Celebrate Pollinator Week with Pie!

This week is Pollinator Week! If you like food - especially pie - you've got pollinators to thank for making them possible. Same for watermelon, pickles, and chocolate.  The birds, bats, and bugs that pollinate plants are responsible for bringing us one out of every three bites of food.

So, Three Cheers for Pollinators! And let's celebrate by making pie! It doesn’t matter what sort of pie you want – strawberry-rhubarb, peach, apple, blueberry, pumpkin – if you want pie, you need bees. So when I was writing The Pie that Molly Grew, I knew I wanted to include the important work of bees in the book.

Apples,  peaches, strawberries, blueberries – they all depend on bees to pollinate the blossoms which then ripen into yummy fruits. Pumpkins too. And yes, pumpkin is a fruit even though it when it’s baked and smooshed and slathered with butter it looks like a sweet potato. And while peach and apple and strawberry flowers have everything they need in one blossom to produce a fruit, pumpkins don’t.

When pumpkin plants flower, they produce male flowers and female flowers. The male flowers make the pollen and the female flowers, once pollinated, make the fruit. There’s a problem, though: pumpkin pollen is too heavy to be carried by the wind. So pumpkins depend on bees to move the pollen from the male flowers to the female flowers.

Fortunately there are plenty of native bees that will do that job: bumble bees, carpenter bees, squash bees, cuckoo bees, longhorned bees, and sweat bees. And you’ll even find honey bees hanging around pumpkin flowers, too!  

I'm celebrating pollinators all week, so drop by and check out pollinator patches, bee guides, and more!

The Pie That Molly Grew should hit bookstores around August 15, but you can pre-order a copy at Riverow Bookshop in historic downtown Owego, NY.

There is Fungus Among Us

 Fungi are everywhere, but sometimes you don’t see them because they are small. Or they don’t look like a typical mushroom. The trick with finding fungi – well, with finding anything, really – is to learn enough about them so you know what to look for. And once you know what to look for, you begin finding fungi all around:

• Growing in the mulch beneath the tomatoes
• Popping up in the lawn after a week of rain
• In the tops of downed branches
• Growing on old logs
• Decomposing a stump in the yard
• In the breadbox and pushed to the back of the fridge

Sue: I remember the first time I saw a coral fungus. It looks just as the name suggests: like a bit of coral pushing up from the leaves. Used to finding turkey tails and mushrooms, I had no idea it was a fungus. Now I see it everywhere in the wooded area behind our garden.

 

Alisha checking out fungi at Highlights

Alisha: One Saturday morning I drove to Austin to meet up with a friend that I’ve hardly seen in the last two years. I parked under a tree and hustled inside for a visit. When I returned to my car, I noticed beautiful polypore mushrooms on the tree. How did I miss them when I arrived? Probably in too much of a hurry. While researching and writing Funky Fungi, I realized there were many specimens of fungi that were there all along, but I never noticed.  

Sue: When we started talking about Funky Fungi, I got a field guide (confession: I had an entire shelf of field guides but not one about mushrooms!) so I could begin to recognize the fungi growing around me. Then I discovered an amazing reference in our library system, The Book of Fungi: A Life-Size Guide to Six Hundred Species from around the World by Peter Roberts and Shelley Evans. In addition to having wonderful photos, there’s a distribution map for each fungus. It clocks in at 656 pages and weighs as much as a hefty bag of sugar (5#). I don’t own a copy, and I hate to even speculate what the delivery guy mutters every time I request it through the library system.

Sue finds mushrooms in the yard

But here’s the thing. Paging through these books, looking at the photos, reading the descriptions … it’s made me not just more aware of the diversity of fungi, but curious about what I might find outside my door.

Alisha: Last summer my husband trimmed some branches from an oak tree. As I helped him cut them into smaller pieces, I noticed a little waving movement on one of the branches. I stooped down for a closer look. It appeared to be a piece of lichen balancing on the branch like a tight-rope walker. It wobbled from side to side and inched forward a tiny bit – an insect covered in lichens! The insect was using lichen as camouflage, maybe to protect itself from predators, or to sneak up on unsuspecting prey, or both! Before researching fungi for this book, I didn’t know that some insects cover themselves in lichens. But armed with that info, I was ready to discover one in my own backyard. Who knows what else I’ll discover!

