A day spent at Knepp today, and it’s mushroom season. I had my mushroom knife with me. I think you know by now that I’m curious about the little buggers. Well, Knepp was the right place to satisfy that curiosity further.
I’ve been shrooming for years now and I rarely eat any of the ones I pick. Coming into it later in life I knew I had to set careful parameters so I didn’t go green and fall over all weird. After all that happened to Babar the Elephant’s dad:
That image in a treasured storybook wrought havoc with my childish trust of mushrooms. I decided to overcome my long held quiet phobia while in my early thirties in the only real way to conquer fear – learning about it properly. Knowledge. If you know something’s true name, you have more power over it.
The illustrator above has used Amanita Muscaria – (Fly Agaric) – one of the more interesting and hard to mistake varieties of psychotropic mushroom. The Christmas mushroom. The ancient Soma mushroom. The reindeer hallucinogen. The Viking berserker. Dry them out first I’m told or you’ll end up feeling like that elephant. You’re better off drinking the urine of someone who has built a tolerance, aye, like they used to back before those pesky Romans took all the fun away. You might go to hospital, you might have Adventures in Wonderland. Either it’ll be the caterpillar or the catheter. I’ve found 1 so far since I made my rules, so I’ve never experimented, and I’m not sure when would be the right time with that one… I’m not in the mycology game for the psychedelics, although I don’t by any means rule them out in the right context. But they’re beautiful and weird. Like us!
I have a 3 strike rule. Even if the thing is unmistakable. I need to find it, check it, be sure of my identification, get a second opinion, then on another day I need to do that all again somewhere else. The third time I’m allowed to carefully eat the one I find if I know it’s edible. The sheer variety of the damn things though – it means that I’ve been doing this for a decade and only a very few things are on the safe list and they are largely both unmistakable and quite common: Chicken of the woods – nom. Hedgehogs. Birch polypore – for weird tea only as the damn things are everywhere. And shaggy inkcaps – (though they deliquesce very fast when picked). Next time I find a cep I can have it. Ditto fairy rings. Ditto Beefsteak. So after over a decade I’m on the brink of better meals.
Today I kind of added field mushrooms to the second strike list although I’m still not 100% certain and will need to study my photos against the book as I haven’t got a positive on their exact name. I just know what they are not and I suspect they are good. There were tons of them in the field and they looked great. A basket would have yielded a tasty feast if I was allowed the things, but there nothing unusual there – they taste just like the ones we just call mushrooms. Perhaps next time though as things taste nicer if you foraged them yourself.
I’m getting closer to a few other species too. My exact boletus knowledge is sketchy but I’m pretty clear on which to avoid. I’ve never found one that isn’t absolutely swarmed by time I discover it. They’re popular with the insect community. They’re big but get nasty fast.
Also I’m still extremely cautious. The bad ones – the really bad ones – they only need a tiny tiny amount to make you inevitably die of total organ failure. This is why it is a pleasant hobby to acquire. If all mushrooms were edible and it was easy to tell which was which, most of us would never see any mushrooms in the wild ever as there would be armies of people with baskets swarming the hills at this time of year, getting out the house before Good Morning Britain was even finished in order to obliviously eat them walking, fighting one another to shove them into their drooling gaping faces like pacmans gobbling dots. The “you might die” thing helps limit the boundless locust potential for human greed. In this small department. For the rest of nature we are still consuming to destruction as fast as we possibly can, leaving nothing but plastic and death… Although thinking about it, some fish are poisonous and we have still turned the seas to poisonous blood. Who knows? Maybe everyone read Babar the elephant at 6.
Mushies gave a focus to a lovely walk. Like a nice game of golf where you could win a tasty meal or you could get strangled to death. We went to a lovely old ruined castle and lay on the ground. We covered a good few miles walking. There were turtle doves. And there were lots and lots of lovely weird extruding fruiting bodies of huge underground mycelium networks enabling communication between plants and trees in exchange for a share of nutrients.
I was a bit disappointed to find none of my safe list but I’ve bumped a few nice ones up to second strike.
Driving home, Lou and I both remembered this rather odd advert for British Mushrooms. I certainly made room today. I’m pretty sure I found my first Panther Cap, but it was so beautiful I didn’t want to cut it to make a full examination. It was clearly loved by the owners of the woodpile. I let it be. They are even more interestingly toxic than the Fly Agaric. It could’ve been a massive Blusher… I’m honestly not sure. Gorgeous huge big thing though:
AlBarclay 