This is one of the most exciting fungi to stumble upon, nestling at the base of pine trees like a cloud of coral. Although uncommon, they tend to recur in established locations, though not necessarily in consecutive years. Firm young specimens are delicious, if laborious to clean, with a firm texture and fungal, nutty flavour. They can grow to enormous sizes…
Finding wild food can be a tricky business. It doesn’t matter how experienced you are, how adept your identification skills are or how in touch you are with your ‘inner forager’: if you get too confident or take them for granted, they will scorn you. I ‘relearned’ this valuable lesson for about the 1000th time a few weekends ago
The death cap is the most deadly of all fungi, a lethal dose being as little as 20g. What makes it most dangerous is that symptoms do not usually show until 6 – 24 hours after ingestion, and by this time it is often too late for effective treatment. Anyone considering eating wild mushrooms should be able to identify it.
In the odd world of fungi, the hedgehog mushroom still manages to stand out as eccentric. Its the joker in the pack, and for anyone who is struggling to get to grips with identifying edible wild mushrooms, its refusal to conform to even the loosest of mycological norms make it a godsend. Better still, it is fairly common, immune to insect attack and very tasty.
Shaggy ink caps can usually be found growing in the same place year after year – often in urban environments. As with all ink caps, spore dispersal is by means of deliquesing whereby the entire cap liquifies from the bottom up, often leaving only the stipe and a disc of cap