Wild mushrooms showed up at the Farmers Market last weekend. The three plus inch rain has brought up all the summer varieties. I decided to go mushroom hunting.
There are lots of edible mushrooms in the Ozarks. There are lots of poisonous ones too. The only summer mushrooms I know for sure are puffballs and chanterelles.
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- The hillside over the south pasture faces west and is a bit dry. For some distance I saw no mushrooms. Then this little one tucked against a rock appeared and I started finding more of many different kinds.
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- The striking white of this mushroom almost glowed against the green moss. The stem seemed close to translucent. it stood about six inches tall.
A man brought in a box with several mushrooms I’d never seen before. One was a rich blue inside and out. Another was white and shaggy. I knew it from a picture as a lion’s mane. Others were coral mushrooms which are a bit iffy as edible for some people.
Mushroom hunting is not usually productive for me. It is mostly an excuse to go out walking. Still, I packed a couple of bags just in case. And I remembered to spray up as the seed ticks are out in force.
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- Red caps are warning to me to stay away. Deadly Amanita mushrooms have red caps. The red over bright white is colorful.
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- These little orange mushrooms are cute. They come up in a scattered group, being one to two inches tall.
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- These black mushrooms remind me of dead man’s fingers except those are usually in a row along some fallen branch. These were a hollow urn that later rolled the edge down to form a rim.
There is a loop across the base of the hill above the south pasture, up a deep ravine, across the top of the hill and down into the big ravine leading back to the south pasture and the house. It’s not a bad hike, steep in places.
There were lots of mushrooms scattered through the woods. They came in many sizes and colors. I took some pictures, but picked none.
The goats were somewhere up the hill. I heard a snort now and then. I found an area with scraped off spots where the herd had rested. The goats were no where to be seen.
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- For a moment I thought I had found a chanterelle. It isn’t orange enough and the cap isn’t wavy. And there was only one, not enough for a meal.
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- Coral mushrooms are elaborate affairs. I’ve seen white and pink ones. This time only orange ones were on the hill.
The reasons for the goats being on the hill were scattered around. No, they were not mushroom hunting. They were acorn hunting. Acorns do not make goats sick and they love them.
My mushroom hunting yielded some pictures, no mushrooms for dinner and a few hundred seed ticks. The goats did much better, coming in full of acorns.