Tuesday 23 February 2016

Fungi Foraging

I am a member of the UK Veg Gardeners' forum, which I use quite frequently for interacting with fellow gardeners and veg growers. Despite its name, the forum hosts discussion of much more than just vegetables - flowers, for instance - and fungi. A new Group has just been set up called the Fungi Foraging Faction. I expect to be using it to share information with fellow fungi enthusiasts, because I am very interested in fungi, but know far too little about them.

I'm feeling inspired to write about fungi today because I saw some nice ones on sale in a Farm Shop at the weekend. You often see cultivated mushrooms for sale, but wild ones are rarely obtainable. I expect they have plenty of them in places like Borough Market in London, but not round where we live! These photos are very poor, I'm afraid. I snapped them hurriedly with my phone, and I don't have the steadiest of hands.


The most expensive ones were Girolles, at £43.15 per kilo, but there were many others priced at more than £20 per kilo, such as the Trompettes at £39.25.






I have been thinking about how many types of fungi I could conclusively identify. The photos below are of ones I know. I wonder if you can identify them too? (Names are at the end of this post).

"A"




"B"

"C"




"D"




"E"




"F"




"G"




"H"





"I"



"J"


Key to photos:
NB: I don't guarantee that these are correct, but I'm 99% sure!
A - Jew's Ear Fungus - Auricularia Auricula-Judae
B - Earthstar - Geastrum Triplex
C - Shaggy Inkcap Coprinus Comatus
D - Fly Agaric Amanita Muscaria
E - Birch Polypore Piptoporus Betulinus
F - Cauliflower Fungus Sparassis Crispa
G - Witch's Butter Tremella Mesenterica
H - Orange Waxcap Hygrocybe aurantiosplendens
I - Sulphur Tuft - Hypholoma Fasciculare
J - Sickener Mushroom  Russula Emetica


P.S. If the line spacings in this post are odd, I'm sorry about this but there is nothing I can do about it. Blogger seems to have decided that I have to have blank lines in some places where they are not necessary, and to have no spaces where they really ARE required! And to make it worse, it all looks different in the Edit mode, as compared with Preview, or the published post.  Grrrrrr!

7 comments:

  1. Fungi are interesting! The photos you show to be identified all look like poison ones to me.
    I had line spacing problems, too, until I learned a few HTML codes. You may already know about them, but if not, you can find them explained on the Internet. Just search for html line spacing. Of course, Blogger does strange things no matter what we do!
    Hope you are having a beautiful day; we are expecting thunderstorms here.
    Lea

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, Lea, most of them are poisonous or inedible. You can eat Shaggy Inkcap and Jew's Ear but I don't think they would be rated as delicacies!

      Delete
    2. actually you probably eat "wood ear" in chinese food quite often - once it's dried and cooked it looks like black leathery strips. Witches butter and "cauliflower" are edible and "cauliflower" taste like pasta.

      Delete
  2. I wonder those really expensive ones taste that much better than the cheaper ones?
    If you look in HTML mode you will often see that blogger has sneaked in some strange formatting. It is very annoying.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, I have tried editing in HTML view, but Blogger ignores that and puts the blank lines back in again as soon as I save the post!

      Delete
    2. Yes I have noticed that happens too. I sometimes cut and paste the text into Notepad to remove the formatting. Then you can copy and paste the text back from Notepad. It usually works but what a faff.

      Delete
  3. Fungi are beautiful, but it's the 1% uncertainty that I would likely always have which would prevent me from ever foraging for them.

    And yes, I had formatting issues in the past too - I now write out my posts in MS Word and then "save as" a text document (Notepad) which removes any formatting. I then copy & paste into Blogger. Still have the odd issue, but nothing compared to before.

    ReplyDelete

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