Winter Mushroom Foraging

hi i'm marlo from wild food uk out foraging again on the 7th of january today so we are in lockdown i'm not far from the house and we're just doing a little bit of exercise my wife's holding the camera whilst also having my 9 month old baby strapped to her so please forgive any little wobbles or squeaks in this part of the video the rest of this video is going to be made up of little shorts that i've put together over the last few months focusing on cold hardy mushrooms that i think you guys should know about there's some good forager mushrooms in this video and then a bunch of other mushrooms i just find really really interesting so that's why they're in there happy new year everyone if you're watching this video you've made it through 2020 what a rubbish year that was let's hope 2021 is uh a lot better right onto the mushrooms we've got uh an elder tree down here you can see this light colored wood which some of you um older subscribers to the channel might recognize because i've done a video here before and i am going to go over a bit of old ground in this video uh and the old ground that i'm going to start off with is a mushroom that i've done a really long video about before because i find it one of the most interesting mushrooms in the country if you want to find out more about the mushroom i'm going to show you then look through the other videos in the channel but it's just down here underneath there growing out of this elder tree here's a younger one a couple of little young ones there's another young one gonna leave those young ones just pick a few of these and show you what we have so they grow in shelves and they're gray in color these are quite small ones and they don't just grow out of elder they grow out of almost any type of wood or wood type substrate uh chipboard stair risers you know i've seen them growing out of people's lovely new decking before this is a grey oyster mushroom and it's a mushroom that we go foraging for through the colder months of the year you can find it almost any time of year but through january february march this is a mushroom that we find more often um so how do you idea it's quite simple it grows out of wood in this shelf type system and it's grey on top when young when you turn it over you see these lovely gills that run all the way down the stem and back into the wood there's a good example almost back into the wood that they're growing out of now we get a few different types of oyster mushroom in the uk this is the gray one pluratus austriatus uh we get a white one we've got yellow ones and pink ones and slightly scurfy ones there's one with a skirt uh so it's a a reasonable family for foragers because all of those ones that i mentioned are edible um this is the one i consider the safest though uh the gray oyster mushroom it's also the most common uh the grey oyster mushroom when it gets to this size or bigger has no look-alikes in the uk the white one certainly does there's a mushroom called the angel wings mushroom which is uh toxic uh and that one looks almost identical superficially to the clerotus pulmonarius the white oyster mushroom and the pink ones and the yellow ones they can look like other different extravagant oysterlings and other different types of fungus that we get growing in the uk but the grey one no poisonous look-alikes apart from possibly if you pick really small ones you could mistake them for oysterlings but oysterlings aren't really a toxic mushroom or a highly toxic mushroom in most of my books they're classed as inedible um i wouldn't want to eat them i don't know if they've been properly tested or the whole family has been properly tested for edibility but we don't want you eating oysterlinks really an oysterling uh it's it has less of a stem it grows more like a shelf out the side of the tree that it's growing out of and you would be very very lucky if you found an oysterling mushroom of this size here that's about what two two and a half inches in diameter some of the oysterlings can get that big or even slightly bigger but normally they're just growing as little shelves probably no bigger than let's say that one there and you wouldn't really see the stem so it would be coming out of the tree a bit more like that don't worry about the oysterlings too much though uh like i say they're not a highly toxic mushroom and but our oysters these are a great winter mushroom to know you can forage for these through the whole year like i say but in winter and particularly january february march that's when we find them in the largest quantities and looking at their best right and here we have on the same tree which is elder as i've said before another good edible mushroom this is one of our more common edibles in the uk even more common than the oyster mushroom because you find it on almost every bit of fallen elder uh all year round um at this time of year through winter that's when the woodier this mushroom is looking at its freshest you can see these are nice succulent almost jelly-like and slightly ear shaped mushrooms sorry did i ruin that close up there there you go uh ear shaped mushrooms now growing out of elder with this coloring hanging down never pointing upwards like a cup pointing up that differentiates these from other pizzas which are potentially toxic hanging down like that growing on elder and when you pick them looking very much like an ear uh there's nothing else in the uk that it could be apart from a wood ear a ricularia a riculari judei i think is its scientific name now this is a mushroom that replaces your cloud ears uh in all your oriental recipes it's a mushroom that i actually prefer to pick on the tree when it's dry because before you use them in the kitchen you generally want to dry them out anyway because this jelly-like texture will become very firm it will shrink down to you know maybe a fifth of this size when you uh when you dry them out and then what you do with these is you rehydrate them in the dish that you're cooking so if you were making some sort of miso soup you would rehydrate them in the miso stock um they're not a mushroom that really lends itself to many western recipes although i have heard tell of people rehydrating them with orange juice and turning them into weird mushroom jaffa cakes and i have rehydrated them myself with a chocolate sherry sauce and coated them in chocolate which has made quite a nice uh chocolate cherry boozy mushroomy sweet um probably not for everyone though if you do a lot of oriental or far eastern cooking though this is a mushroom to know because you can buy a little tube of cloud ears from supermarkets that i won't name for five pounds and upwards or you can