I’m off work for a couple days so this morning I asked the dogs if they’d like a car ride to a forest. It turns out they were quite excited by the prospect, so off we went. There was a particular forest I had in mind, but there was a traffic problem on the highway, which I heard about on the radio, so we opted for another forest a little closer to home. Since we’ve had some rain over the past couple days, I thought we might find some hypothetical tasty edible mushrooms. I say hypothetical because any old fool knows there are no wild edible mushrooms in Southern Ontario.

It turned out that this was an excellent choice of forest. The first place I look in this particular spot is by a little saddle in the hillside, not far from where I park the car, a spot that features several oak trees. Here is the first thing I noticed.

Hedgehogs in the woods

This is a familiar site in this little part of this forest. The distinctive orange-tan irregular caps are a dead give-away. Hedgehogs!

These firm, toothed mushrooms are very tasty, and these are choice specimens. I found 16 or 17 of them, mostly in the same area. Two or three came from another spot, over on the other side of the trail, that is also fairly reliable for these mushrooms.

The part of this forest I visit also has quite a few hemlocks, and I always take some time to thoroughly look in and around the hemlocks because sometimes there are Hypomyces lactifluorum – lobster mushrooms. This morning I found around two dozen of them, and they were mostly fresh and choice.

And here’s a shot of this morning’s bounty!