No Rain For Weeks... But LOTS of Mushrooms!

[Music] everyone a mad apparent that I'm spending some time outside on this very very dry and very very hot day so I live we haven't had a steady rainfall in probably two weeks if not longer than that so everything is looking thirsty the plants the mushrooms the trees even I'm really thirsty it's been in the steady 80s and even in the low 90s for late September so these conditions that I just described very dry and very hot they're not always conducive to a very successful mushroom hunt because mushrooms really respond well to water the majority of a mushroom fruiting body is water weight and so it takes a lot of water in order for the mycelium to create an aboveground fruiting structure and so even though it's been dry and even though it's been hot that doesn't mean we're not likely to find any mushrooms so what I want to do in this video is take you around my local woods and show you that as long as we're looking hard enough we can still find mushrooms in these kinds of conditions so let's go see which ones we can find so I'm super pumped to find this one right here on a rather dry day this is harissa Marin ACS the lion's mane mushroom choice edible mushroom and a medicinal mushroom now this one kind of looks like it's on its way out you know it's orangish brownish looks like it's ready for Halloween whenever you find it fresh it's going to be pure white and as it gets older it starts to discolor a little bit now this doesn't mean that it's bad I could probably remove some of these darkened spines right here and it's probably still going to be very nice and tender inside I don't see any mold overgrowth I don't detect any smells when I smell it and so it still looks pretty good and something to bring it home trim it up and see if I can still render this thing edible but you typically find this in oak beech forest summer months through fall it's not the easiest mushroom to find in my opinion but whenever you do find it consider yourself lucky kind of tastes like seafood but what I really really like about it I really like to harvest this mushroom I like to make medicine out of lion's mane when you look at the research on it I think you'll be quite amazed this one's different than some of the other medicinal fungi out there because this one seems to have direct neurological benefits there a great study showing that this may help to treat Alzheimer's disease dementia cognitive impairment depression even anxiety and anxiety disorders are the most common mental disorders in the United States of the 40 million American the age of 18 have some form of anxiety disorder that's about 18 percent of the US population and there are specific compounds in here known as heresy knowns and Aaron a scenes found within the fruiting body and also in the mycelium that seem to stimulate nerve growth factor synthesis which is responsible for the growth or repair and the maintenance of neurons so I really like hair Samarin a seus i really like to eat it I like to make medicine out of it and last year when I did make medicine out of it you have to harvest a whole lot of it in order to make just eight ounces of tincture it's I made a dual extraction out of it and it produced this beautiful golden champagne like color and even the tincture kind of had bubbles and kind of reminded me of champagne with kind of a mushrooming paste to it but I really enjoyed that one you have to discipline yourself not to eat them all whenever you do harvest it because we're gonna make medicine you need five six seven eight different specimens in order to make at least eight ounces of tincture because there's a lot of water waiting here but hey not bad for a find of the day on a very dry day this is Harrison Marin ACS the classic lion's mane fungus so even on the driest of days you could still come across a nice fresh fruit and cluster of toxic jack-o'-lantern mushrooms OPA la de salud ends just like it's important to know the edible mushrooms it's also important to know the poisonous mushroom so this is definitely a poisonous mushroom you would get very very sick consuming it but there a couple ways to positively identify this one and not confuse it for some other edible mushrooms that might look like this notice that it's growing in association with wood and it's growing in very very dense clusters it's probably a dozen of them right here there's another small cluster over here and there's a cluster right behind me so that dense cluster associated with wood and this is a white rot fungus and so it's helping to break down the lignin in wood also notice that on the underside it has true plate like gills very well-defined gills you don't see that in one of its look-alikes which is the chanterelle mushroom now people looking for the edible chanterelle mushroom might confuse the chanterelle for this one right here and this is a poisonous mistake to make the chanterelles obviously are edible and they're very tasty those ones grow mycorrhizae out from the soil they don't always grow in dense clusters like this you might find them in a cluster of two three