A group of shaggy-mane mushrooms popped up at the edge of the driveway. Then a cluster of orange-brown mushrooms with conical tops appeared nearby, followed by a couple of larger white mushrooms with flat tops.
When my eight-year-old granddaughter went to kick one, I suggested instead of destroying them, she see how many she could find. She and her friend returned from a jaunt in the meadow with this report: “We each found 3,000 mushrooms.”
While her estimate might not have been accurate, it wasn’t an exaggeration. Mushrooms were popping up all over. Wondering how widespread the phenomenon was, my wife and I set out on a mushroom-finding expedition.
The more we found, the more we found. I’d be on my hands and knees studying one kind and I’d be called over to look at another. In one area, dozens of tiny caps, no bigger than a fingernail, were sprinkled in the moss. In a nearby grassy area grew a semicircle of brown mushrooms that looked like huge pancakes.
We found clumps of fungus resembling orange marmalade, groups of tall and slender mushrooms that looked like graceful creatures, layers of various textures bracketed on trees, a rotting log smothered by layers of white fungi.
It seems this is a banner year for mushrooms, and Island mushroom hunters are on the move. That got me thinking there was a feast to be had from the bounty growing in the forest near our house.
Armed with a booklet on Island mushrooms, we quickly found more species than were named in the booklet. The more we looked, the more wonders we discovered.
And then the treasure trove — or so I thought. Huge mushrooms were pushing up through the duff under the trees.
“White chanterelles!” I said, for I had heard about these mushrooms, and what we found resembled the white chanterelles in the booklet. Closer examination sparked some doubts. Careful study removed the doubts — they aren’t chanterelles.
If those mushrooms are edible, I thought, we could eat for year on what we can find within a hundred metres of our house. It’s just a matter of correctly identifying them.
If only we had taken in the mushroom show at the Swan Lake Nature Centre. Fortunately, an acquaintance forwarded a photo of the mushroom in question to Scott Mair of the nature centre, and he identified it as a short-stalked russula.
Off to the Internet to see if it’s edible.
There’s no shortage of websites devoted to mushrooms, with thousands of photos. But there are so many species, and so many variations within species, it’s difficult to make positive identifications.
And there’s one thing in common in all literature and websites on mushrooms — the wise admonition that you never eat anything until you are 100 per cent sure it is not poisonous. Even many edible species come with warnings that some people get sick after eating this one or that one. One edible species might look much like a poisonous species. Some lose their toxicity when cooked, but you should still be careful.
The more I learned, the more I knew I didn’t know. My mind was spinning, and I hadn’t even nibbled on anything from among the psilocybin genera. (I don’t know if magic mushrooms even grow around here.)
As I sorted through all the information, my appetite for a mushroom feast dwindled, but my appetite to know more about these fascinating organisms grew. Flowers get all the good publicity, and that’s understandable — a bouquet of slimy mushrooms won’t advance your romantic prospects — but you can’t beat fungi for variety and quirkiness. Not only are they interesting, but they play important roles in ecosystems. I’m happily learning that all mushrooms are magic in their own way.
The short-stalked russula? Edible, say the websites, but not very tasty. As for the other mushrooms in my neighbourhood, until someone with the right credentials comes along to make a positive identification, I’ll stick to eating the mushrooms I buy in the store.
That’s just fine — not everything has to be eaten or manufactured into a product to be valuable.
