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Column: Mushroom season has arrived

My neighbour came by to tell me about a great crop of big beautiful mushrooms in his yard. Are they good to eat? I walked over to have a look. They were indeed beautiful! A dozen or so big white mushrooms were scattered under an old white pine.
180914_VM_bush_mushrooms
This is Russula brevipes. It’s abundant, but not edible.
My neighbour came by to tell me about a great crop of big beautiful mushrooms in his yard. Are they good to eat? I walked over to have a look.

They were indeed beautiful! A dozen or so big white mushrooms were scattered under an old white pine. I told him I did not know the mushroom, but I would take a few home to attempt to identify them. Emphasis on the attempt.

Once I found the spore colour, it would likely take four hours of searching mushroom books with only a 10-per-cent chance of success.

At home, I cut off the top one of the samples, placed it on a sheet of white paper and covered it with a bowl. Overnight, spores would drop from the gills onto the paper in enough quantity to be seen. Hopefully.

The next morning, a lovely circle of buff-coloured spores awaited me. Allan and I sat down with a stack of books to see what we could find. The first book seemed to have the answer.

This mushroom was Lepista irina and it is edible. I asked Allan if he wanted to give it a try. He frowned and asked what happened to our policy of checking at least five references and waiting to find it again next year with the five-book test again?

OK, we kept looking. He took the shortcut by looking up the species name rather than going through the labourious dichotomous key system. Second book looks good. Third book did not have it listed. Allan looked it up online. Yikes! Lepista irina looked totally different on the Rogers Mushroom site.

At last, I got out my big brown mushroom book and started again. The dichotomous key asks a series of two questions, each leading to another question, over and over again until — usually —it comes to a dead end.

From the beginning: Is the spore print white to buff, yellow, yellow-orange, lilac tinted or some other colour?

“Buff” took me to the next set: Does the mushroom have a universal veil forming a volva at the base and perhaps leaving patchy remnants on the cap? Or, not. I followed not. This led to another, then another for the next hour.

Maybe it was Lepista irina and maybe not. I started over.

After the second hour, I firmly declared the mushroom was not edible. And if I was wrong, who would care? The “not edible” proclamation has a 100-per-cent rate of nobody getting sick.

I will be giving two lectures on the last weekend of September on appreciating the wild mushroom. On Saturday, it will be in the forest north of Markstay, and in Sudbury on Sunday.

Drop a line for more info to [email protected] or call 705-853-1571.

Viki Mather has been commenting for Northern Life on the natural world and life in Greater Sudbury since the spring of 1984.

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