thanks for the info! Matt.

P.S. Because we have 2 dogs who appreciate cat food just as much as the wine cap spawn does, I had to put a short nuisance fence around the chips which kept them out of there all summer.

Every summer we pickle, salt cure, dry and freeze pounds of them to last the entire winter. I find many people are amazed at the skill, which is really nothing more than the gathering behavior humans have indulged in since our appearance on the planet. But I digress.

It would be incredibly cool to grow mushrooms, and after I master basic veggies, I may just give it a try.

http://agricultureguide.org/

Well, let me second Leslie’s welcome to the world of mushrooming. There certainly is always something to see, find, learn in this “Fifth Kingdom”.

I thought about your question yesterday as I was driving to the Beaverkill in the Catskills where I went fishing. It is intriguing, and if I had not been a teacher would simple have said, “Gee, I don’t know what effect periodic flooding has on fungal life”, but my students taught me that a ((n) educated?) guess was much much more satisfying than the raw unadorned truth, so here goes. An invention of sorts, a hypothesis for Bob, on the way to the river…

My guess is that rapid changes in environmental conditions, such as periodic flooding, will probably eradicate a wide range of fungi not adapted to the extremes, but facilitate, what might be called ‘weed fungi’, those able to live in a wide variety of habitats.. Specifically, I think you might see many more saprophytes, those that feed on dead leaves and wood, like Psathyrella and Coprinus (which flourish in the rich manure laded humus of our garden in spite of the flooding of the manure piles (at the Horse farm) and the “100 year floods” that have ravished our flood-plain garden plot three times in the past decade.

I am sure that your mushroom experts at the local forays will have great information on what to expect down south.

My guess though is that the fungi most facilitated by periodic flooding will be the filamentous and mold- like fungi which will cause an almost invisible ‘soft’ rot. These ‘lower fungi’ do not form mushrooms, but often make zillions of spores or simple break apart into small segments able to reproduce on their own in short, non-sexual cycles. Like all fungi, however, they digest their food source outside of their cell walls by enzymatic decay.

These fungi have become more widely publicized since the flooding in New Orleans, but archeologists have been keenly aware of the damage caused by periodic soaking and drying cycles for years. Under these conditions the carbonaceous artifacts they seek will rot away much faster than if kept in either a continually soaked, or dry state..

But, having said all of that, I remember the year that Leslie and I collected morels by the basket in a depression that in previous years had been a stream bed flowing through the abandoned apple orchard. They appeared there just once, in that dry spring.

As she said, there is always SOMETHING interesting, and in this case it was spectacularly edible.

Good question. Good Luck,

Bill

Welcome to the blog – and to mycology!

Your yard sounds pretty challenging, but where there is water there are fungi, so there’s bound to be SOMETHING interesting, even if it isn’t edible.

I’ve alerted Bill to your comment and am sure he’ll respond before long. When it came in he’d “gone fishing,” literally, and there’s nothing more important than that.

In the meantime, if you haven’t read his other mushroom posts, you might enjoy them too. Just use the search button for “Bakaitis” and it should pull them up.

I am sure that you are not alone in fearing both the collecting and consuming of wild mushrooms. This is a very healthy fear as some are toxic and can make you sick to your stomach and a few can cause death. Some, of course, are quite delicious and eagerly sought for the table, but most, it is fair to say, are what the French would call ‘non -comestible’; non edible for various reasons.

There are thousands of species of fungi around, and it is also fair to say that no one knows them all. The safe way to move amongst them all is to move slowly, get to know one or two a season, perhaps watching them for a year or two before commiting them to the test of your own biology. Always check them out in reliable field guides (plural as the opinion of various authors differ and the state of knowledge does change.) Join one of the local Mycological Clubs and go out on walks with them.

In some ways it is similar to bird watching. Many of us can’t distinguish among many sparrows and certainly not the appropriatly named confusing fall warblers, but we all can tell a Crow from a Robin. So too with mushrooms; some are difficukt to distinguish, some are quite easy. Start with the easy ones and if you really get interested you can spend a lifetime attempting to know them all.

Most casual mushroomers limit their collections to a dozen or so easily identified species. Some of these have been featured in previous blogs. Stropharia rugosoannulata is well marked and once you become comfortable with the color variation of the fading cap you won’t mistake it for anything else. It will become as familiar to you as that Robin that hops across your lawn.

Have fun collecting tis season,

Bill Bakaitis

Fantastic photos. I will have to link to this post soon. I’m sure more people will appreciate the information.
Shirley Bovshow