just go to your nearest elder tree in the uk at any time of year and find this mushroom but in winter right now when it's cold there's actually ice which has melted in my hands there was ice on this mushroom just now but it still looks nice and fresh and healthy so in winter that's when you get them looking like this don't go to the supermarket go to your local woodland the foraging is good for your body and for your mind uh and for your weekly shopping budget and here we have a lovely winter an early spring edible this is one of my favorites really look at that color it's the uh scarlet elf cup or potentially the ruby elf cup uh sakura cipher cochineer or sarkar cipher ostriaka it doesn't matter uh to a forager whether you've got the rhubarb the ruber the ruby or the scala elf cup because they're both equally as edible for us um there's no real way that i know of anyway to tell the two of them uh apart in the field you need a microscope as far as i know um but like i say both nice and edible both beautifully colored and colour is going to be a bit of a theme through the rest of this video we've got some of the most brightly colored mushrooms in the country coming up to show you uh this one though might just about be the brightest i'll let you decide uh the scarlet elf cup grows mainly on old hazel but you find it in rotten leaf litter where there's lots of old bits of wood underground i'm not sure it's exclusive to old bits of hazel there's certainly loads of hazel around here um but it's a mushroom that when you find one of them if you look around the area you tend to find hundreds so keep your eyes peeled for little hints of red in uh in amongst leaf litter and broken bits of wood when you're out for your walks in the next few weeks through to march and even april um i believe my colleague eric even found some in may last year so they can go into quite late spring um they do often come up in november and december as well so a nice long fruiting season for a very distinctive mushroom you see it's cup shaped and it has a stem and you could just imagine a little elf drinking out of it out of its own scala elf cup right the rest of this video is going to be kind of cobbled together uh from what i've done over the last few months so forgive the shoddy video editing but i hope you like the content but down here we've got what is renowned as probably one of the most cold hardy edible mushrooms in the world i'd say probably this is our velvet shank these are quite mature ones on top and we've got this younger one down here let's have a look at this so oops drop him there's our velvet shank underneath there's our velvet shank on top now you can see it's growing out of a tree stump um and this i know to be an old sycamore because i chopped it down they'll grow out of lots of different types of broad leaf wood though um this here is a mushroom that's obviously been up for a little while because the stem has started to discolor they start off pretty orangey all the way down you can see the gills on this young one are just kind of off-white when very young the cap of this mushroom will be orange all over but these ones have been growing on this stump for probably about three weeks now and and they've been through some temperatures of minus five and some snow and some ice and some hail so they've really been bearing up well to to look as fresh and lovely as they are right now but that's why the cap of this young one has slightly discolored that will happen naturally as the mushrooms age and weather now these older ones i think this one down here is probably the oldest looking i will expect to have pretty much a black stem there you go and you can see the gills have slightly discolored a little bit further from white but the stem goes black now looking at this uh as as a whole there's a few mushrooms that will grow in clumps and tufts of tree stumps at this time of year you will see sulfur tufts now sulfur tufts are toxic and they have similarities in in the way that they grow a more yellowy cap hence the sulfur tough name um but the sulfur tufts have gills which have this kind of strange olivaceous green iridescence if you like it's a bit of a weird thing you kind of look at the gills sideways and you see hints of green if you look at them straight on though they don't look too green now you can see the gills on this have no green to them whatsoever the sulfur tuft is poisonous but it's not deadly the most dangerous look-alike for this mushroom is easily the funeral bell and it's because of the funeral bill that we didn't put this mushroom in our book because it can look almost identical superficially in fact earlier on this year i was running a course and i saw some mushrooms growing out the side of a tree and i went over thinking they were velvet shanks and said to the group oh look looks like we've got some lovely edible mushrooms here and i picked one and it wasn't a velvet shank the only difference at that stage when they were young was that the uh gallerina marginata the funeral bell has a ring on the stem so if you've got something that looks like a a velvet shank here are flamulina velutipes but it has a skirt or a ring on the stem leave it behind it's a funeral bell and that is a mushroom that's considered among the most toxic that we have in the uk it is most certainly deadly so our velvet shanks no ring on the stem and it blacks them as they mature although the gallerina can get a dark discoloration to the stem as well now this mushroom is really tasty uh it's slightly past its best this one but the rest of these look to me like i should be picking them right now leave these young ones and see if they grow and there is a group of beautiful velvet shanks right so what do you do on a very cold november day when you're a forager you come to the top of a giant hill walk around some heathland but it's worth it because you find some really really fun things we're looking for wax caps and other types of mushrooms and here is a surprise one that i wasn't expecting to see hoping the camera can pick it up it's just like a little club this is a cordycep this is cordyceps militaris which is uh touted online as a wonder cure for many different things you know make of that what you will apparently it's good for everything uh from living longer to increasing your libido but like i say make of that what you will for me it's just a really interesting family of mushrooms it's a family of mushrooms that infest living things so there's one david attenborough program which is fantastic and there's a species of cordycep in there that infects an ant and it takes over the ant's brain makes the makes the ant climb to the highest point uh it can get