Mushroom Monday - Rusty Winter Mushrooms

Here are a few straggler mushrooms I've found for this #mushroommonday before winter completely covers them in snow.

In the dark gray weather these little flammulina veluptides stood out with a nice orange color.

This shows them when they are ripe for harvest. These are a bit tricky mushrooms to forage as they often get dried out quickly from cold weather.

I tend to find them on trees with bark peeling off them growing out from in between the bark layer and the solid wood. Here are some just starting out. Note the velvety texture on the cap, one of their common name's is velvet foot because they have a plush sort of texture on their stems and caps.

I took a taste test of a tiny one, and it had a nice powerful mushroom taste. You can buy these at the store under the name enokitake or enoki. Their shape and color in stores is long, skinny and white almost like a noodle because farmers grow them in high Co2 environments. Out in the wild they get orange and have a more firm texture. If you don't harvest them soon enough in the wild their stems get too tough to eat and you end up with mostly just the caps to eat.

Here is late straggler mushroom for the season. It has turned rusty red with age and is fairly large.

I flipped it over to try and identify it and I see some noticeable features. The rough stem and ring on the stem near the cap along with the symmetrical gills point to armillaria aka honey mushroom. There are a few different species of armillaria but I'm guessing this is an old Armillaria mellea but you never can tell with such old specimens like this.

Now for some UFOs (unidentified fungal organisms). At first glance I thought they were old flammulina veluptides (winter mushrooms).

On closer review their size was much larger than winter mushrooms and their stems were quite different.

The gills looked quite different from winter mushrooms.

I finally found some younger specimens of these unidentified mushrooms. It seems they resemble brick red caps (Hypholoma lateritium) more than winter mushrooms. One can never be sure with older mushroom specimens.

Soon all that will be left for me to find in the forest will be polypores like this trametes versicolor. At least you can get some medicinal properties from these if you boil them in tea it will add vitamin d and other cancer killing compounds to the tea. You can also make alcoholic tinctures with these to extract the medicinal properties but this takes a long process. I usually just buy the tincture from fungi perfecti to be sure I get the most potent extract. One day I'll go through the full process of turning these into tincture as these things are all around me.

That's all for now, thanks for looking :-)