posted by Catherine on Nov 19
Who would have thought that looking for mushrooms could be so fun!
We headed of with a simple guidebook, a fully loaded camera and a hot thermos of coffee. We weren’t experts by any means and to even class us a beginners in the fungal department would have been an overstatement!
But, we didn’t have to go far, they were all around us. You just have to look for them. I mean an open patch of grassland might look empty of mushrooms, but if you walk slowly across it looking at the ground, you will soon see them all.
There was more than one occassion where I walked out into a field of green and stumbled across a patch of about 20 bright orange mushrooms! I really couldn’t see them as I approached.
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Honey Wax Caps
I got some really amazing photos too – however, the soggy knees were not the only downside!
I got poked by branches, slipped on leaves, and we couldn’t even 100% identify nearly any of the mushrooms we found as you sometimes need to see more than just the cap.
Identifying Fungi:
Firstly, the cap only helps you with a very few mushrooms, like the spotted red ones – you really need to see the stem color too. However, quite a lot of ours were only small – so we couldn’t really see the stalks without poking them – which we didn’t really want to do.
If we could see the stem, we tried to get it in the photo too – but then sometimes you also need to know the color of the gills underneath! And there really wasn’t any way we were going to break them to have a look – as this kinda ruins it for anyone else trying to spot them if we snap them in two!
And finally – some can only be identified by bashing them on a sheet of paper to see the colour of the spores – and picking them just for that reason is totally the opposite of what a day like this was all about.
The Wrong Way To Identify Fungi:
After we got back with some amazing mushroom pictures – and a tiny bit cold from the day’s woodland walk - we hopped online to look up some of the more distinctive mushrooms – and I couldn’t believe what I found!
Some people – amateurs like me – were actually picking up the ones they couldn’t identify and taking them home to photograph them or bash out the spores! Not only could that particular mushroom be the only one in that particular place – but it may not have even released it’s spores yet, i.e: not sowing the next generation.
What it will do now is shrivel up in someones home or garage, then be thrown away!
Not one for the ’take only pictures’ ethos, is it!
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Fungal Foray - Woodland Walk
And remember – don’t eat any mushrooms if you are not 110% sure of what they are! Make sure you keep an eye on the kids so that they don’t swallow or touch anything they shouldn’t!
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