or four but not a dozen like this and a chanterelles don't have true gills they have these ridges or folds some people might confuse the edible chicken of the woods for this one as well now chicken of the woods tends to grow directly on wood and shelf like clusters at least the late the poorest all furious species late the poor Cincinnatus grows a little farther away from wood in many cases but both of those have pores on the underside not true gills like you will find in the toxic jack-o'-lantern mushroom now the toxicity within the jack-o'-lantern mushroom is associated with two compounds eluded s and allude an M these belong to the broader class of molecules known as illusions so these will make you very very sick if you consume them however it's interesting that some pharmaceutical companies are very interested in these compounds and in 2001 the FDA granted fast-track status to a semi synthetic derivative of elude and s they named it I row fall VIN and this drug has been studied for its role in treating breast cancer skin cancer colon cancer prostate cancer and pancreatic cancer with many successes with some failures along the way but it still remains in the testing phases so it's not widely available but just because it has these cytotoxic anti-cancer properties and also antibacterial properties antiviral properties doesn't mean that this is a medicinal mushroom this is definitely still a poisonous mushroom and you should not consume this mushroom you will get very very sick at extreme gastrointestinal distress you'll probably be vomiting for many many hours if not a few days but still a beautiful mushroom to appreciate in the woods this is the jack-o'-lantern o falada illusions now one of the benefits of exploring the woods in search of mushrooms is that you're going to expose yourself to a variety of new habitats that might not have a lot of mushrooms at that particular time of the year but you come back later you might find several other mushrooms especially choice edible mushrooms so I'm talking about is that I just discovered a very large stand of tulip poplar trees I didn't even know this one was here so I'll definitely come back here in April in May and look for my morel mushrooms because I have a lot of luck finding morel mushrooms associated with tulip poplar trees but right here we have a very underutilized and overlooked fungus it's very common and it's no surprise I'm finding it today because even if it's very dry you're very likely to find a lot of polypore fungi especially this one which is the turkey tail fungus remedies versicolor notice the multiple zones of varying colors these concentric on top and then on the bottom it's pure white and it's got a lot of pores in the bottom so this is a poly pore mushroom and keep those characteristics in mind you know it's flimsy it's got the varying concentric zones on top the white bottom this helps to differentiate the turkey tail from some of its look-alikes which might have a different color on the bottom they might have gills on the bottom they might have teeth on the bottom or they might not have concentric zones on top I really love this fungus because I use it as part of my medicinal strategy and I've been using it for a very long time it's interesting that most people just talk about chaga or reishi or lion's mane or the shitake mushroom is medicinal fungi but this one has a lot of research on it and it has been used for centuries in various cultures and you know in 2002 the journal clinical pharmacology stated that 30 clinical trials at that point in time had been conducted on the turkey tail fungus showing that ingestion of this mushroom has led to significant improvement in general health status and survival rate in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy there's a lot of research on its immunomodulatory properties its antiviral properties and on and on so if you do find this mushroom you know it's very common I courage you to see if you can incorporate this into your life one way or another just do more research on it see if it might work for you or maybe it won't work for you but it's been working for me and so even if I don't find any other mushroom out there I know that I can count on the turkey tail fungus Tomatoes versicolor so I guess I'm pretty excited to find this one because it is an edible mushroom this one is the platter full mushroom megak Libya rot money it's found spring summer through fall so it's very very common and it can be found throughout the whole growing season but it's not really a choice edible mushroom so nobody's really losing sleep over this one nobody's coveting their secret spots and not sharing the spots with other people but it is in edible mushroom as long as you cook it however it is not a beginner's mushroom because it's a guild mushroom that can seemingly grow terrestrially that you will find it grown from wood as well and it does have white gills but these white gills are very widely spaced and they're directly attached to the stock and this mushroom will drop a white spore print some people might confuse this mushroom for