Some places in the world aren't covered with a foot of snow like I am, and the early mushrooms are starting to fruit. It'll be a couple months here before harvest begins.
hopefully, this is a chance to display your 'shrooms!


Coral mushrooms. Fairly good taste. A single mushroom can sometimes mean 5 lbs or more.



Not edible! We always called 'em Death Angels. Amanita. Sure pretty to look at, though.



False morels. Poisonous to some folks. Not recommended to eat, however, wife and I eat without ill affects.



Real morels. Both the gray and brown forms. Probably our favorite eating mushroom.



A puffball a bit past its prime. Real tasty when fresh.



Identification uncertain to me, so we avoid these. Sure are pretty, though.


I really invite Tatiana or others to help me out on the identifications, especially that last one. I hope everyone has good mushrooming this spring!

Jack

I picked morels on Rootok Island. When I spotted the first one I got to looking and found about ten of them. They were dark compared to morels I picked in the lower 48. I never saw any on the other islands I was on. They were good

Great shots, Jack. I wish I knew more of the eatable ones than I do. I only pick and enjoy the morels, though there are several other types that can be eaten.

I have morels all over the place in this region. They even grow right along my cabin every spring.

Thank you Jack, for the share, as always.


A big drain bowl of them.


My 44 mag marlin was just to show the basket size. I never go anywhere in the woods without it.

There is nothing bettah than a big supper of my famous spaghetti , with dried morels to flavor.

Scientists from all over the world come to my area for symposiums and workshops on mushrooms. We have so many most experts can't identify a lot of them. Morels are my favorites followed by puffballs,shaggy manes,chantrelles and corals. Many others may be edible but we don;t take chances. The early ones should start popping up in the next month. Excellent post.

I'm no mushroom expert but can list about 9-10 that I have commercially picked and either sold at our farmer's market or to buyers. These would include both golden and white chanterelles and also the high elevation spruce chanterelles, hedgehogs, yellow feet, matsutake, candy caps, boletes, morels, lobsters, cauliflower, and probably a couple others that aren't coming to mind right now. I know the ones I know and steer clear of the rest...even though undoubtably many I pass by are edible. Just don't know enough to identify them.

Some of my commercially picked 'shrooms:

Candy Caps...kind of a cool mushroom as it is used for flavoring things like cookies and custards. Has a strong butterscotch smell to it when dry. The tops are rough like a newts skin and the stems bleed white milk. Both characteristics aid in identification. Dried candy caps fetch prices well over $100 lb in San Francisco and other bastions of high society.

Hedgehogs. One of my favorite eating mushrooms during the late fall winter months. This mushroom can freeze solid and still not be damaged.

And of course the iconic pacific golden chanterelle. Grows in the second growth douglas fir in the 20-30 year age class. Very specific to where it will grow and not grow. Lately we have not had many good chanterelle years as our late summer- early fall have been too dry. In good years pickers have no trouble picking 100 lbs plus in a day.

And here is a good day's mixed bag for me from late fall: Hedgehogs, chanterelles, candy caps.

’ll just post a few pictures to continue Gulo’s post, because I've got too many mushroom pictures to choose anything specific…



They are a pain to identify based on appearance, because there are surprisingly many of them in the genus Ramaria alone, and there are other genera of coral fungi as well. This one is probably one of the most common species globally, growing on rotten wood, easy to identify because of the crown-shaped tips – Clavicorona pyxidata (=Artomyces pyxidatus). It is also the earliest to appear – most other coral fungi fruit in the fall, and this one sometimes fruits in May. It is completely unrelated to the OP’s coral fungus





They are egg yolk mushrooms (Bolbitius vitellinus = B. titubans). It’s pretty common on nutrient-rich soil along trails, near mulch and compost piles, etc. It’s a small genus with maybe a dozen species, which are all very fragile, slim, watery mushrooms, like small ink caps, but with colorless spores. Some are quite pretty, and most are rare to very rare. The Parrot bolbitius (B. psittacinus/callistus) is emerald green at first, turning yellow, and then orange-red with age. It grows on wet rotting aspen trunks in vernal pools, left after spring floods along meandering boreal rivers.


We actually described a new species, Bolbitius sibiricus, two years ago, that’s currently known from just one find in one spot globally, and it’s near my vegetable garden. Other than being a new and rare species, it's pretty useless to humans Field mycology is still fun, with lots of undescribed species even in northern latitudes.




They aren’t really that toxic, compared to the really dangerous Amanitas, I mean the Death Cap (Amanita phalloides) and the Destroying Angel (Amanita virosa). The Death Cap is very invasive and spreads along with its host trees. Here, it popped up in a planted oak patch about two decades ago, probably after hitching a piggyback ride on oak saplings from European Russia, and has since spread to local pine and birch forests. I find more and more of it every year. It is a very attractive and elegant mushroom, although deadly.




