White Striped Shelf Fungus
Some particularly pretty pictures from another kingdom. I don’t, yet, know their names. Some are reputed to have medicinal values, some are supposed to be good eating, I hesitate to try as I know too little and that is too much (danger) when it comes to shrooms.
Click on each image to see the big picture.
If you know their identity or other fun facts about them please do leave comments.
Red Cup Fungus
White Shelf Fungus
Orange Shelf Fungus in Orange Town in Orange County
Blue Fungus
Outdoors: 72°F/43°F Sunny
Tiny Cottage: 70°F/67°F
Daily Spark: The regular occurence of fungi was same-mold, same-mold. -WillJ
Walter Jeffries Tinker, Tailor… A bit eclectic & a tad eccentric, polymath, quantum mechanic & Farmer. Also lucky at cards.
Your red cup fungus looks like a sarcoscypha.
I have eaten raw the orange and red species in France, but they didn’t add much taste to the salad, only colors. The ones in the picture look too old to be edible, and I don’t know if the American species are edible.
I think the fungus you labelled ‘Blue Fungus’ is a turkey tail. I am no expert but from what I have read it is not tasty but is reputed to be a treatment for breast cancer when drunk as a tea infusion.
See http://fungi.com/
Paul Stamets (Mycelium Running etc) books are well worth reading if you can get them from your local library. One idea of his I’d like to try one day is to grow and sell gourmet mushrooms on straw and feed the spent spawn to the pigs.
Wow my Captcha challenge is extra hard today. Either they are getting harder or I am turning into a spambot!
Nope, don’t know ’em. (That blue one does kinda look like a turkey tail, but then again it doesn’t.) I’ve taken a decent amount of mycology and I still wouldn’t eat anything unless I was with an experienced mushroom hunter, from that area, who’d eaten that mushroom before! Clearly you know this, preaching to the choir here….
It’s not that mushrooms are necessarily something to be avoided, just that they can be highly local and it takes some apprenticing *in that area* before attempting to use wild ones. There’s a mushroom that grows in rice straw that is a pretty significant protein item in SE Asia (paddy straw mushroom)– that looks exactly like death caps, which live in North America but not in SE Asia. It’s not uncommon for Laotian & Vietnamese immigrants to eat death caps by accident because of that similarity. : (