Another Booch Bombing

We've been making kombucha fairly successfully for many months now, experimenting with various types of tea for the base and with many different flavorings.

Yesterday I was preparing the tea for my next batch, waiting for Cindy to bring hers in so I could re-use the SCOBY*, when I heard, "Help, help, HELP" coming from her office.  The plastic spigot on the gallon jar she was using had failed spectacularly, shooting the spigot outward and spewing kombucha all over the floor of her office and the hallway.  Worse yet, she had tried to stem the flow with her hand and the jagged glass around the spigot opening had sliced four out of five of her fingers, so the blood was flowing as freely as the kombucha.

Don't Get A Jar With A Cheap Plastic Spigot For Your Booch

We got the mess on the floors cleaned up and Cindy patched up, but she was really bummed at losing that batch, because she had planned to flavor it with herbs and grapefruit juice.

So I had her drink the grapefruit juice instead to help her body recover from the shock, and we'll get a new jar (maybe with a spigot intended for brewing) and make a new batch.




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* SCOBY is an acronym for Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast.  The bacteria and yeast consume the tea and the sugar to produce the beneficial probiotics in the finished product.  Provided you actually get to the finished stage, of course.

For more information on brewing kombucha, check out the information at Kombucha Kamp.

Stinkhorn Revisited

It turns out that the Stinkhorn eggs we found yesterday are not Phallus impudicus, but rather Phallus hadriani.  According to the Mushroom Expert, the difference is in the color of the egg; impudicus is yellowish and hadriani is purplish.

Also, the smell is apparently one of decaying flesh, not dog poop as I previously thought.

So... a phallic mushroom that smells of decaying carrion and attracts flies?  Who wouldn't want that in their garden?

Ugh.

We didn't wait for it to "bloom"--Cindy dug up all of them she could find and put them in the trash.

Stinkhorn

Cindy came out into the garage where I was making glass beads a little while ago and asked me to come look at something she found while she was weeding the garden on the side of the house and asked me what I thought it was.

I said, "Effetre's Evil Devitrifying Purple, Creations is Messy's Eggplant, Simply Berry, Heffalump and maybe some Thai Orchid."

She said, "No, not glass, is it animal, vegetable or mineral?"

Oh.

Stinkhorn Egg

Turns out it's a fungus, Phallus impudicus, commonly called Stinkhorn.  It starts with an egg like the one above, then grows into a cup from which the phallus-like stinkhorn erupts.  It apparently smells like um, poop, and attracts flies that spread its spores so that the fungus can reproduce.  The foul smell can apparently permeate your entire garden with its stench.

About to Erupt?  

The egg in the photo above is apparently just about to erupt and send the horn upward.  That egg was about two inches in diameter and at least two inches tall, with a clear, slimy, gelatinous substance on top.

I think we found it just in time.  It's definitely NOT something you'd want in your garden.

Unless maybe you have no sense of smell and you hate your neighbors.