I love seeing these groups pop up everywhere! They are such a fantastic resource to help prevent deadly mistakes, but also great for learning more about the incredible variety of mushrooms all around us, many of which are too tiny to casually notice but contain such beauty. As a kid I would hunt morels with my grandpa and that probably inspired me to keep my eyes open. Several years ago I had some huge mushrooms pop up in my yard, and after getting a positive ID I fried them up and ate them. Sometimes you just get lucky with what the squirrels drag into your yard.

Now I’ve finally taken the next step to growing my own, and yesterday transferred my first starts of oyster mushrooms to grain jars. I also managed to start some cremini spawn on boiled cardboard, and just giving it a little more time before transferring that to grain jars as well. Can’t wait to taste all the results!

  • CuriousOtterMEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    Hey, welcome! I’m glad you noticed the new community :)

    That’s sounds like a wonderful experience to share with your grandpa! Could you share how you were able to positively identify the mushrooms? I’d love to find resources to help this community get started!

    • ShdwdrgnOPEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      In this case I used the help of a reddit community, but I also did a lot of checking online. For my area, hawk’s wing is extremely common, and every photo I found that looked like my mushroom pointed to this species. The problem was, hawk’s wing has teeth and my mushrooms have gills. When I thought I had the answer, I posted it on reddit and a number of people confirmed what I was pointing out. And luckily there are no look-alikes so at worst it would have had a bitter taste. In my case it was delicious.

      What’s really driving me nuts is I can’t find anywhere that I wrote down the actual species, and I can’t seem to find any trace of it now. I’m just hoping some come up again this year, I’m readying to grab some mycelium samples and start growing some in the house. I’ll need a lot of space though, the caps on these guys grew over 8" across.

    • ShdwdrgnOPEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      OK I feel a bit dirty now, but I went and checked my reddit history and found the answer… My mushroom is Chlorophyllum Rhacodes.

      Also, it looks like I collected quite a bit of info from mushroomexpert.com and urbanmushrooms.com. Apparently my mistake this time was just searching for mushrooms by my State name.

      • CuriousOtterMEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        Wow those are giant, 8 inches is incredible!! I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a large mushroom myself, although I’m very much a novice.

        Also, I’m going to go ahead and add these links to the sidebar. I’m sure they can help community source some IDs. Thank you!

        • ShdwdrgnOPEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          Ah I hadn’t noticed community sidebars yet, I’m still getting used to Lemmy like most other here. Those two sites should be great references for most people, although of course there’s so many differences that even that’s not enough for some species. Can you also add a blurb about poisonous look-alike species?

          Yeah I was amazed the first year these things popped up in the yard. Looks like from my initial query I was seeing some over 220mm or about 8.5" across. When the cap starts to flatten out they really spread!

          • CuriousOtterMEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            Certainly, I’ll go ahead and add that!

            Just curious but would you be interested in helping moderate the sub? I’d appreciate it if you’re interested.

            • ShdwdrgnOPEnglish
              2·
              2 years ago

              I’m flattered that you asked, but I already can’t keep up with my own projects as it is. :-( I already thought about creating some new communities on Lemmy, then questioned my sanity.