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!
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.