October Mushroom Foraging UK

hi i'm marlo from wild food uk out foraging again it's the 9th of october and more importantly we've had a fair bit of rain in the last few days in the last week or so there was a dry week just before but there's been rain and the temperature has dropped so what's happened is uh in the last week or so a lot of the sort of early autumn mushrooms have kind of gone to bed for the year because they don't like it when it gets too cold at night and we've got the start of the kind of second autumn flush coming out right now and uh you guys seem to like that back to basics little series i did at the beginning of lockdown so i thought i'd try something a bit more along those lines with this video um and i'm actually gonna try some video editing for the first time for our hundredth video on wild food uk's youtube channel so forgive me if the editing is a bit sketchy but i hope you like the content and the content is starting just down here with the first mushroom that we saw that we thought was worth talking about there's been a few others around there's another youngster another very young one there yes slightly bigger one there they're all quite immature actually the uh the caps of this mushroom will flatten out into something very akin to your portabellos i'll just cut this bigger one and show you a few things so uh this isn't a back to basics video because there's no basics in the mushroom world but if i was doing a back to basics video for mushrooms the family i would start on is this one this is an agaricus mushroom which is the same family as pretty much all the mushrooms you buy in the shops the button mushrooms closed cup mushrooms that's kind of what this is at the moment this is a closed cup mushroom then it will turn into a button mushroom as the cap comes away from the stem it will leave a little ring on the stem and it'll expose the gills which are hidden and mostly eaten actually now you can see those gills are pink and it's a stout white stemmed mushroom with a white cap that's gonna as i say flatten out this would have become quite a large agaricus mushroom which leads me to believe that it's a young horse mushroom agaricus arvensis so the way that we tell whether we've got an edible or a poisonous garrick there are poisonous members of this family that look incredibly similar to this is we damage it first of all you can see a tiny bit of slight yellowing i suppose there where it was damaged before where i've just run the knife over the cap there's a tiny bit more yellowing now that's a little worry in the agaric world because uh the poisonous agaric um the that is most commonly found is called the yellow stainer uh and it stains yellow brighter than that though generally but any yellowing is a bit of a worry in the agaric world the yellow stainer accounts for the most poisonings that we have in britain each year because it looks so much like a field mushroom or a horse mushroom which uh like i say i still believe that's what we've got here because it's stained yellow though you can see it's becoming slightly brighter because it's stained yellow i'm going to apply the second test that we do when we find the nagarak and smell it and what i've got there is the most amazing smell of anisee this is really really quite a strong smelling one and that's a good thing because that does mean that i've got my horse mushroom agaricus arvensis it's uh one of the tastiest mushrooms around in my opinion it doesn't get too much kudos in the forager world because it's quite common and it's so similar to the mushrooms that you get in the shops that it doesn't seem quite so adventurous as some of the others i'm going to show you i suppose but from a taste point of view it's absolutely lovely i'm going to leave these babies i don't like picking mushrooms that young i probably wouldn't even have picked this one if it wasn't for the fact i was doing the video i would have come back in a couple of days to get it when it was slightly more mature uh because by that point the cap would have opened and it would have dropped at least some of its spores but considering how much of the spores or sorry the gills have already been munched by a slug i assume i'm not sure it would have been worth waiting anyway uh just over here we have another slightly more interesting mushroom for the microphile but not for the forager i'll just let you get yourself into a comfy position there eric and if you could pan down we've got first of all here very strange looking thing there's another one behind it and a few more around this one here slightly more accessible amongst the brambles and what i'm going to try to do is get down to the base of it without breaking it because they are very fragile let's see if i can get the whole thing out for you yeah there you go i can show you it grows from an egg this is a mushroom called the uh the dog stink horn it's much less common than the uh the horse mushroom so it's uh a nice find like i say it's good to see this mushroom but it's not one that's going in the foragers bag today this is not one that i would like to eat it doesn't look particularly appetizing for a start but some books class it is inedible and when that happens i just are on the side of caution and i uh i'd recommend everyone else did the same uh this mushroom it's in the stinkhorn family some of you might have seen the normal common stink horn phallus impudicus it'll get to about a foot high and look incredibly phallic with a sort of black tip for half a day until the flies come and take all of the black stuff off and fly away and hopefully seed some more stink horns it's a very common mushroom and it lives up to its name it is stinky before the flies remove all of uh all of the black stuff this one is nowhere near as stinky but it obviously does want to attract insects i assume which will take