Porcupines are like rocks

On the way home from the Camrose garden last night, we hit one of these:
Luckier pet porcupine than the one that encountered my car

We were pretty fortunate in that the oncoming traffic was far enough away that we didn’t hit any cars in swerving to try to dodge it. Today in the sunlight we should be able to see if there are any quills stuck in the tires. Hitting it broke off the bottom potion of the bumper on the car, but not so much that it’s going to fall off. Now we need to figure out how to reattach it. But for an animal the size of the dog, it really felt like we’d hit a rock with the car instead. Darren managed to dodge enough that it went between the drive train and the passenger side wheels so hopefully caused less damage than if it went anywhere else. We managed to stay on the road too, which was good. Being in a ditch in the middle of nowhere at 11:30pm would’ve been a BAD thing. So we got ourselves in order and back to the other side of the road for a quick check to see if we could continue and then on we went. We thought we were out of the woods when we saw 10 minutes from home a deer going to jump onto the road. Luckily, it saw us coming and stopped, else the car would’ve been totalled and maybe us not survive. From now on I think we’ll make the effort to go home -before- twilight kicks in to minimise the chance of meeting animals on the road.

The better parts of the evening were actually at the garden. Every bed got thoroughly weeded and some pictures taken. I discovered a -huge- mushroom growing in the long grass beside the corn patch. I had kicked it off its stem trying to figure out what it was and thinking it was a rock we’d somehow missed. I was very surprised to find it was a mushroom about 10 inches across. I’m not sure if it was an edible variety so were not eating it. Here is a picture with the spray gun from the hose beside it for a scale comparison:

Gi-normous mushroom head

Other highlights of the garden – the big max pumpkin plant is making a remarkable recovery from the sunscald/windburn it had. I hadn’t thought it would be able to regenerate dead sections in the leaves but it is doing just that as well as spreading out new leaves too. Here is a pic:

Big Max Pumpkin

Carrots are growing their first True leaves and starting to look like carrots!

Holy Mole Pepper seems to be doing alright