Bluckcurrant leaves , a pot of jam, and the last cardoon 2024.

Jesus has a night trial:

High Priest speaking: ‘ Why aren’t you talking? Why are these witnesses against you? ‘… desperately, he asks…

‘ Are you the Christ, the son of the blessed?’

Jesus speaking:  I am: and  you will see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.Mark 14 : 60 -62 ( Sandy’s understanding.)

August this year provided masses of blackcurrants, which were easy to turn into jam.

One jam jar had something in it that wanted to grow too, a spore.

It is neither plant nor animal.

They have a kingdom of their own.

Fungi.

I knew what I saw, but I didn’t just see

I looked.

Here are some facts:

They have spores.

They don’t really die. Some spores can ” sleep” for hundreds of years , and given the right conditions, they can  start growing again.

Vinegar and baking soda are two common substances one can use to kill them.

Fungi make chitin in their cell walls an estimated one billion tons of chitin are produced each year in the biosphere.

‘ Fungi are the grand recyclers of the planet and the vanguard species in habitat restoration.’ Paul Stamets

Here are two different quotes following the word fungi, which lead to a third. The first is a warning.

‘ Out of damp and gloomy days out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us , conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us , morose and grey. Woe to the thinker who is not a gardener but only the soil to the plants that grow in him.’

Friedrich Nietzsche

And now something different from Henry David Thoreau.

‘ Nature doth thus kindly heal every wound. By the mediation of a thousand little mosses and fungi, the most unsightly objects become radiant of beauty. There seem to be two sides of this world, presented us at different times, as we see things in growth or dissolution, in life or death. And seen with the eye of the poet , as God see them, all things are alive and beautiful. ‘

He also said: ‘ A truly good book is something as vividly natural and primitive , mysterious and marvellous, ambrosia and fertile as a fungus.‘

The blackcurrant shrubs grow near the cardoon, and I have made the decision and cut the cardoon down low in the hope it will grow for 2025. The energy going into seed didn’t look good as I have never seen the large heads look so bad.

This is the last cardoon plant growing in our garden. It seems like we have always had them, originally  grown from seed and appreciated.

Let us hope we made the right decision. The cardoon plant has been in so many posts. I have just counted 14 .

Here is a random selection of three.

Cardoon, daffidol bud, and hyacinth in the snow.

Cardoon and pear.

Cardoon unpacked.

Thank you for looking at my post.

Sandy 🙂