I collect Fly Agarics (Amanita muscaria) to make a remedy for aching joints. The water-soluble red pigments in the cap skin have proven NSAID properties, and help with arthritic/rheumatic pains as vodka-based compresses.






Amanita is a big genus, that I'm quite fond of, especially the grisettes, because there are LOTS of species in this section, and many are still nameless (I have several in my collection, awaiting formal description). Grisettes are all edible and good.



This is a great picture, it shows the difference in the habits of common black morels (Morchella elata agg.), and burn site morels (two key species), which usually appear 10-14 days after black morels. The little gray morel in the picture is called the black-footed morel (Morchella tomentosa), so it’s not the “gray morel” in the sense that it’s used in to denote young yellow morels. I’ve only seen and collected this species twice here in Siberia in 2012 and 2013, after extensive forest fires, and it hadn’t been registered in Russia before that.
Other burn site fungi are interesting to find, because they either evacuate from their dying host, or use the opportunity to fruit when their competitors have all been killed by fire, or just like eating coal, so there are usually few opportunities to see them in a particular region. Most are small, but some are very pretty! Here’s a nice colony of the red pyropyxis (Pyropyxis rubra) we found with my friend Nina Filippova up in Yugra the same spot where we found a huge crop of black-footed morels, not far from where the Irtysh flows into the Ob. It is so rarely seen that there are only a few records of it, worldwide.

Pyropyxis rubra




The deciduous forests around my hometown in the forest-steppe sometimes produce LOTS of them. They’re not poisonous unless you ignore the necessity to boil them, which removes the volatile, water-soluble toxic substances. I’ve tried skipping this step and do not recommend it.


There are just a handful of species here that fruit as early as thimble morels (they’re known as “snowbank fungi”). These red cup fungi, called Microstoma protractum, are among them. Beautiful, but you’ll need a macro lens for good pictures.


The Pig's ears (Discina ancilis) is a relative of false morels and also fruits very early in the spring. It's difficult to clean from sand sometimes, but it's edible.



Sarcosoma globosum is another weird, rare snowbank fungus that’s said to have medicinal properties. It’s essentially a very slow-growing fist-sized bag of translucent slime with very erratic fruiting – sometimes there are hundreds of them, and sometimes they disappear for decades, for no apparent reason.






Overripe puffballs are always fun to stomp, too

Wow. LOve all these neat shroom pics.

Tatiana, your nice remedy of arthritic/rheumatic pains as vodka-based compresses, made me think of my own remedies too, not using shrooms, but other ointments , mixed with DMSO , for pain and many other healing properties. I really like things like this. Working with horses as a vet assistant for some years acquainted me with some great healing substances . Ive used DMSO for years . It has a surprising very long list of ailments, it helps tremendously.

I too do the puff shroom stomp

T4ever, I wasn't surprised at all the variety of shrooms you have there ! It seems your area has the best of everything, practically.

These are cute little waxcaps, Sir. They look familiar....

To all, especially Tatiana, T4E, and Sharon -

Thanks for the educational additions. That is what I'd hoped for. I've got literally 100s of fungus pictures; wish I knew more regarding identifications. Can any of you help me with this one? Tania?

That is known as the Ken Kesey mushroom from the Electric Kool-aid Acid Test

white -

As a kid, we called it "squirrel puke", but I don't think that's the official name. "Sometimes a great notion"?, or "Cuckoo's Nest"???

This is a Hydnellum peckii, a species of tooth fungi. It oozes excess liquid when it grows quickly, in August and September. It is extremely sensitive to nitrogen pollution, and some Hydnellum species are now extinct in Europe due to fertilizer runoff, even in protected areas.
There's a very similar and even more common H. ferrugineum, which is a bit darker. Another pretty and cosmopolitan one is H. caeruleum, the blue hydnellum, which is a pretty pale blue color. H. aurantiacum is more rare, and beautifully golden-orange. There are a few other species in this genus. They are slow-growing fungi belonging to the family Bankeraceae, with most species preferring undisturbed, old-stand forests on poor soils. They are often used as ecological indicators of valuable forests with the highest biodiversity.








If you chop and boil them, and add ammonia to the pot, it will produce thelephoric acid, which will dye yarn pre-mordanted with alum a pretty bluish-green or bluish-gray color, that discolors into a good, rich olive drab with time. If you just add alum to the pot, it will produce a deep, rich brown shade, so together these two techniques are perfect for dyeing yarn into camo colors. It is a bit trickier than most other mushroom dyes, but the result looks great.

Could have been either of those.........but that was 1971 when I read them ...............seems like it would fit better in Cuckoo's Nest

Does anybody have pictures of puffballs at heir peak or just before?

Also, how do you prep/cook them? Cut them in slices?

Are the little puffballs good to eat as well?

Thanks.

Dr. Fur -

Here's a couple puffball pictures when the fruiting bodies are just starting to emerge, and are really good table fare.





I slice them across and fry in butter, Sometimes, 1 slice is enough to fill a 10" skillet!