Here are a few straggler mushrooms I've found for this #mushroommonday before winter completely covers them in snow.
In the dark gray weather these little flammulina veluptides stood out with a nice orange color.
This shows them when they are ripe for harvest. These are a bit tricky mushrooms to forage as they often get dried out quickly from cold weather.
I tend to find them on trees with bark peeling off them growing out from in between the bark layer and the solid wood. Here are some just starting out. Note the velvety texture on the cap, one of their common name's is velvet foot because they have a plush sort of texture on their stems and caps.
I took a taste test of a tiny one, and it had a nice powerful mushroom taste. You can buy these at the store under the name enokitake or enoki. Their shape and color in stores is long, skinny and white almost like a noodle because farmers grow them in high Co2 environments. Out in the wild they get orange and have a more firm texture. If you don't harvest them soon enough in the wild their stems get too tough to eat and you end up with mostly just the caps to eat.
Here is late straggler mushroom for the season. It has turned rusty red with age and is fairly large.
I flipped it over to try and identify it and I see some noticeable features. The rough stem and ring on the stem near the cap along with the symmetrical gills point to armillaria aka honey mushroom. There are a few different species of armillaria but I'm guessing this is an old Armillaria mellea but you never can tell with such old specimens like this.
Now for some UFOs (unidentified fungal organisms). At first glance I thought they were old flammulina veluptides (winter mushrooms).
On closer review their size was much larger than winter mushrooms and their stems were quite different.
The gills looked quite different from winter mushrooms.
I finally found some younger specimens of these unidentified mushrooms. It seems they resemble brick red caps (Hypholoma lateritium) more than winter mushrooms. One can never be sure with older mushroom specimens.
Soon all that will be left for me to find in the forest will be polypores like this trametes versicolor. At least you can get some medicinal properties from these if you boil them in tea it will add vitamin d and other cancer killing compounds to the tea. You can also make alcoholic tinctures with these to extract the medicinal properties but this takes a long process. I usually just buy the tincture from fungi perfecti to be sure I get the most potent extract. One day I'll go through the full process of turning these into tincture as these things are all around me.
That's all for now, thanks for looking :-)
Love the colors of those first ones
The latin name Flammulina velutipes implies some kind of flame color. They are pretty tasty but the problem is finding enough of them for a decent meal. These ones would have only make a bowl of soup at most.
That’s a pain not enough fir a real meal
Fortunately there are plenty of the cultivated ones at the store. They are one of my favorites to buy but their wild form has a more powerful taste/texture.
Nothing like food you harvest yourself over store bought
I love how you know so much about the characteristics of these mushrooms.
Foraging wild mushrooms requires lots of research, if you make a bad identification it could cause poisoning or even death. But in most cases the deadly ones are easy to differentiate if you observe the details.
Yes, of course, that's what I mean. You must have many years of experience to tell them apart. I see them and I can never know anything because I really forget the details. Thanks for sharing your images and knowledge.
wooooooow, the top picture of the mushroom I really like it, I really want to try it, it's really awesome thanks for sharing
This is what they look like in stores, they are a fairly common mushroom for sale. Perfect in hot pot soup after boiling them for a while they are almost like a noodle in texture but with a mushroom taste.
heeeemmm this is very delicious my friend,
I envy your harvest! I haven't seen Flammulina for years (
I wonder if they grow more on oak trees, that's where I found them. But there weren't actually enough for a meal just a few little bunches here and there.
Is this lichen also eaten? And what dishes are made from it?
I've only heard of lichen being used medicinally as an antibacterial.
I heard that too)
The native Americans used to wrap it in with their bandages. It's usually bearded lichen that I've heard of having the most beneficial antibacterial qualities. https://www.growforagecookferment.com/foraging-for-usnea/
Thanks for the interesting information! I will study)
You always show us beautiful mushroom pictures with us here.
These might be the last ones of the year to grow.
Those flammulina veluptides look delicious, like apricots or little browned dinner rolls.
They are pretty good, they sort of taste like a regular white button mushroom but with a bit of a chicken taste to them and their texture is more firm than that of a normal mushroom. Just have to be careful not to confuse them with the deadly galerina honey mushrooms that sort of look similar to the untrained eye.
lol, I will definitely leave all the foraging to you! I only forage at the store and from my friend's friend who grows the swirly hippie dooder fungi.
always enjoy your fungi posts! (and Higgs.)
Careful for the swirly hippy dooder fungi, I know a guy who decided to eat that every day and burned his brain out on it permanently. But then again he had an already addictive personality with alcohol so who knows if it was the shrooms or not. Higgs recommends carrots instead.
very unique mushroom 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
Especially since it grows in such cold weather.