Tagged With: Fungi

Mushrooms

Mushrooms

Mushrooms

Do you like mushrooms? Cathy and I both do. Dorothy isn’t a fan so I have to leave them out (or cook them separately) when she is home. Now that she’s back at school, I’m buying them in bulk again. Great Wall Supermarket has big bags of these mushrooms and they go pretty well with just about everything I cook. Tonight that was hamburgers with mushroom gravy. What I really love are porcini (a.k.a. cep, Boletus edulis), which have such a wonderful, earthy flavour. Bought dried in very small packets they are convenient but quite expensive. I really should buy them a pound or two at a time, which brings the price per ounce down quite a bit. I don’t think I’m ready to buy a 25 pound bag, though. Walmart has one listed for $1,048.32. I don’t think so. Sorry.

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Mushrooms

Mushrooms

Mushrooms

It’s mushroom season in our back yard. There were a total of five maple trees running in a line through our back yard when we bought the house. One of them, a silver maple (Acer saccharinum) was clearly large enough to be older than the house but the others, I’m pretty sure, were planted about the time the house was built. Three of the five are gone, now. One came down in a storm and I preemptively took two more down, including the largest one, to prevent the same thing happening and it falling on the house. Each year since then, mushrooms appear early in the fall and I have to assume they are living on what remains of the roots of those trees. They appear, flourish, and then turn to mush in about a week. When they become mush, they appear to be devoured by the grubs of some insect or other. It’s pretty gross, actually, but all part of the grand panoply of life.

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I’m A Fungi

Bracket Fungi

Bracket Fungi

A basidiomycete walks into a bar but the bartender tells him he’ll have to leave. He says, “But I’m a fungi!” I needed to get out of my office today so I took my camera and went out into the woods next to my building. There are a few snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) starting to bloom along the edge of the woods, which is encouraging. I also came across the carcass of a deer. There wasn’t a lot left except bones and it explained the presence of so many turkey vultures circling over head. This bit of fungus caught my eye, because of the variations of color. Very pretty, in a decaying sort of way. The ground is very wet and I really need some Wellington boots when it’s like this. I managed to stay mostly dry, though.

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Mushrooms

Mushrooms

Mushrooms

It’s that time of year again. The roots of the trees that used to be in our back yard are home to a few varieties of fungus. This time of year, they send up their fruiting bodies and spread their spores to the wind. The most plentiful are these soft brown mushrooms. They come up and are there for a day or two and then turn to mush. Insects of one kind or another lay their eggs in them and the larvae eat the rotting mushrooms. They’re actually pretty gross when in that state, but right now they are sort of pretty.

A mushroom walks into a bar. The bartender says, “We don’t serve mushrooms here.” The mushroom replies, “But I’m a fungi!”

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