Drainage fields...

Looking outside my office window today and hoping that crappy weather keeps holding off so stuff can get a bit dryer for yardwork.. Been staring at our drainage field.. It's a big gross puddle that will be a mosquito haven come warm time.

I'm thinking I should help out the drainage field.. and help out some bird feeding needs at the same time.  So after a bit of digging around I've come up with a list of flowers I think I'm going to try. I opted to stick with annuals, of the high self sowing persuasion to a great extent.

Rocket Larkspur
flowering tobacco
daisies
china asters
corn flower
sun flower
zinnia
flossflower
spider flower
snapdragon
aster
black eye susan
cosmos
marigolds
bachelors button
four o clocks
annual cockscomb

Hopefully I will discover that a few of them are suitable to the environment, lol.

All this gloom and wet has also started turning my mind to mushrooms. I find Sporeprints on Youtube has a lot of super easy DIY mushroom setup videos. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L85IWNO33J0&playnext=1&list=PLEB54C04B393B4707 is an excellent example. I'm hoping in a year or two we will be starting to harvest all sorts of mushrooms for fresh eating and drying.
Still not quite sure how I want to handle attempting truffles. Given some of the information I've run across it might be really hard. But I really want to try it, and if worst comes to worst, I'll still have some hazelnuts, and I wanted those anyway :)

Haven't cooked jack diddly yet today.. Still not sure what I'm making for dinner either. So, a little bit of terminology today :)
A tisane or infusion is made when boiling water is poured over herbs and allowed to steep.
A decoction is made when a herb is simmered in water.
A distillation captures the essence of an herb through evaporation and condensation of steam.
An extract is made when the herb is soaked or fermented in alcohol.