2 weeks, I emptied my gauges of over 12" of rain.  The official total for the year is around 38" depending on where "spotty rains" fell, where we normally have only 27" by October.  Whatever the exact total, I've never seen the roadside ditch this full! 

You all remember "cubits", right?  As in Genesis 6:15, "The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits"?  Well, it turns out that each Middle-Eastern culture, whether Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian, or Hebrew, had a different "cubit" defined.  There were Common Cubits, Standard Cubits, Royal Cubits, Long Cubits, Assyrian Cubits, Biblical Cubits, Black Cubits, Cloth Cubits, Hashemite Cubits, Legal Cubits and the Cubit of the King, to name only a few.  All are supposedly (but not supposeably) based on the length of the forearm to the tip of the middle finger.  Don't even get me started on the divisions of the cubit into palms and fingers!  The Wikipedia page about cubits is beyond bewildering.

Anyway, what I've learned is that someone other than me should be the one to attempt an Ark.  Regardless of the temporary panic that brought on the thoughts about The Ark, the rains have since stopped, and fall has arrived with cool nights and sunny days.  And a bumper crop of mushrooms is growing.

Normally, our mushrooms are the grey-white-turning-to-brown monstrous foot-wide toadstools pictured above left, which begin growing as the nice neat puffballs seen here to the right.  But these rains have also stimulated these smaller, frilly brown fungi (pictured below), that can be found everywhere the grass gets mowed.  I don't know if they also grow between clumps of the taller unmowed prairie grasses because I'm not curious enough to wade into the wet, tall grasses to find out.

Needless to say, I don't trust my fungal identification skills enough to harvest or consume any of these wonderful gifts from the prairie.  And in the meantime, please take the painfully-won wise advice of ProfessorRoush and don't ever Google or otherwise exhibit the slightest curiosity about cubits!

Moss Musings

Today's blog entry may be surprising to anyone who lives in an area where plentiful rainfall occurs during summer, but the fact that I care about a pad of green moss will not be surprising to anyone living and gardening in Kansas and other arid Western states. 

I've always cared about moss.  I've long been fascinated by the "primitive" botany of these spore-producing survivors whose ancestors first colonized land, evolving millions of years before flowering plants came along.  There was a period in my teens when I could identify most of the common mosses of the Indiana woods I grew up in and tell you what their presence meant for soil acidity and moisture.  That knowledge has sadly been crowded out of my brain over the years by other trivia, but my fascination for the persistence and presence of moss remains. 

I was astonished to see this growth this summer, documenting this scene in October in my garden on my camera simply because moss is unheard of in this exposed, predominantly clay area and practically impossible in July and August, yet it was there all summer.  This spot is in full sun right along the edge of my vegetable garden, and yet this moss thrived here, grew all summer long, and made it clear up until the first freeze.  If you look closely, you can see the low electric fence wire running across the picture; the very fence that I depend on to keep rabbits, deer, and other critters out of the vegetables, and the grass/hay mulch at the top of the picture that I use to cover the garden.  

Normally, I might find a little moss along the north edge of the limestone blocks that line some of my garden beds, perhaps occasionally in May or June when it warms and we have enough moisture to support it, but even in those sun-protected areas the moss is temporary, springing up in hours and drying and dying just as fast.  I haven't checked recently, but the 50% additional annual rainfall we've seen from January 2019 has held steady and we are going to finish the year with a near record rainfall for this region.  I guess that's what it really takes to grow moss. 

Most surprising to me, however, is that after all the moisture I expected to have a bumper crop of "fairy ring" mushrooms this year.  I've blogged  previously about this, only seeing the two pictured in the previous post and the singular warty puffball (above left) I discovered in a dry path halfway up the slope from the garden to the house on August 31st.  That's it, three mushrooms in an entire wet year.  Many are God's mysteries created to vex mortal beings.

   

Please, Fall, Come.

ProfessorRoush is absolutely, assuredly, positively, unquestionably, and undoubtedly ready for Fall.  Things out there in the greater garden are looking bedraggled and I'm decisively ready for Fall.  I'm tired of mowing the lawn every week without fail and I'm surely ready for Fall.  The lilac leaves are mildew-ing and dropping and both they and I are conclusively ready for Fall.  Everything is overgrown and I'm losing to the weeds and I'm categorically ready for Fall.  Come on over, Fall!

I woke this morning to the perfect hint of Fall, but I have yet to be convinced that we will see it.  There was moderate fog around and I love the fog for its dampening of sounds from town and the sense of isolation it brings.   The view above, straight into the garden and lacking the usual houses on the horizon, takes me back 10 years in an instant, to a time before those houses were built and it was just us and the sky to the south.  Click on it and dive in with your soul.  And the view below, at a slight eastern angle to the first, picks up the longhorn cattle grazing in the pasture and my neighbor's pond beyond.  Serenity at its finest.  Don't you feel calmed by the scene?

It has been such a weird gardening year with the rain and all.  If you knew anything of Kansas, you should know that the garden above should be browning by now, if not completely August-drought-dry.  Instead, the growth is nearly as green as at the beginning of spring, as it has been all summer long, just beginning to show the changes of grass color to the reds of fall. I've never, since moving to the prairie, mowed every week all summer and by this time of year I'm usually able to cut every other week if not just once a month.

I checked on Friday, and through that day, we've had 42.18 official inches of rain in 2019, an increase over average rain of 14.76 inches, or in other terms, 54% more than the average annual rainfall through September 6th!  Climate change or coincidence?  Just for those following the fictions of Al "the Arctic will be ice free by 2014" Gore, the high and low temperatures here for September 6, 2019 were 94ºF and 68ºF respectively.  The records for that date are a high of 106ºF set in 1913 and a low of 42ºF set in 1962.  If climate change it must be, I think I'd prefer the extra rain and today's temperatures versus the high of 1913.  In fact, even 1913 seems to be a weird record since the majority of the high temperature records in this area were established in the Dust-Bowl 30's. 

The strangest part of this year, to me, was that because of all the wet weather, my garden's fairy ring never materialized.  I have an enormous fairy ring in my garden, which I've never written about but have intended to.  In recent years, it has approached more than 50' in diameter, old and growing every year.  Instead, I waited and waited and they almost never came.  These two mushrooms above, the smaller posing for a close-up in the photo below, just popped up in the fairy ring yesterday and are the only two I've seen anywhere in the garden this year.  Since the same official rainfall records note that we are -0.72" behind our annual average rain for September (making the earlier part of the year even more wet in comparison), is it that this fairy ring only dances in drought times?  Inquiring minds would like to know.