Is this a safe, and edible mushroom?
Just now noticed you folks discuss mushrooms too⌠love the pics.
I hunt morels each spring, here in TN, usually first week in April is when I find them. When redbud trees have been in bloom for a while and dogwoods are just starting to bloom, that is when I normally find the most of them.
They taste so good. Below is a pic of a few I found just across the hollow from my home.
TNHunter
It takes a lot more to identify mushrooms. Some edibles are distinctive and can be named by just a single photo, but to identify most you need to look at many more features. The gill/pore details, spore prints, what the mushroom is growing from, smell, texture, sometimes even chemical reactions.
You donât have a common edible mushroom there, the smart way to get into edible mushrooms is to learn about the species you want to find. Learn where and when to find them, how to identify them, and how to identify poisonous mushrooms that look similar.
Yeah
The woods near my house are full of mushrooms.
Iâm not going to eat this one .
Oyster mushrooms might be around now, youâd be looking on dead and dying trees for them.
@Boizeau I would add that the first thing you should do is learn how to identify the handful of mushrooms that are genuinely dangerous. That way you can quickly and easily avoid any unfortunate mistakes, and feel more confident about trying edibles that you find. Mushroom ID is best approached as a process of elimination (presumed guilty until disproven), especially when youâre just getting started. Fortunately, there are only a few that will kill you and a few that will make you wish you were dead. Most of the rest of the poisonous ones will just make you⌠uncomfortableâŚ
That is the main reason I havenât gotten in to the mushrooms because I donât know which ones are eatable and which ones are not!
I been so curious and would like to know more about the shiitake / oak logs but I do not know anything about how they do them? Would be willing to learn about them and to know where to get more information kind of step by step and where to get the materials from.
A few other people have mentioned them on this thread, but probably the best source of spawn and info is fieldforest.net
Itâs actually not too hard to learn which ones are safe to eat and which arenât. Some are more challenging than others, but some of the best ones are also the easiest. I think where a lot of people get into trouble is they donât know the proper descriptors and what to look for. If you didnât know what apples or tomatoes were and I asked you to go to the store and get some round red fruit, you might easily confuse them. Thatâs the sort of information people go on to ID mushrooms and get in trouble, but it doesnât take much reading to know what to look for.
If I told you chanterelles are orangey-yellow mushrooms that grow in the woods, you could end up with a poisonous jack-o-lantern mushroom. But if I added that they only grow on the ground (never on wood), in scattered groups of single mushrooms (never clusters), and never have sharply defined gills but instead have fleshy branching gills running down the stem, the differences are obvious. And once youâve IDâd each, itâs as easy as telling apples from tomatoes.
Itâs worth while to do a little homework and see if you have local mycological society(aka mushroom club). While you will certainly meet some interesting folks, you can learn much about what the main edibles are in your region.
@jcguarneri @cis4elk @lordkiwi
Thanks for the tips, information and the links! I would be checking them out! But any other information that you all think I/we should need to know would be well appreciated!
Those are LBMâsâŚ
Little Brown Mushrooms (well⌠perhaps not too little).
I was told that LBM thing one time on another message board, while discussing some brown mushrooms⌠trying to identify some⌠and they basically said that there are so many different types of LBMâs that it makes them the most difficult to clearly identify.
If they were yellow or red instead of brown⌠you would have a better chance identifying them.
I am no mushroom expert myself⌠I do harvest and eat morels, chanterelles. Those I know.
TNHunter