Hunting Mushrooms

      There is nothing better than walking through the woods on a cloudy, misty day.  No heat to deal with and the bugs aren't usually out yet if you've had a good rain.  But that doesn't mean the animal aren't busy and tracks show up better in the muddy areas.  The best part is mushrooms are popping up everywhere.  I never knew there was such a variety of mushrooms in the world. We had two days of mushroom hunting and collected probably over 150 mushrooms most of which we couldn't identify but some we did. 
   Again as with anything from the wild please do your own research before you eat anything!!  Mushrooms can be especially dangerous as you must be very careful to know what you are eating making a mistake can be fatal.  We used books, pictures, and internet to identify our mushrooms and did not even taste anything we were not 100% sure about. Pictures will not do it alone as so many of the mushrooms look alike and may look like a poisonous counterpart.  You have to study descriptions and often take spore prints of the mushrooms to determine what they are. I can not be responsible for someone eating a poisonous mushroom.
  That said we have had alot of fun exploring and learning about what the earth has to offer us. 

The Mother Lode of Mushrooms!

                                                       In the end all our mushrooms filled that 5 gallon bucket.


Here is our prize mushroom.  Super D found this while hunting.  No deer but I think this was better.

                           This is called a Bearded tooth mushroom and it was good to eat!  These are rare to find and this provided enough for six people.  It was meaty and super yummy fried up.

                             These are a honey mushroom but there are several varieties and we were not successful in figuring out which one these were.  Some are edible and some aren't so we didn't chance eating these.

       These are a Pale Jelly Roll. They are not edible but pretty cool to look at.  They wiggle like jello.

     Ever see a blue mushroom?   These are the Indigo Milky.  They leak a blue milk like liquid when damaged.  They are edible but we didn't get the chance to eat these yet.  I'll report on taste next time.

    How about a purple one?  We never did figure out what this was.  But it was a cool looking! 
Can't wait to go hunting again!