Remember to check out our Funky Fungus Fridays over at my author Facebook page, and Alisha’s #FungiFriday posts on Twitter

Check back next month for our Happy Book Birthday celebration! Funky Fungi, 30 Activities for Exploring Molds, Mushrooms, Lichens, and More is part of the Chicago Review Press “Young Naturalists” series. You can find out more about our book at the publisher’s website. It will hit bookstore shelves next month! But if you can’t wait, you can pre-order it at your favorite local bookstore, or online at Bookshop.org

Inspiration along the Writing Journey

As we worked on Funky Fungi, Alisha and I discovered a couple of books that inspired us on our writing journey. They engaged our curiosity and prompted several conversations that led us to look more closely at the fungi surrounding us.

Entangled Life, by Merlin Sheldrake

You know it’s going to be a fun book when the first thing you read is “What is it like to be a fungus?” Merlin Sheldrake gives us a tour of the kingdom from a fungal point of view. If we want to understand how ecosystems work, we need to understand the mycorrhizal fungi beneath our feet. Fungi challenge the way we think about evolution and intelligence, even what makes an individual. 

In one chapter Merlin takes us on a hunt for truffles; in the next we watch mycelium solving a maze. My favorite, though, was the dive into lichens. Lichens are relationships between algae and fungi, but what exactly do the fungi do? Then there’s the connection of fungi with roots, and mycelial webs connecting entire forests (and other plants) into an internet of sorts. Throughout, he cites research, both past and ongoing, that contribute to our current understanding of fungi. Underlying it all is the caveat that what we think we know now will undoubtedly change as we learn more. 

Finding the Mother Tree, by Suzanne Simard 

I picked up a copy of this book the day it hit the bookstore. I love how Suzanne Simard took me right into her world of trees. Born and raised into a logging world (the rainforests of British Columbia, Canada), she spent her days learning about – and from – the trees surrounding her. In this memoir, she writes about her work in forestry and her research in the forests. Suzanne’s language transported me deep into the northwest forests. Reading it on my porch on warm summer days, I could almost smell the pine needles and the earthy soil of the rainforest.

The book’s focus is Dr. Simard’s studies on how trees communicate through underground mycelial networks, how they care for each other and mount defenses against natural enemies. I particularly liked the sections where she detailed the methods of her scientific inquiry. She does not gloss over the hard work: fencing study sites, transplanting trees, digging, watering, camping out, even the failures due to weather and other elements. And there were plenty of failures – that’s part of the scientific method, right? 

Nor does she gloss over how the scientific community responds to new ideas that challenge the status quo. By the end, I gained a better understanding about the connectedness of the “Mother Tree” that nurtures the forest. More important, I gained appreciation for how important these underground connections are for the survival of both forest and human. 

Remember to check out our Funky Fungus Fridays over at my author Facebook page, and Alisha’s #FungiFriday posts on Twitter

Check back next month for another post about our book-writing journey.  Funky Fungi, 30 Activities for Exploring Molds, Mushrooms, Lichens, and More is part of the Chicago Review Press “Young Naturalists” series. You can find out more about our book at the publisher’s website. It will hit bookstore shelves in two months, but you can pre-order it at your favorite local bookstore, or online at Bookshop.org

Saturday Online Science & Nature Program

 

 This Saturday, January 9 the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History is hosting a Science & Nature program for families. The 45-minute long program begins at 11 am Eastern time.

Join museum educators as they share science skill-building activities and ways to explore the natural world as well as collections.

Author-illustrator Susan Stockdale joins the program to read her book, Stripes of All Types. She will talk about how studying natural history informs her books and share the process she uses to develop her books. Then kids of all ages will have a chance to create their own artwork to share what they know about their favorite animal.

Find out more and sign up at the Smithsonian website 

Check out my interview with Susan Stockdale over at Sally's Bookshelf. And if you get a chance, grab a copy of the book to read because it's really, really fun.

Find out more about Susan Stockdale at her website

See you Saturday at the museum!