An email came through recently asking if I had any dried bracken for sale. Did you mean the photo of dried bracken - on the right? No, yer actual dried bracken! And what colour is it after boiling? Stupid here actually went and collected some dead bracken and tried boiling it - made a terrible smell in the kitchen.
After applying a brain cell, I looked up bracken and found that the tightly furled young bracken shoots are called fiddleheads - so called because they each look like the scroll at the top of a fiddle/violin. Now, fiddleheads are edible apparently, provided you boil them long enough - that's a project to try in spring. (Fiddleheads would be a great name for a band - and sure enough, it is the name of a band! Or two...)
Round here, bracken is viewed as bit of a pain, as it is poisonous to some animals - and tends to squash the small saplings that the RSPB have planted out round Haweswater. However it is harvested commercially by the local Dalefoot Composts to make various composts - I added their use and link to the bracken wikipedia entry.
Earlier in the week in the Naddle oak woods, I saw a nice Hen of the Woods fungus and what I think is Moasaic Puffball as we collected acorns:
