Mushroom Monday - Some Weekend Finds

Here are a few fungi finds from the weekend for this #mushroommonday

I found most of these fungi on my walks with my daughter in the evening. Of course some of the neighbors like to decorate their trees with fun toys like this.

She had to stop and play a while with the little gnomes and rock garden. Now we're off to find some real mushrooms.

We found a huge one with a long stem and white gills.

These white gills and tough stem look quite familiar.

We also found a smaller one that was older with a turned up cap.

Here is the cap of the huge one. With all these features I think it is a deer shield mushroom with a Latin name of Pluteus cervinus. These are edible but you can really only eat the cap because the stem is so tough.

Now for a similar looking mushroom just nearby of the same size but the cap looks a bit different.

I flipped one over and noticed the pink gills, thick stem and stem ring.

The pink gills are a dead giveaway for meadow mushrooms. Eventually as this mushroom gets older the gills will turn dark brown.

Meadow mushrooms are a nice edible but you have to really look at the gill color because there is a sickening green gilled lookalike called the green vomiter. Another problem with this meadow mushroom foraging is finding them in an unfertilized area because these mushrooms absorb toxins from the soil. Its best to forage for them in totally wild prairie grasslands vs. suburbia where everyone sprays roundup and puts toxic fertilizers in the ground.

That's all for now, hopefully some more mushrooms soon.