With time to do a little more searching, I find that it is in fact a fungus, Xylaria polymorpha, with the common name, "dead man's fingers." So appropriate! ... they looking like ancient mummy fingers. Apparently, it feeds on subterranean dead wood which makes sense here as there is a line of holly stumps from an old hedge in the vicinity. This means that it is entirely harmless to my landscaping purposes ... what I was concerned about, fearing any difficult weed infiltration or infestation. While it looks fungi-like, its hard woodiness made it seem nothing like any of the ordinary fungi that crop up in a typical yard. It has a pronounced mild, but strange scent. That, coupled with its appearance makes is seem like something that would be finely ground and put in a genuine witch's brew! Apparently, since it is black, I am catching it in its late stage. I read that in its earlier stage it can be some variation of bluish-greyish-green. In general, I comb the area where it is, looking for the tiniest of weeds, many times on hands and knees, so it has remained well hidden, apparently, for some length of time. FWIW, Near the same area, yesterday, next to a sweet potato vine, I found embedded in the soil surface a Russett-potato-like looking thing ... about 2 1/2" length x 1 1/2" diameter. Since I have never dug down and explored what any possible sweet potato might actually look like, I guessed that maybe I was looking at it. I pried it up to take a closer look and found that the exposed skin portion was decomposing ... likely due to the light frost we had a few days ago. I tossed it back to near where It came from. Today, I discovered that the "potato" was really an "egg." It had "hatched" a mushroom which, since I had unearthed it, was lying on its side. I wish I had known this was coming. Due to its size, I think it could have been observed while actually performing the process. I picked it up to take a closer look and readily noticed it had a pronounced, unpleasant scent. I deposited it on a picnic table for later, more in-depth examination, and went inside. A while later I opened the door to go outside and was IMMEDIATELY struck with the foul odor of this thing! It was really bad, smelling up the whole area. It had a slight semen-ish smell, but with an additional component of very strong industrial chemical odor, which I am at a loss to describe. See it below.

Thank you bitterwort! I noticed today with all the ice melted outside, that now there are many more all over around the basil plant, the pot, and the ground all around it. Plus if you look in the pic you can see that the one looks as if it is coming out of the seed pod that fell off the plant. Darn, I was really starting to hope I had salamander eggs, lol. Thank you very much! Daniella

Your right Roselee. We were priveledged to see it! Of course you should have seen my oldest daughters eyes roll when I told her to come look at the bee. Geez, Mom, you want us to look at ANOTHER bug? LOL. She has gotten to that age where she is almost too hip to watch bugs. Of course, once she started watching it, she thought it was pretty cool. We are currently watching a black swallowtail caterpillar. It's a full grown catepillar now and we feel like it won't be long before it goes into it's pupa stage. My only regret is that my camera was broken a couple months ago! Rebecca

To add to what Jean wrote, they're called adventitious roots and when the make contact with soil those white squiggly adventitious roots penetate the soil and make regular roots. As far as I know tomatoes are one of the few that I know of the can form roots all along the stems when in contact with soil. And b'c of that quite a few folks plant their plants by trenching, which means planting then horizontally in a shallow trench rather than vertically as most do. Based on your experience with that container seeds place I'd let it go and look for varieties at the more established trustworthy tomato seed sources of which there are many. Carolyn