27th Street

People who know I forage for mushrooms almost always comment about the possibility of accidentally eating poisonous mushrooms and the impossibility of identifying everything out there. In fact, many if not most of the mushrooms I see in the woods I can’t identify. I can identify a relatively small number of tasty edibles very well though, and a handful of the nasties as well.  The rule is to never eat a mushroom you cannot identify accurately 100%.

Fortunately, some of the best edibles are easy to identify. For instance, once you’ve handled a hedgehog mushroom – Hydnum repandum or Hydnum umbilitcatum – and see the tell-tale spines, feel the texture, see the colours, you won’t have difficulty identifying those again. At first, you may just know you’ve found a hedgehog. Later, you’ll realize there are two types, a smaller one with a belly button type indentation on the cap (umbilicatum) or a bigger one with no belly button. The colours are a little different. I find the umbilicatum usually under conifers and the repandum in mixed hardwoods. Both are delicious.

So, how many mushrooms do you really need to identify? Let’s go by season. Morels are a good start. If you find them, you’ll want to harvest them because they are so delicious. They have a couple lookalikes – false morels – but they are easy to distinguish. Then we see the a spring oyster mushroom in our area – Pleurotus populinus.  They look like the oyster mushroom s you buy in the grocery store. They have a particular smell and texture – and they are the only mushrooms that look suspiciously like grocery store oysters that grow on dead trees in Ontario in June.

Later, we have chanterelles, a variety of boletes, and then hedgehogs and lobsters (the weird parasite, Hypomyces lactifluorum), honey mushrooms into the fall and so on. My point is that you don’t have to learn to identify hundreds of species to forage safely and successfully. You just have to know a bunch of key fungi very well. I started with chanterelles. My brother showed me some in the forest. I picked a few, felt them, saw them at different stages of development, picked them again on my own, and soon, I was very confident I would not be fooled by any lookalike.