away the spores which should be on the tip of uh this rather phallic looking little mushroom um the eggs of the common stink horn are considered edible but i've not read anything about anyone eating even the eggs of the dog stink horn mutinus uh caninus i believe is its scientific name anyway there's the dog stink corn if you're lucky enough to see these just leave them where they are um they're a lovely find but we're gonna go and find some other things that are edible and poisonous and interesting if you'd like to follow me right well we've come just a little bit further along and now i'm going to give you some really useful information probably some of the most useful information that i'll give you in this video because it's all about trees and habitats when you're foraging for mushrooms knowing a little bit about trees and habitats is going to give you an advantage when you're out searching for for your mushrooms because the mushrooms that we go after largely fall into two categories so the the saprophytes or the soprobik mushrooms they're the rotters as far as i'm concerned and they'll grow on various different types of deadwood and and woodland detritus but the other type of fungus that we go after a lot as foragers are the mycorrhizal fungi now they're the ones that live underground and they can get huge underground they're kind of made up of this three-dimensional spiders web called mycelium which is made up of these tiny little tubes called hyphae but underground they can't hunt and they can't find their own food sources so what they have to do is build what's called a mycorrhizal relationship with effectively a host organism where they use that hyphae to kind of break into the roots of what can be a tree or a plant and then what they do is they actually feed and help that tree or that organism by providing it an extra space of root system which can tap into extra nutrient resources like water sources or even mushrooms can even break down rocks and get minerals out to feed to their host trees and they do seem to do it in quite an intelligent way because they want the tree or or the plant that they're growing with to be big and strong because in return that tree gives the mushroom what it needs to survive now these mycorrhizal fungus most of them are quite fussy they'll only grow with certain types of trees so if you want to find a specific type of mushroom look in your books to see what trees it grows with first but i can give you a bit of a head start here because there's certain organisms in britain that are just head and shoulders above the rest for edible fungus and i'm standing in amongst four of them right now so number one for edible mycorrhizal fungus is this tree that i've got behind me it's quite hard to zoom in on the leaves from where you are but this is a beech tree which is easily recognizable if you look at the floor because we've got our beach nuts all over the floor around it now the beech tree is one of my favorite trees for a number of reasons you can make beach leaf noir out of it the leaves are edible in spring although they get papery quite quickly but the reason is one of my favorite trees is because it has uh the widest variety of edible fungus growing with it in britain now second to the beech tree is our oak tree just over there oak trees i'm sure you all know what uh an oak leaf looks like but again if there's no leaves on the tree look at what's on the floor our lovely acorns oak trees are pretty much on an even par with the beach when it comes to edible fungus they're the top two organisms for edible mycorrhizals in the uk and there's loads of beech and oak around here which means that there's loads of mushrooms and obviously someone else thought that too because there's a bit of awful tagging on these beech trees here but it does look quite a lot like you zoom in here that someone's tagged a mushroom onto the tree possibly because this is a good mushroom spot now those are the top two organisms third is grass grassland is where we go foraging for mushrooms in spring and summer because that's where you find most of your edible summer and spring fungus um so grass is number three but over here we've got number four they stand out in the forest because of their lovely white bark you can see there in the distance those birch trees that's your top four organisms now mix that with a bit of moss all over the floor and you've got a mushroom foragers paradise because beech oak birch grass and moss that means a wide variety of edible fungus including things like your chanterelles and your porcinis um you won't find a winter chanterelle here or a saffron milk cap because they like pine trees and evergreens but around here there's a lot of different edible fungus just because of the mature trees and the environment that we're in now one last tree it's not as high up on the list as the ones that we were just talking about but these two trees i think this is the easiest way to go you could follow me i think from here from about here you'll get the best shot and there's a few trees like this up here this is a lovely old chestnut tree it looks absolutely magnificent you can see that kind of twisted gnarled bark that tells you you've got a sweet chestnut tree now when you see a tree this mature you can be pretty sure that it's going to have some fungus growing with it anyway even if it's not a beach and oak or a birch this one here is actually the host organism of a mushroom i'm going to show you in just a minute called the beef steak fungus it's a mushroom that's exclusive to sweet chestnut and oak trees so i'm going to show you that on an oak tree in just a minute but i just wanted to finish this little section about the good trees with our lovely chestnut last little bit about this though because uh it's good to know what's at the top you know your beach oak and