Prior to this summer, the most excited I ever got about mushrooms was when John Witherspoon rocked his mushroom shirt in the movie Boomerang with Eddie Murphy. I feel a similar sense of enthusiasm when walking through the yard of our century home, pointing out mushrooms here, there, and everywhere! So many mushrooms. Best of all, I don’t recognize a single one of them. So now, in addition to bird watching, I’m a mushroom watcher.
The first great mushroom we found was firmly affixed to a tree stump. It’s a shelf type mushroom and has garnered a bit of interest from our pups. Fortunately, they seem more interested in keeping it company than using it as a chew toy. It seems like a possible Turkey-tail but it’s bigger and doesn’t have any overlapping growths.
In a moist and mossy area of the yard we have a group of psychedelic coloured mushrooms that made an appearance mid summer. Their wild colors are unlike any fungus I’ve ever seen in the real world. Then, we got a new crop of large and colourful mushrooms that seem to like a warmer area of the yard. They were a bit different with the mossy area producing taller ‘shrooms than in the sunny area which were more round (I think. Photos, please).
These button looking mushrooms popped up after a heavy rain in early September. They look very much like what I buy in store—I’m excited to find out what they are.
This mushroom looked similar to the button-type mushrooms until I got closer to the ground and could see that it was more bulbous on the bottom. It reminded me of the bottom of a bulb of garlic. Also, I discovered it under the bough of an evergreen branch in a fully shaded area and the button-type were obviously exposed to more sunshine.
A stump produced a mushroom after a heavy rain as well. It seemed to look like what my white button mushrooms from the store look like when I forget about them in the back of fridge drawer—wrinkly and rough. It was alive and well though.
These fungi are plentiful on top of a fallen tree in an old graveyard near our house. They look like babies of the big guy above!
There’s too many things on my list to research, so I’ll be saving these photos for identification over the winter. If you have an idea what these mushrooms are, let me know in the comments!
Now & When 