I have always thought mushrooms and lichen were worthy of interest, but who knew they were worthy of obsession?
Turns out, we have at least 50 different kinds of mushroom in our field and at its edges, so we thought we'd try to document and share them with you, you know, naturalist style. Right now, we only have 1 mushroom field guide, the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms, and, sadly, it is inadequate. We could only identify 3 out of 50 of our fungi with certainty using this text: the tiny Velvet-Cap Marasmius, the gelatinous Beefsteak Polypore and the freakish and very stinky Stinky Squid.
We will be ordering Mushrooms Demystified this week and hope it can help us better determine edibility. I mean, there's one called the Fried Chicken mushroom, and it looks like some we have growing near the future chicken coop, which would be, you know, funny as well as fun to eat...but, you know, not so funny if we ate it and died. For all we know these could be brand new Dirty Trichs masquerading as Fried Chickens and that would be a dirty trick indeed.