birch it's also good to know what's at the bottom because if you're out in autumn foraging in a wood full of ash you're in the wrong place there's not many mycorrhizal fungus grow with ash there's one in spring that's not even very tasty that i know of but i don't know of any specific ash tree fungus that we go for in autumn below ash you've got your rhododendrons and laurels they're just no good for mushrooms and then below them you've got the whole maple family of trees which is just rubbish if you're a forager and firmly at the bottom with no edible mycorrhizal fungus in britain that i know of is the sycamore tree so what that means is simple you know if you're in a wood full of sycamore and autumn looking for mushrooms you're in the wrong place go somewhere else look for someone like this with mature beech oak and birch preferably with a bit of moss and a bit of grass and some other magnificent broad leafs around as well there you go so let's go and have a look at our beefsteak fungus and here we are at the base of this oak tree we've got our beef steak fungus this one here is a young one looking uh very much like a an ox tongue that's why it gets the other common name the ox tongue fungus it is an edible this one it's an edible that i consider really really safe for novice foragers as well i have done a whole other video on this mushroom but basically when it comes to the poly pores or the bracket type fungus that we go for as foragers to me there's really only three we go for chicken of the woods which has to be treated with a bit of caution because some people do react badly to chicken of the woods this one here beef steak fungus and another one i'm going to show you in just a second the blackening polypore the reason we go for those three is because they're all soft wow that one's actually quite white inside normally or i would expect a beefsteak fungus of this size to be a bit more red they do often look just like a bit of wagyu beef nice and marbled you can see the sort of burnt beefy effect on the cap of or the top side of this mushroom fish gelina hepatica hepatica relating to your liver again it looks a bit like a liver and uh on the underside you can see it's much lighter now if this was more red maybe i can get it to happen from there but by squeezing it you kind of almost get a red blood-like effect coming out of the mushroom makes this one a really really easy one to identify and you can if you find it try a little bit raw beefsteak carpaccio it's a it's got a unique flavor for me in the mushroom world it's not particularly mushroomy it's more um it's got sort of an acidic side to the flavour but it's useful uh in sort of mixed mushroom dishes there's nothing i would ever do with beefsteak just by itself though anyway i'm going to take this little bit as i said it's not one of my favorite mushrooms so i'll leave the rest where it is growing here and show you a few more of our favorite trees under attack let's head just down here yes first of all though this is the kind of view you get when you come out foraging in these lovely places and even when there's no mushrooms around i still enjoy coming up here over here though there's another mushroom i've done a a video on before down here this is the blackening polypore miraculous giganteus and the beefsteak fungus doesn't really do too much damage to the trees but this one does it it rots the root system of the tree and quite often trees that have been infected with this for a while actually blow over where i used to live there was quite a few trees on their sides uh with this fungus all over around them in a in a local wood to me down in croydon in south london around here there's some more of it showing you why it's called the blackening polypore blackens as it gets older and it blackens as it's damaged now this is another one of those edible kind of bracket type fungus if you like this is far too old to eat though sometimes and that's not too bad actually sometimes you can still cut off the edges of these big fronds and that does still feel nice and soft and edible but these bits here if i just show you there you go when they get old they become extremely fibrous uh tough if you cook with them pretty sure you could still dry them out pound them into something usable in the kitchen and but when they're like this there's normally other mushrooms around for you to go for and over here there's one that i do actually eat will go backwards in its life cycle here is it in its um rotten old stage you can see there was quite a lot of it there here it's looking a bit younger again underneath there actually this is probably one of the best bits but you can see underneath there that white on the cap below that's not mold that's the spores the white spores that have dropped out of this honey fungus this one here onto the cap below honey fungus has white spores now around here we've got some in reasonably good conditions still now these i would consider eating no actually they're not that they're not that fresh after all we might find some fresher ones a little bit further along but this is honey fungus it would normally have a a slightly more honey colored cap as you can see it has a ring on the skirt on the stem rather which is close very close on this long stem to the cap of the mushroom and it grows in clumps out of the bases of lots of different trees and when it does it's not good for the tree at all most fungus are good for trees as i was explaining before the saprophytes what they do is they rot down all the old wood and they turn it back into compost for the trees and the mycorrhizal fungus they feed the trees um this mushroom is one of the few that kills trees now uh this is a beech tree and he's still in reasonable condition so he'll be able to live with this fungus for a number of years and oak tree could live with honey fungus