Blog - mushrooms

The Monthly Mushroom: Oyster Mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus)

by Jasper Sharp, 11 April, 2018, 0 comments

Looking for fungi in the wild is one thing, but if you really want to get to know your mushrooms, what better way than to grow your own? With growing kits for a good number of different varieties available from various shops or online sources, it is not quite the dauntingly complex process you might think (see final image below). By far the easiest to cultivate at home are Oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus sp.), which thrive on a variety of substrates. Paul Stamets’ seminal Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World (2005) contains photos of them thriving on straw, corncobs, human hair, wood chips, old clothing and even a straw-stuffed armchair. The most common of the “exotic” types to start making their way into our supermarkets over the past couple of decades, the Oyster mushroom owes its name more to its shape than its delicate taste and texture. Read more...

The Monthly Mushroom: The Egghead Mottlegill (Panaeolus semiovatus)

by Jasper Sharp, 25 March, 2018, 0 comments

Paul Stamets in his mycological bible Mycelium Running writes that “Mushrooms can be placed in 4 basic categories: saprophytic, parasitic, mycorrhizal, and endophytic, depending upon how they nourish themselves,” pointing out that many deploy a mixture of all these strategies. The woodlands blog has featured the mycorrhizal types such as the Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria) that derive their energy by forming mutually-beneficial relationships through extending the root systems of trees and other plants. Both parasitic and endophytic types sustain themselves by living on or within other organisms, be they plant, animal or whatever, the former to the detriment of its host, the latter harmless and sometimes even beneficial. The pathogenic Honey Fungus (Armillariam sp.) is a good example of a parasitic type, while the relationship between Tar Spots and the leaves of the sycamores and acers that they appear on is best described as endophytic. Read more...

The Monthly Mushroom: Candlesnuff Fungus (Xylaria hypoxylon)

by Jasper Sharp, 20 February, 2018, 1 comments

February isn’t, generally speaking, the most conducive time of year to go roaming the woods or immerse yourself in the great outdoors. With its cold rains, claggy mud, bare trees, muted colours and short daylight hours, it is a month marked by dormancy for many, although still one in which the early green shoots and nascent buds are at least appearing to signal some sort of an end to another grey and dreary English winter. With the fleshier varieties of fungi, much of the dramatic flushes of just a few months ago have long died and rotted back into their substrates. However, there are a few more durable species that persist around the year, although generally ones that tend to be overlooked because they are so ubiquitous, inedible, and, at first glance at least, not particularly interesting. Read more...

The Monthly Mushroom : Happy New Ear! (Auricularia auricula-judae)

by Jasper Sharp, 5 January, 2018, 1 comments

One can only imagine what our ancient forebears must have thought when they first came across the fleshy, shell-like flaps of Auricularia auricula-judae protruding grotesquely from forest branches. We do know, however, that by the time of Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, or a Naturall Historie in Ten Centuries (1627), this gelatinous fungal specimen had already acquired its own name and mythology. He described it as “an excrescence, called jew’s-ear, that groweth upon the roots, and the lower parts of the bodies of trees, especially of Elder and Ashes. It hath a strange propertie: for in warm weather it swelleth and openeth extremely. It is not green, but of a duskie brown colour.” Read more...

The Monthly Mushroom: Enoki in the UK – The Velvet Shank

by Jasper Sharp, 11 December, 2017, 0 comments

Mushrooms come in many shapes, colours and sizes, that much we all know. It is these aspects that provide really the only way for the amateur mycologist, who doesn’t have access to sophisticated DNA sequencing techniques or microscopes to look at the tiny differentiating details of the spores, to go about the troublesome business of identifying their finds. However, neophytes embarking on their first steps into the fascinating world of mycology quickly discover two things. The first is that the forms of the fungal fruiting bodies are never fixed. They begin initially when the hyphal cells first fuse to form a tiny primordium, described poetically by Eugenia Bone in Mycophilia as “a dense little nubbin of preformed mushroom that (in many cases) contains all its cells”. Read more...

The Monthly Mushroom : Fly Agaric

by Jasper Sharp, 3 November, 2017, 2 comments

We find them growing in fields, on parks, lawns, even between our toes, but most of us commonly associate fungi with woodland habitats. At this time of year, our forests are positively bulging with them. Far from the view of their mushroom and toadstool fruiting bodies, their mycelial root system of thread-like hyphae are crucial for breaking down fallen leaf litter and decaying dead wood, returning once living matter to the soil. Some, like the Armillaria or Honey Fungus, are less beneficial, parasitising living trees, stunting their growth and even killing them outright. Others however, play a much more crucial role in our woodland ecosystems. These are the mycorrhizal species. The term mycorrhiza comes from the Greek words “mykos” for fungus and “rhiza” for root, and describes the types of fungi that form symbiotic relationships with plants. Those that penetrate plant root cells are called endomycorrhizal or arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Read more...

The Monthly Mushroom – The Shaggy Inkcap

by Jasper Sharp, 1 October, 2017, 3 comments

As any seasoned mycologist will tell you, there’s much more to mushroom hunting than mere foraging. The sheer beauty of their manifold shapes, colours and patterning makes many specimens ideal photographic subjects. Then there is the joy of learning how fungi are situated within a broader ecosystem, with different specimens associated with different plants, trees and microhabitats. There is also the satisfaction of positive identification and the excitement that you may have stumbled across a rare specimen in a place they’ve not been spotted before, and of being an active member of a community contributing to this still obscure knowledge base (if you wish to get more involved in this aspect, the British Mycological Society have both a website and a lively Facebook discussion group (where people post their pics). Read more...

The Monthly Mushroom – Chicken of the Woods

by Jasper Sharp, 7 September, 2017, 3 comments

It might not be much to look at, but Laetiporus sulphureus sure tastes good on a plate. A relatively common adornment to many a tree in Summer and early Autumn, the legendary Chicken of the Woods is one of the tastiest edible mushrooms found in the UK, and also one of the most highly prized: as the name suggests, it has the taste and texture of chicken, and its firm flesh makes an ideal substitute in stews, stroganoffs, curries, pilaffs and other meat dishes. Easily overlooked by those not in the know, it is instantly recognisable to the gourmet fungi forager, and bares little resemblance to other poultry-named fungi like the Turkey Tail (Trametes versicolor) or the Hen of the Woods (Grifola frondosa), the Japanese delicacy known as maitake. It is a bracket fungus that grows in large clusters of undulating fan-shaped shelves, the colour ranging from bright yellow to orange on its topside (hence the alternate common name Sulphur Shelf), with its yellowish underside pitted with pores from which it releases its spores and a firm white fleshy interior. Read more...

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