To eat or not to eat...

We think these are edible "Oyster Mushrooms" growing at the base of a tree trunk in our yard....however, the "Mushroom Book" is in Arizona! We thought we would post a picture and see if anyone can identify these BEFORE we eat any. Any ideas?

Dog days of summer…

It seems like we went through 2 or 3 weeks of overcast afternoons, more rain than usual in the morning or evening and waves at all of our favorite beaches. This was great weather for the Puerto Viejo Pro Surf Tournament on August 9th, of course but not so great for casual swimming. Now we are in a period of perfect water – at least for those who like to swim and snorkel. We’ve spent 4 of the last 5 days at the beach and are planning another outing tomorrow. One day we brought Spot, Tiger & Blondie (3 of the puppies) to the Salsa Brava beach with us. They had a great time playing with each other as well as other people at the beach, although it did take a good deal of “encouragement” to get Spot and Tiger into the water. We stopped at Black Beach on the way out of town for a little more play time before heading home. As luck would have it we struck up a conversation with a young man named junior who was very impressed with Blondie. To make a long story short, Blondie now lives with Junior and we are down to 6 dogs. Since that worked so well we took two of the other dogs to a different beach today. They also had fun but didn’t attract any new parents…tomorrow’s another day and there are still more beaches to hit! (photo shows Brownie at Punta Uva today).

Custard Apples

Here’s another very strange looking fruit that is surprisingly tasty! The Custard-apple is a species of Annona. The tree that bears these fruits is a semi-evergreen tree sometimes reaching 33 feet.tall and a native of the tropical New World that prefers low elevations, and a warm, humid climate. I got this one from a neighbor so I am not yet sure what the tree looks like. The flesh of the fruit is smooth, sweet and tasty. It does have sizable seeds throughout the flesh but that is a minor inconvenience. This is one fruit I would actually plant!

Jungle Perils

Life in the jungle is not always easy. We arrived home from work one evening and were greeted by a neighbor who had found an infant howler monkey on the jungle floor. He brought it to us hoping we would be able to nurse it back to health or find a vet who could help. It was too late to bring him to the vet (about an hour away) so we gave him warm milk and a little plantain which seemed to give him some new energy. A few other neighbors stopped by – the consensus was that this little fellow was in pretty bad shape. There were several large growths where torselos had bitten him and laid their eggs inside of him. He was not able to sit or crawl on his own and appeared to have internal injuries. We made him a bed, wrapped him to keep him warm and hoped for the best. Sadly he did not make it through the night.