for a hundred years quite easily i expect but things like our birch trees are much more susceptible and if honey fungus gets onto a birch tree it can take out in a matter of years they basically take from the tree they take nutrition from the tree and kill it slowly that way they've also got two ways of spreading honey fungus so if you've got it in your garden and you think you can protect the other trees just by picking all the mushrooms and stopping it sporing that won't work because underground this mushroom uh has what are called rhizomorphs which uh like little black kind of boot laces um tightly woven bits of mycelium i assume which will spread out underground from tree to tree so when you find your honey fungus quite often you'll find ones and twos dotted around in the area around the tree where you see the main fruiting bodies it's a an incredible fungus one of them in oregon in america covers more than 2 000 acres in area underground and there is still trees there you know honey fungus has been on the british land mass probably longer than humans and uh i'm pretty sure humans have killed more trees in that time than honey fungus has it's a a part of our our natural ecosystem but if it's on your favorite oak tree in your garden then that oak tree is like i said under attack now from an edibility point of view honey fungus is edible to most people but it makes some people sick so you will find loads of it and if you're tempted to try it the first time you do don't have very much just go for a small portion and see what happens leave yourself 24 hours or so before you eat the next bit just to see if you have any kind of gastric reaction whatsoever the wind's picking up a little bit which i know will be found a little bit annoying by some of you on the camera microphone but we'll plow on nonetheless all right we've come along a little bit further not far at all and down here there's a nice edible there's a few of them around so watch where you tread eric but this is probably the best example you can see that lovely green cap with almost like radial rings towards the edge and if i pick him you'll see that the gills aren't really de-current but he is in the funnel cap family you can see the caps gone quite funnel shaped this is the klitocybe adora or more commonly known as the aniseed toadstool that lovely greeny color now the real key identifier for this mushroom is its smell it's uh much like the horse mushroom has a pungent aroma of aniseed and this is a mushroom that has an aniseed flavor when you cook it the horse mushroom doesn't but this one does so use it wisely apparently it goes really well with lots of fish dishes but i don't eat fish anymore so i'll be using it for something different now behind it over here is a really common awesome mushroom quite a lot around here but this is one i want to show you because it's a really common one that you'll see a lot there's a nice tall one and i'm getting down to the base of it because this is in the amanita family and i want to show you all of its features there you go there's the big bulbous base which is actually the remnants of the egg sac it grew from it's grown up the cap used to be attached to the stem where it was attached to the stem it's it's left a skirt or a little veil the gills are white and there's a little bit of the volvo remains on the cap there it's mostly all brushed off on this now uh this looks really like the uh destroying angel but the destroying angel is quite rare um this is a mushroom that i believe to be the false death cap it looks like either the white variant of the death cap or the destroying angel the way that you can tell the difference between them is quite simple you use your nose and if i'm correct what i get from this mushroom is the smell of raw potatoes um i've never eaten it because apparently it tastes like raw potatoes as well which isn't a particularly appetizing sounding um but there we go the false death cap we get two versions of this amanita citrina and amanita citrina var alba they both smell of potatoes leave them behind really uh because they could be confused with some of the most poisonous mushrooms that we've got in the uk now if you can stand up carefully there eric we're gonna just wiggle round the corner here follow me sorry i will get a collar mic one day we're gonna come over to a mushroom that i consider to be very safe for novice foragers here is our lovely amethyst deceiver i saw the flecks of purple in amongst this leaf litter there's a a youngster and there's quite a few more little pinheads there's a few more growing there a couple of them that have gone rotten um and earlier on i knew i was going to find some amethyst deceivers because you pretty much always do they're a very common mushroom and earlier on i saw this mushroom so i thought i'd pick it just to show you a quick comparison because uh this is a deadly poisonous mushroom and it's really the only worry or the only worry i consider uh when picking my amethyst deceivers so this is the lilac fibre fibre cap or inicybe geofiller variant liloquina and this is our amethyst deceiver lacaria amethystina and they don't look too similar now but when this mushroom's younger it can have a similar purple coloring and it'll be small and and closed a bit like our younger versions that i showed you a second ago now there is one key difference if you have a look at the gills the gills on our amethyst deceiver are bright purple the gills and our deadly poisonous lilac fibre cap are kind of creamy color off-white certainly not purple so if you're picking your amethyst deceivers which i highly recommend it's not a big mushroom but they often grow by the thousand then just check the gills make sure that you've got purple gills and you're entirely safe there we go amethyst deceivers i do find them one of the most beautiful mushrooms