the deer mushroom which is in the genus pluteus but that one has pinkish gills at least a maturity and it usually has free gills that are not directly attached to the stem but this is not really a choice edible mushroom even though it is an edible mushroom not a beginner's mushrooms I'm just gonna pass this one by it's got some bugs in it as well it smells all right smells very much for me I've eaten it only on a few occasions and I did enjoy those occasions but I'm gonna leave this one behind because you know there's probably some other mushrooms that I can talk about so hey mega Colombia rod Monty the platter full mushroom so even on very dry days you can still spot signs of fungal activity and in fact this thing right here you could see this all year round even in the wintertime even with four feet of snow in the ground you could still tell that this fungus is within the street because what I'm looking at right now or the rhizome or so the honey mushroom the our malaria gene is these black shoestring like strands and rhizome or essentially hyphy that are outside of the tree and they're involved in nutrient transport now not all fungi produce these structures especially these black ones whenever I see it the honey mushroom is here now I don't see the fruiting bodies but if I come back maybe in a couple weeks whenever there's a lot of rain I might see the mushroom fruiting bodies so this is the honey mushroom our malaria I'm also seeing associated with the breakdown of this trace of puff balls now it's very hard to see from this angle but they're two little tiny puff balls right here these are the pear-shaped puff balls like Oh paired on pirate for me there's some older ones around here and you can see them depositing their spores right here so whenever the rain comes down and hits it that's how they're able to spore you late and I guess it's getting all over my camera right now someone have to rub that off I like eating puff balls I like eating them when they're fresh but not when they're spent like this because you might get sick it just wouldn't make for a good meal to eat already spent puff balls but whenever they're fresh they're plump and when you cut them in half they're going to be pure white inside you want to make sure that it is not a poison pigskin puff ball that one will be creamish and I'll turn purplish then blackish but with the edible puff ball like a parrot on pirate for me the pear-shaped puff ball you cut it in half it'll be pure white inside and it will turn yellowish with age and then greenish or brownish because those are the colors of the spores so like a parrot on pirate for me the pear-shaped puff ball in the honey mushroom to fungi associated with the breakdown of this dead tree alright so we have a great specimen to end on because finally after all these hours of searching even though it's been really dry we're finally seeing a mycorrhizal fungus this is great because all those other mushrooms we talked about were so see with a breakdown of wood whether they were saprophytic mushrooms or parasitic mushrooms but the mycorrhizal fungi that wants to come up out of the forest floor and associated with the living trees and this one is specifically associated with living oak trees and this one is an Amanita mushroom this is Amanita lavendula or Amanita Lavin doula this is definitely not an edible mushroom so do not consume this mushroom you typically find it summer through fall it's a medium to smaller sized mushroom you don't see it growing to be very big like some of the other amanina mushrooms but like many emanating mushrooms and has patches on the cap and these ones are grayish or lavender colored it's got a partial veil around the stock and it has an enlarged base and I'm really excited to find it because we haven't had rain in two weeks it's not longer than that it's been really really warm and I didn't see any other mycorrhizal fungi except maybe a rare rustle or two in these woods but now I'm finding an Amanita mushroom and so if I continue looking I might see some other mycorrhizal mushrooms but this just goes to show that even if it's been dry you can still find mushrooms of all kinds and encourage you to get out there and look for mushrooms and don't be turned off just because it's been dried just because it's been really hot you can still get out have a good time if nothing else you'll explore new habitats and find trees associated with mushrooms that you might come back to later in the year like this tulip poplar trees that we talked about earlier thanks for watching this video happy dry conditions Russian you

Channel: Learn Your Land

Views: 42,641

Keywords: Adam Haritan, Learn Your Land, Mushroom, Mushrooms, Fungi, Fungus, Spore, Shroom, Foraging, Mushroom Hunting, Hunting, Gardening, Outdoors, Nature, Wild Edibles, Mycology, Paul Stamets, Sam Thayer, Wild Food, Permaculture, Survival, Prepping, Primitive Skills, Mycelium, Health, Nutrition, Medicinal Mushroom, Poisonous Mushroom, God, Universe, Daniel Vitalis, Rewilding, Paleo

Id: j8dqyJoEH98

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 03 2017