Slugs are always interesting to watch and once you’ve mastered the large obvious ones like the Banana Slug and the Chocolate Arion it’s time to develop one’s observation skill a little and try to figure out the smaller native and non-native slugs that can be found in British Columbia. Two good (but sufficiently challenging) slugs for the beginner are the …
Merville Woods
Musing about Merville Mushrooms
We’ve had some fairly wet weather over the last week and the mushrooms are loving it. Fall is a great time of year on the West Coast for the mushroom enthusiast and Jocie and I took the toddlers out to “look for mushrooms.” An excellent place to find a variety of mushrooms in the Comox Valley is out at Merville …
Merville Woods Mushrooms – Part 2
Earlier in November we enjoyed some mushrooms at Merville Woods, a second growth forest characterized by mixed conifers including pines. This post features a few more mushrooms that we found there. One was a mushroom that we had identified on a previous walk at Woodhus Slough but others remained a mystery even after creating a spore print and consulting our …
Merville Woods Mushrooms – Part One
We took advantage of good weather last week to get out to Merville Woods, just north of Courtenay, British Columbia. This is an area that is characterized by sandy soil, mixed pine and other conifer forest and a thick under story of salal. It’s prime mushroom habitat and many commercial pickers go there for both chantrelles and salal. We found …
A Cone that is Not a Cone
During a mushroom hunting walk at Merville Woods yesterday we came upon several Vancouver Groundcone (Boschniakia hookeri). Like the name suggests, this root parasite looks like a fir cone. It is actually a parasite that is connected to the roots of nearby plants, in particular Salal (Gaultheria shallon), which is common and commercially harvested in Merville Woods. According to Plants …