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With its wet and cool, fall is definitely mushroom season, even more so than spring and summer. Fungi are fascinating. And even though I haven’t worked up the nerve to pick mushrooms for the supper table, I’m studying and observing them, so on the day that I do pick some for supper, I’ll be sure to be harvesting edible mushrooms.
Many Americans are as scared of wild mushrooms as they would be if they saw a mushroom cloud looming in the sky, an attitude people in mushroom-loving countries cannot understand. The fungus kingdom is as vast as the plant kingdom, with a huge variety of flavors and textures. If you’ve identified your wild species with certainty, collected with an expert, grown ‘wild’ species from a kit, or depleted your life savings buying wild mushrooms in a gourmet store, you’re in for an unbelievable treat.
Even so, the problem with mushroom hunting in North America is that we don’t tend to have a mushroom picking tradition, so it can be hard to find a knowledgeable elder to learn from. However, there are more and more thriving mycological (mushroom) organizations in bigger cities that have identification outings, fungi fairs, and gourmet mushroom dinners. They can provide some great online info too. For example, check out the Mycological Society of Toronto.
Some tips on mushrooming safely:
•
National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms by Gary H. Lincoff
Peterson’s A Field Guide to Mushrooms: North America by Kent H. McKnight
Mushrooms Demystified: A Comprehensive Guide to the Fleshy Fungi by David Arora
Mushrooms and Other Fungi of North America by Roger Phillips
Mushrooms of the Boreal Forest by Eugene Bossenmaier
Lone Pine Field Guides’ Mushrooms of Ontario and Eastern Canada by George Barron.
• Visit top-notch mushroom websites, where you can find articles, safety tips, recipes, mushroom photos, spore print photos, and mushroom stories. Some good sites include:
Foraging with the Wildman ~ Click on the Wild Mushrooms link.
MushroomExpert.Com
Tom Volk’s Fungi
George Barron’s Website on Fungi
MycoWeb: Mushrooms, Fungus, Mycology
MushroomHunter.Net
Mushroom-Collecting.Com
RogersMushrooms.Com
Cornell Mushroom Blog
The Great Morel
RussianFoods.Com for mushroom recipes.
Wild About Mushrooms the online recipe book of the Mycological Society of San Francisco.
Edible Mushrooms, Missouri Outdoors ~ Nice little
PDF booklet with images.
Poisonous Mushrooms, Missouri Outdoors ~ Another nice little PDF booklet with colour images.
Alberta Mycological Society
Mycological Society of Toronto
North American Mycological Association and their list of great online mushroom education links.
• Learn how to make spore prints. Because it can be difficult to identify mushrooms, spore colour and gill/pore patterns are invaluable tools to aid in the process. To make a spore print, take a mature mushroom cap, stem removed, and place gill/spore side down on white or black paper, or glass so you can place white or dark paper behind it for contrast depending on spore colour. Cover the mushroom with a glass or bowl and let sit six hours to overnight. Carefully
• Get to know the bad guys. Amanitas, the well-known poisonous mushroom family are attractive, however they cause up to 90% of all mushroom poisonings, so it’s a good idea to learn how to identify and avoid them. Amanitas have many distinctive traits, from the membrane known as the cup of death that surrounds the mushrooms’ bases to their white spores. Very young Amanitas can even be mistaken for puffballs. How to tell the difference? Cut the puffball in half. If it looks like a mushroom embryo with cap, gills, and stem, it’s an Amanita.
• Another bad guy is the orange to yellow Jack O’ Lantern. If you don’t correctly identify what you’re picking, you may mistake this poisonous mushroom for chanterelles or sulfur shelf fungi.
• When collecting mushrooms for the table, always leave at least one uncooked, so that if you do experience distress, it can be used for identification purposes.
• Never leave any unidentified mushroom laying about the house or fridge. An unsuspecting person, child, or pet may eat it.
