Here are some photos of a sparassis, probably sparassis spathulata, that grew in my yard. I harvested the first one, then kept an eye on the area. It started to grow back. I took pictures to track its progress. You can see the tree root it is growing on in the October 17th photo.

In retrospect, I wish I had set up a some landmarks so I could have made the photographs more consistent, but I did the best I could on the fly and adjusted some with editing.

We had a freeze in early November and it stopped growing. It is still firm, but I think it is waning now.

My biggest lesson was seeing the debris that got embedded in it every time we had a rain. (See October 21, for example.) A lot of that stuff stayed in there. No wonder they are hard to clean. And there was a leaf embedded in the lower part from the beginning.

The color change on October 26 was real, not an artifact of photography. Stain from the oak leaves perhaps? It would go slightly underwater when there was a hard rain. It is stained again today (last image), and we had a rain last night.

Also I love the little horns that appeared on October 29. And the tiny mushroom at the end of my index finger on October 31! I didn’t notice it at the time.

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