that we go foraging for and he can go into my foraging bag and i'm going to take you now to the last few mushrooms for this video and uh here we are a colorful end to our little mushroom video down here we've got the most prized edible that we found today now they're not in perfect condition down there they would normally be this same kind of bright yellow all over but i am actually quite surprised to find these uh in october this is a mushroom that i first find in this particular area around june most years and they go through summer and early autumn but they're not a mushroom that tends to last too often into late autumn just from that view i wouldn't be 100 sure of what they are but here's one which i picked just a second ago and you can see what we have here is a chanterelle an october chanterelle now chanterelles you can id by a few different means first of all all the chanterelle family have what are called full skills they're more like folds than actual bladed gills which i'll show you in a second and uh this particular one our cantharellus cebarius uh is yellow on the outside but the real test is when you cut them in half you'll see the flesh inside the mushroom is white now that white flesh rules out the only really potentially uh dangerous look-alikes for this mushroom the full chanterelle is a mushroom that looks very similar to this but it will have a similar color to the outside a sort of orangey yellow to the flesh as well and so will the jack-o'-lantern which is a fairly uncommon mushroom but another one that can look a little bit similar to this that you don't want to eat so our chanterelle is truly the uh the best find of the day they're a mushroom that i really really enjoy i pickle them i use them just like normal mushrooms um they're a mushroom that are so pretty that along with our amethyst deceivers i often uh just fry them up briefly so they keep their color and use them to decorate the tops of things like our wild mushroom pate that we take on our walks so this is the best mushroom that's going in the bag today and one that i'm really really pleased to find so just to finish off though behind me in the same patch as our chanterelles we've got oh he's falling apart here's a another one now this is a similarly colored mushroom looking very similar from the cap to our chanterelles this isn't a mushroom in the chanterelle family though you can tell that by those bladed gills as i described the chanterelles have full skills uh this is a mushroom in the rustular genus and the rustular genus is uh called the brittle gill family um to uh or those are that's its common name and it's called that because the gills in the family are all brittle and when you run your fingers over the gills of a of a brittle gill they flake like almonds now this is a useful family for for foragers because they're so common there's well over 200 types of brittle gill in the uk and quite a lot of them are actually edible um but there are some that will make you sick there's no deadly poisonous ones in the uk there's one deadly poisonous one in japan as far as i know but in the uk we don't have any seriously toxic brittle gills the worst a brittle guild can do to you is make you sick now it's an interesting family for foragers because there's a test you can do when you know you've got a brittle gill and i exercise extreme caution before doing this i did a video on the death cap not so long ago and the death cap looks quite similar to a young brittle girl unless you examine it closely but when you're sure you've got a brittle gill what you can do to determine whether you've got an edible or a poisonous one is actually have a nibble of the mushroom this one here is one that's worrying me but i'll do the nibble test anyway and what you do chew the mushroom up a little bit and leave it on the tip of your tongue and yes i have a toxic brittle gill here now i've no problem in swallowing the tiny little nibble that i had because i know that these aren't seriously toxic they're just emetic they'll make you sick but the reason i know that this one's poisonous is because it burnt the tip of my tongue and it's actually still quite hot in my mouth a little bit like a piece of chili all of the poisonous brittle gills in the uk will do that if you have a nibble of them and this one with its coloring and uh let's have a little smell yeah there's a bit of a plant-like smell there what i think i've got here is the geranium scented rustula and it's known like i've just found out as one of the toxic ones but knowing about this family will enhance all of your foraging walks for mushrooms because when there's no chanterelles and no amethyst deceivers and no porcinis and beefsteak fungus there is always a rustula somewhere and there's a few that i do really like to eat the yellow swamp rustler is great the charcoal burner is great the green cracked rustular is one that i really like and the russella parizuria the powdery brittle gill that's another one that i really like but having a nibble of a mushroom to determine whether it's edible or not is not something i would advise any true beginners to do wait until you're a hundred percent confident in iding the family that your mushroom's in before you start having nibble tests um right i think what we'll do is we'll leave it there and i'm gonna go home now and and cook some mushrooms and try my hand at video editing i hope you've enjoyed this leave us a like if you did

Channel: Wild Food in the UK Ltd

Views: 287,907

Keywords: horse mushroom, dog stinkhorn, beech tree, oak tree, birch tree, beefsteak fungus, blackening polypore, honey fungus, aniseed toadstool, anniseed toadstool, false death cap, amethyst deceiver, lilac fibrecap, chanterelle, girole, geranium scented russula

Id: f7tcCRjyrLI

Length: 35min 42sec (2142 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020