Foraging for Mushrooms

Subtitled: There's a fungus among us

Saturday afternoon we decided to go for a walk in the woods.  I have a friend who has been going on mushroom forays with some mycologists in South Louisiana and he was over at the house visiting.

Factoid: Mycologist: a person who studies fungi.  I learned a new vocabulary word.

The mycologists walk around in the woods and try to find as many different types of mushrooms as possible, naming their genus and species.  Since we like to eat them, we'd only be interested in learning to identify which ones are edible, or more specifically, which ones are poisonous.  My buddy explained it this way - in Louisiana there are many snakes.  You learn how to identify the poisonous ones, the cottonmouths, the copperheads, the coral snakes and a couple of types of rattlesnakes and you stay far away from those.  Same thing with mushrooms. 

So he asked if we've ever foraged for mushrooms in the woods behind our house and we had to reply, "No."  But we love mushrooms and it seems to be interesting, albeit a little mysterious, so we headed off for the woods.  We all spread out in the woods and were told to just look around.  It is funny how you overlook things until you are looking specifically for them.  Well, it didn't take long before we discovered... Oyster Mushrooms!  These are edible and there are many different types of oyster mushrooms.


Oyster Mushrooms

These tend to grow at the base of rotting trees, feeding on dead and decaying matter in logs.  They particularly like willow trees.


Photo from underneath

The interesting thing about mushrooms is that what you can see is the "fruit", what you can't see is underground or spread throughout the log, threads getting nutrients from decaying organic matter.  They fruit in order to reproduce.  When you find a spot with edible mushrooms and harvest them, you can keep coming back to the same spot to get more as they grow as you are only "picking the fruit" and not disturbing the fungus itself.

The gills of the mushroom have cells on which spores are produced.


Gills of the mushroom

You don't want to store mushrooms in plastic, we were told.  Use a brown paper bag for storage.

There are different types of oyster mushrooms.  These were growing on the side of a dead tree, but were falling apart and way too far gone to eat.

We found some Turkey Tail Mushrooms.  I think you can see why they are called Turkey Tails.  They are widely known as having medicinal qualities when brewed in a tea, specifically in hindering the growth of cancerous tumors and being an anti-malarial and anti-oxidant.  We did not harvest any of these.  There is something called a false turkey tail mushroom and we want to be absolutely sure what we're dealing with.


Turkey tail Mushrooms

We saw all sorts of mushrooms.  This was a hard, non-edible type mushroom growing on a dead log.

Here was another oyster mushroom.  Again, a little too far gone to harvest and eat.

We ran across a brick foundation of sorts in the woods.  I have no idea what it was for.

I zoomed in and captured a fern growing in the bricks.


Wild fern growing amongst the bricks

This moss growing on an old fence post caught my eye:


Moss growing on an old fence post lying in the leaves

This Spring we're going to go with him foraging from chanterelles, another edible mushroom found in Louisiana.  We brought the oyster mushrooms back to the house.  Tomorrow I'll show you what we did with them.