Fungi Friday - On the Way to a Haircut

It's a day late for this #fungifriday but better late than never.

I took a two mile walk to get a haircut and along the way loads of mushrooms were growing in people's yards and along the sidewalk. The first sight were these Agaricus mushrooms.

The slightly reddish top and shape reminded me of reddening lepiota a decent edible mushroom.

But I did a quick test to see if it stained red... Sadly its stained yellow indicating a toxic lookalike of the yellow bruiser. Agaricus xanthodermus is responsible for poisonong lots of people as it looks like field mushroom or horse mushroom as well as Reddening lepoita. So its always good to check the gill color and check for staining.

Loads of mica caps are out along with many other ink caps. These were one of the first mushrooms I ever harvested in boy scouts as a kid.

They are a type of ink cap and eventually rot into black ooze. Sadly they are edible but not very tasty and you can only boil them to keep them from turning into slimy goo. Plus like all ink caps if you eat them and drink alcohol later you will have a bad reaction due to compounds in the ink cap that mix badly with alcohol.

Now for a strange new sight that I haven't seen in a while.

At first I thought they might be honey mushrooms but they lack a ring and don't look like ringless honey mushrooms.

Something about the roughish stem and gill pattern reminded me of the blewit family.

Also as they get older the caps get wonky looking. I suspect these might be field or spotted blewits. Not quite as easy to identify as wood blewits with the purple gills. I've never actually harvested any other type of blewit due to the ambiguity of the gill color.

That's all for now, and my haircut is done and it was fun seeing these guys out.