• With a new mushroom, never eat a lot at first even if it’s considered edible. Everyone reacts differently, and what may be okay for someone else might not be okay for you. As David Spahr from Mushroom-Collecting.Com (his book Edible and Medicinal Mushrooms of New England and Eastern Canada comes out in the summer of 2009) says:
Be very careful. Mushrooms listed as edible in some field guides may not be edible in your area. The lilac brown bolete (Tylopilus eximius) is usually listed as edible. In Maine, there have been many poisonings from this one. Do not eat it. Angel wings (Pleurocybella porrigens) are a thin and white oyster-like mushroom found growing on conifers. There have been some reports of poisoning recently although most field guides list them as edible. Angel wings should be avoided.
• Try to find an experienced mushroomer to take you out on a few forages.
If you’re interested in growing your own, head to Fungi Perfecti LLC. Owner Paul Stamets has been a mushroom researcher for decades, as well as hunter and grower. He’s also authored a number of excellent books, such as Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms
and
Mushroom
Cultivator: A Practical Guide to Growing Mushrooms at
Home.
I highly
recommend
Mycelium Running:
How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World.In
the book you learn that not only can mushrooms be used to
clean up toxic land and breakdown biological warfare
toxins, they are the communication network beneath the
ground, as well as good medicine. An incredible read.
Photo Credit: Darek Nidecki
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2009 Mushroom Season Log NWO
22 May The first morels are found in a sunny gravel and mossy shoulder of the road. The purple violets are blooming, foxtail pollen spikes are growing, tree buds are bursting into leaf, and the black flies have just started.
Picked continuously until around the 14th of June. Most abundant picks were June 1st through 9th. Fiddlehead and morel season coincide.
Likely the big mushrooms we saw late last summer growing from sawdust piles at the mutant mushroom place were oysters. Had that fine almond scent. So huge though! Will have to investigate. Do oysters get parasitized at all? Some type of parasitized giant white mushrooms there too.
Good article Oyster Mushrooms at Mushroom-Collecting.com and
the article The Oyster Mushroom in The Spore Print, newsletter for the Edmonton Mycological Society.
Saw the first batch of small puffballs near the river, but the snails or mice had already nibbled on them.
28 June Oyster mushrooms! I didn’t even know we had them here. First time I’ve seen them, the beauties. Glowing whitely in the rain-dark day, growing on big old popular. Most of the wood standing or fallen dead. These oysters have that fine anise scent, white spore. Creeping on them were little white caterpillar worms. When the twin flowers bloom, the oysters are sprouting on the island.
2 July wood lilies and goatsbeard blooming. Mushrooms? No red aspens yet.
4 July Went looking where oysters are likely to grow, places where the forest is poplar, birch, jack pine, and old enough to have big old dead poplar. Found them. These ones are the more tan type of oysters, anise/almond scent, black beetles. Checking spore.
Spore is white to white cream.
Totally amazing. Funny, at first I was a bit off-put by the flavour of the oysters. Then I was addicted. I’m finding that I buy commercial hardly at all anymore because wild is so flavourful and memorable!
July Note The season is stunted and late. Such a bad summer, cold and often rainy. The plants haven’t grown. The mushrooms are later than usual too. Have wondered if morels are sprouting again, as can happen in right conditions, but have not had a chance to take a good look.
End of July Lobsters found. Still worried about the “may parisitize poisonous russulas,” so haven’t tried picking my own. Did try some commercial dried. Nice!
August Lots and lots of boletes. Though haven’t picked. Last summer while picking to study, the amount of flies born of these mushrooms put me off! Plus super busy month moving and such. No time for wandering.
End of August Friends finding chanterelles. Super dooper crop of puffballs on the island landing road.
September I’m now in Hamilton mostly for two years for school. A new place to hunt... The escarpment and trails! And I'll be able to head out with real seasoned mycologists from the Mycological Society of Toronto outings. So cool.
2010 Mushroom Season Log NWO
I'm not in NWO, however I have contacts. Morels...
3 May The first morels are found under trees in partial leaf, in the farther hunting area.
Mushroom Hunting & Cultivation Videos