Gypsy mushrooms

I collected a lot of choice edible mushrooms today and here is the last one I found on the way back home. Most years Gypsy mushrooms are around in August and early September, but this year is different as they are fruiting heavily right now under eastern white pine trees, as long as poplar, birch or beech trees are also close by.

Tom Volk of I believe the state of Oregon in the USA made the Gypsy mushroom his fungus of the month on his website back in Nov 1999 with interesting info on possible antiviral properties in this mushroom. It is a well liked edible in europe and though I personally find the stem hard to digest and only use the caps as food which I find are very good eating.  I do use all parts of the mushroom in teas, especially during flu season.

Which photo has the most number of Gypsy mushrooms in it. Photo 4 will need to be clicked on or you will definitely miss a few. ciao

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Spruce bolete amongst the white matsutake woods

Here are a few photos of Spruce boletes (Leccinum piceinum). I usually can not ID orange/red cap scaber-caps with many different staining colors and cap and stem scabers, but these were in a strictly conifer only woods where I was gathering white matsutake, these boletes are considered to be a good edible that is especially flavorful in dried form.

Click on photo to notice the spruce bolete on the rolling mossy terrain.

Off in the back section of this photo are 5  or so white mutsutake mushrooms in dark conifer forest these mushroom can be noticed hundreds of feet away. Actually any mushroom can be seen well in the moss or needle duff with the absence of fallen hardwood leaves.

The 2 orange colored mushrooms picked  up in mixed woods of birch, poplar and conifers are quite noticeable at the back of this tray of mushrooms and are a different variety of Leccinum then the spruce bolete (Leccinum piceinum) and the stem texture, cap cuticle and mushroom flesh staining was very different then the other mushrooms when preparing them for the drier, but if I had 4 or 5 different varieties on this tray these differences would not have been noticed.  Orange/red capped Leccinum are a very common Northern Hemisphere & Atlantic Canadian  mushroom with some very good edibles in the group though IDing them is difficult with 6 to 10 varieties with a couple of possible rogues in the group, there have been some GI illnesses reported in the mid and western USA. Conifer forest narrows down your possible Leccinum species considerably and is a good place to start exploring orange/red cap Leccinums as a possible forageable food source. ciao