Salamander Sighting

I've been working on cleaning our yard, since there's a huge pile of trash and rotting wood that the previous owners left back there. A large mound of wood was piled up under a tree, and grass and weeds have been growing over it, but I've been picking out the wood to level the ground again. Today, I discovered my first salamander!

I think he/she's an Oregon Ensatina.

The funny thing is that I totally thought I'd discovered a snake when I lifted a log and saw it's head! It's very lumpy, like a snake's, and not many salamanders seem to have that.

Here's another website with info and great pictures of these guys:
http://www.wildherps.com/species/E.eschscholtzii.html#oregonensis

I guess I don't know much about salamanders, since I never expected to find one in my yard, in Multnomah County, nowhere near a body of water. I always thought they lived near rivers. Pretty cool! The beehive that's also in the wood pile is a little less cool.

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Homegrown Mushrooms

Sean's mom sent him three different mushroom growing kits for his birthday last fall, and we've been doing our best to care for them. It looks like we're only going to get one shiitake from this batch, but it's been expanding like mad the past few days. The picture above shows it 4 days ago, and the one below is from this morning.

We have a bucket full of "Espresso" button mushrooms (which required a couple lbs. of spent coffee grounds to grow), which are multiplying, but still don't really have caps yet.

The third mushroom is for making tea, but I forget what it's called. I love that it's growing straight through the side of the plastic bag it came in!

You can buy your own mushroom growing kits from Fungi Perfecti, which is where ours came from. If you want to see more pictures of our mushrooms, I put them up on Flickr.

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