30 Days Wild - day 26

Today we have been exploring decaying fallen trees to find some of the mini beasts that live in this habitat. Warning this post contains a photo of the creepiest fungus I have ever seen!

This is a fungus called dead man's fingers, it seemed quite a new growth on the decaying tree. It definitely looked like creepy fingers reaching out from under the branch... really quite chilling!

Some loose bark laying in the leaf litter had now become home to many different types of woodlice and pill millipedes.

 We also uncovered this leopard slug with it's markings clearly visible. Burrows of various beetles can also be seen in the wood.

This piece of bark has many slugs, a snail and lots of interesting patterns and markings from a bark burrowing beetles.

This is the pattern they leave on the tree trunk, it's a little faded from being exposed for quite a while but you can still clearly see the markings.

A few different types of millipede were spotted a white legged snake millipede above and a striped millipede below.

We also found a bracket fungus just starting to grow, this was on the same tree as the dead man's fingers.

The children have really been enjoying exploring all these different habitats and we have plans to make some mini murals picturing some of the things we have seen.

Happy Halloween

Just a short post to wish you all a Happy Halloween / Blessed Samhain and show you a few of the things we have been doing. We have brought in our Halloween tree, this is usually made from some spooky looking sticks which the children decorate.

I had to squeeze it on the window ledge between our ginger and turmeric plants that we have been growing. It looked a little sparse so we thought we would make a few extra decorations, one of these was a twig star.

As you can see in the photograph these are very easy to make, I have used some small twigs saved from when my husband pruned a shrub recently and copper wire. Any wire or string would do, I have used copper wire as we seem to have loads of it about, my husband saves it from broken appliances to use in craft projects. If you are interested in salvaging your own copper wire you can read about it at the bottom of this post.

The twigs are just tied in the shape of a star and hung on a piece of thread onto the Halloween tree. We also made some ghostly cupcakes.... my daughter thought they looked really cute. We added blueberries to our cake mixture to represent 'eye of newt' and desiccated coconut for 'bat toe nail clippings'. The ghost shape is just formed from icing. Very tasty.

We have been really busy and my husband has been doing some crafts too for Mexico's day of the dead (Día de los Muertos),  If you would like to see his sugar skulls, cupcakes and pumpkins you can read here. They look really cool.