Beauty of Mushrooms, and my need to go deeper

It's a wild world. There are thousands of edible fungi. It's actually WAY easier to hurt yourself messing with plants than with fungi, but for some reason we have lot of mycophobes around. Only 1 mushroom is known that can hurt you just by touching it... there are dozens of plants in my biome that do that, I’m not even thinking about the obvious ones like cacti, pompus grass and star thistle, I was thinking more insidious and common ones like hemlock growing all over the place (which contains poisonous alkaloids like coniine), but people are not aware enough to know what they don't know. Sure there are some mushrooms that can kill you if you eat/digest them, but same is true for plants. Just as with plants, many mushrooms are medicinal. The Cheeto colored Corticepts and white Lions Mane are the new hip ones, but Chinese medicine has been using the red Reshi/Ganoderma more than 2000 years, and a staggering variety of crazy things exist, from Corticepts Sinses and C. Militaris which take over bugs bodies, (but somehow they still have medicinal properties for us humans) to Lobster mushrooms which are parasitic fungi that literally convert inedible mushrooms into gourmet mushrooms.

Recently I started getting into mushrooms and I want to share some steps along my journey. (Take this as your disclaimer that this is not a guide for picking your own mushrooms. Picking mushrooms can be risky if you are foolish, and you do so at your own risk.) I know about 8 that I am familiar enough to play with. 15 if you count ones that don't grow in this biome (chaparral). It's easy enough if you have a discerning mind and an eye for detail... and of course the right books or mentors.

Best way to get started fast is to learn the real bad ones, and learn ones that don't have dangerous look alikes. But how do we get there? Well for me the journey started in Oregon in a little town called brookings. Took the scenic route up the Avenue of Giants (big trees) as my Wife crochet me a mushroom hat for the festival. As it turned out my Aunt/Uncle were Volunteering at this event: https://wildriversmushroomfestival.com/ If you are like me before starting this journey you wouldn’t believe the variety I saw there. Not only were there options to try various incredible mushroom foods, we were treated to porcini beers! There were tables lined with mushrooms (Below). There were more mushroom types on those table than I would have ever imagined existed. Mushrooms from an incredible variety of colors and shapes; different textures, different fungal lifecycles it was overwhelming and exciting!

At this point I have 4 posters, 11 books, and am starting to get involved in mushroom cultivation more actively. I’ve been following many online social groups on reddit/facebook, including some local to Sac CA, Casual groups, ID groups, and been on several forays with professional mycologists. I'm certainly no professional myself, so I am cautious and I always do another round of reseIten picking to eat. That said,
I'll share 4 mushroom forage options from top of my head which I know in my local area. All these images I took myself in the greater Sac area.

Starting with the really common ones in this area: wood blewits have this really beautiful color and a slightly earthy aroma and may not be for everyone.
Some of the lighter color ones (not blue) is an indication of an older mushroom, while the tiny ones have the most color.

Also discovered a couple patches of honey mushroom which were pretty good (below).
Observe with me some identifying features:

Mushrooms growing in clusters
white spore print (between mushroom stacks)
The little skirt or ‘partial veil remnant’
White gills that just slightly connect to the stipe

I also note the gills seem to run the whole length, but about every other gill runs only 1/2 or 1.3 of the way across the cap
(Below you can see various views of the honey mushroom)

Seems like they have some variety. Here is an entry for my local area: https://www.mykoweb.com/CAF/species/Armillaria_mellea.html  [California Fungi: Armillaria mellea: Photographs and descriptions of the Mushrooms and other Fungi of California, USA]


To be honest tho, my favorite mushrooms so far are the inedible ones. My personal favorite locally is the red pinwheel - Marasmius plicatulu  Beautiful!
(below) Photos of Red Pinwheel (Marasmius plicatulus)

 For more pictures like the above checkout Inaturalist. They have a great catalogue: https://guatemala.inaturalist.org/taxa/55291-Marasmius-plicatulus/browse_photos

Likely if you made it this far you were already familiar with the Amanita Muscaria "Mario Mushroom" or the Fly agaric. It’s common in our symbology, and is the archetypal mushroom. They don’t grow in my area, but here is a link if you haven’t seen them. https://guatemala.inaturalist.org/taxa/48715-Amanita-muscaria/browse_photos
Generally considered inedible and probably somewhat toxic, but still, it’s a beauty. What mushroom is more striking than this? This is why so much mushroom swag has this mushroom! Just like this lovely hat which my wife crochet for me.

(Below) me showing off my mushroom hat in front of my mushroom posters (thanks David Aurora for the design, and thanks to Steve & Sue for the gift!)

Another very striking and inedible favorite of mine is Satan’s Boletus. Also I don’t see many polypores around here, which I guess is good for you if afflicted by Trypophobia (fear/discomfort of tiny holes)

You can see one example on the top right side of the poisonous mushrooms poster(above right). Yes, the California ones look very different, it’s actually a different species but similar color pallet including the stain color.

It's expanding my appreciation for all of the wild life, so I think my jelly boyz deserve a shout out. Essentially all jellies are edible, and can be eaten raw; I don’t yet know the exact science at play here but I suspect that unlike most mushrooms which are made of chitin, our jelly fungus have structure made of other stuff! Link here to get started out on what that “stuff” might be:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2019.02993/full

A somewhat similar feel, but not genetically related Most Slimes are technically edible, but very tiny. They have some interesting properties of animation and creative baby distribution methods. I have been learning all sorts of cool stuff from the internet (thanks reddit/u/saddestofboys for your dedication to the topic!)

There are many good videos around and online for slime molds but I found this (silent) timelapse particularly interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8dl_CuwQhk Very cool, Especially the dive bomber at the end!


if you are lucky you can find all kinds of things around. For instance. Easily recognizable, and delicious and medicinal is Lion's mane I have not found any big enough to harvest (yet), but I have seen them harvested by others in this area

 One time we got lucky in a park and found a bunch of Morels! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morchella  which (IMHO) are some of the easiest mushrooms to identify (tho telling one sub-species/family of edible from another, is an interesting challenge)All of my professional friends said that it's totally not fair to be my first find because it took them 5+ years to find after they heard about them, and for me it was literally the first thing I foraged, that got me into all of this! Morchella!
 Really it's a great experience in broadening my awareness of the natural world. It's made me super curious about the boundary between micro/macro-scopic.  I'm getting myself a microscope soon so I can deepen my awareness as well.

Foraging is cool, but for beginner it could be risky… And when you are restricted to what you can find it can be rather large challenge just to uncover good edible finds, even if you have the mushroom sense but don’t know how to identify, but especially if you don’t know where to look! Even if you know exactly what you are looking for and you do find them, there is a chance it’s infected with worms, flies, beetles, or other molds/fungi. This is where putting science to work can really change the game.

Cultivation is going to be a lot more productive than foraging for me for sure in this biome... but I want to start trying for real and posting about my findings more regularly. In the last 24 hours there have been a couple motivating changes pushing me further down the path.

Firstly I just purchased a microscope

Today I just purchased this microscope:

https://amscope.com/products/40x-2500x-binocular-microscope-5mp-camera?variant=40347638235311
https://amscope.com/collections/microscope-parts-accessories-microscope-slides-microscope-slide-preparation-kits/products/ak-msp01
Later I’ll update this to link to my review of the scope in another post

And this evening I started working with a local mentor who was featured on Good Day Sacramento:
https://www.cbsnews.com/gooddaysacramento/video/mushylove/
In case the CBS site is also crap for you the video can also be found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyt7S4r5WLA