Saturday, July 10, 2010

Probably one of life's lessons

SomeBeans and I have had a week in the Lake District. He has given a great overview of it on his blog. One of my favourite photos of the week, however, was this one. I made him take this photo after plodding past hundreds of cow pats with small forests growing out of them. The mushrooms only grew where there was a cow pat.All I can think is that it must be a metaphor for life somehow. Answers on a postcard to...

6 comments:

Ms B said...

Where there's muck there's shitake!

Meredith said...

Maybe some kind of metaphor about not "wasting" rich opportunities for growth? ;)

Cute post.

Nutty Gnome said...

When I worked in the NHS I was like a mushroom - kept in the dark and fed on bulls**t!

Plant Mad Nige said...

Beats the crap out of me!

Plant Mad Nige said...

One a more serious note: were the spores in the cow, or did they land in the cowpat afterwards? Or does the crap stimulate mycelia already in the ground to produce fruiting bodies?
I think we should be told!

HappyMouffetard said...

I'm enjoying the metaphors for life.

Nigel - we wondered the same. It's amazing how plodding up a mountain can lead to long discussions on the provenance of mushroom spores. I think we decided that the spores must have been in the dung as the mushrooms were exclusively in the dung. If they were in the general environment, you'd expect some to come up in areas with other sources of nutrients. Whilst the mountains of the lake district aren't over-run with sources of nutrients, I don't think we even saw the fungi on the plentiful sheep droppings liberally scattered over the entire Lake District.