to in the uh vicinity of where it is after it's been banned from its own little ants nest by the uh the bouncer ants that have figured out that it's infected so then this ant climbs to the top of the tree and that point at that point the mushroom mummifies it and grows out of the ant's head um i assume so that it can uh spread its spores as far as possible from that high spot to infect some more ants now there's a cordycep for almost every type of grub in the uk and this one grows out of uh different uh grubs from moths and caterpillars most commonly apparently so what i'm gonna do is see if i can get down to that grub oh it's actually quite near the surface by the looks of it and see what this one's growing out of not too far down well whatever it was there's the crub it looks like some sort of beetle larvae or something like that i'm not sure maybe i'll post this on one of the entomology groups online and see if they can figure out what type of grub it is but there is your cordyceps militaris and this is one that you can grow at home i know there's cordyceps kits that you can buy and because of that i think i'm gonna take this one home and see if i can clone it maybe in uh one of my later videos i'll show you the results of that but there you can see this beautiful tongue or club-shaped orange mushroom with these tiny sort of floccul like parts to the top not sure if my hand's steady enough for the camera to focus there you go cordyceps militaris growing out of some sort of grub an interesting find but not one for the plate really you wouldn't uh well you could eat this but you'd need a lot of them to make a meal let's go and find something else um down here is uh the most or one of the most common wax caps that we have in britain so we'll get this one out the way this is uh the snowy wax cap it's a white one that as you can see that's not much bigger than my thumb but it'll get to you know three or four times that size if i turn it over you'll see the current gills running down the stem on a waxy mushroom growing in late autumn in grassland now i can tell this mushroom and i do eat it but i don't recommend it for novice foragers although it's a really common wax cap it's one that has some really poisonous lookalikes we have a a white grassland mushroom called the klitocybe rivulosa which is deadly poisonous and it's reasonably similar it'll grow in similar places and because of that i'd just er on the side of caution with the snowy wax cap until you really know what you're doing just take a step back just down here we've got a mushroom that i've done a video on before it's amazing orange colored mushroom this is called orange peel fungus alluria orantia and this is an edible mushroom but it's nowhere near as tasty as some of the other mushrooms that i'm going to be finding or showing you today so the snowy wax caps i'm leaving behind because there's better stuff than them and there's certainly better tasting mushrooms than these little orange peel fungus they are very pretty and i do eat them occasionally you do have to cook them and although they look quite flexible they're actually quite brittle so when you uh pick them and cook them they kind of fall apart in the frying pan they're not the best of edibles but there are better things around so let's go and have a look for them now continuing with the bright color theme we've got this mushroom down here this is another wax cap is that the best shot we can get maybe if you take a shot from around here see the color a little bit more clearly there you are this is another beautiful wax cap you can see it oh well if i hold it up in the light there you go you can see it much more clearly this beautiful red and yellow wax cap this one with yellow gills uh could be one of a couple really it could be the uh crimson wax cap or it could be the splendid wax cap lovely name um either way this isn't one that i normally collect uh it is edible though um most of the wax caps for reasons i'll tell you in just a little while we leave behind apart from a few and the red ones although they are edible and i will collect them sometimes i don't always because basically they're uh prettier in the ground but i'll pick this one so it can go in the bag now have a little look there you can see white flesh in the stem that's what tells me it's either the crimson or the splendid because there's another very red wax cat i'm going to show you in just a minute doesn't have white flesh now just over here past our slightly older crimson wax cap or red wax cap you can see they start to fade here's some more they start to go orange and then even taylor as we can see on this one here now just uh take a look at the stem though because this one orange on the cap could be mistaken for another good edible mushroom but the stem is still quite yellowy bear that in mind for the future of this video now another amazingly colorful mushroom um this is just the color fest today this is a beautifully adorned graveyard and down here we've got a truly gourmet edible mushroom i'm gonna stop and spend a bit of time on this get my knees wet because this is one that all of you guys need to know about it's a a really good edible i'm just going to cut it as low down as i can and show you the cap and underneath the cap that lovely lilacy almost purple coloring now this isn't a wax cap mushroom this is a wood blewet um and wood blew it uh the sort of mushrooms that you can buy in places like borough market for an absolute fortune or you can just go out into almost any woodland at this time of year and pick your wood blue it's because they're a very common mushroom they're a saprophyte that loves growing on leaf litter of almost any type so i find them this is in grassland really there's not much leaf litter around here um so they're not even that fussy as to only grow in leaf litter but that's their kind of ideal environment and they grow in all of the uk in almost every woodland in the uk if i go out at this time of year and don't find a bluit when i'm looking for them i'm very disappointed so really common and really tasty they have this lovely coloration on the gills and the stem so they get called blue legs and in restaurants they use the french name as they tend to which is the pied blue on the cap or the cap rather is it starts off quite purple when they're young but it will discolor as you can see into a sort of tany brown sort of slightly darker brown and then it will fade into a pale almost kind of lilacy white in certain circumstances now like i say really common and really tasty and really safe too because with that coloration there's only a few mushrooms that it could be certainly at this time of year so there are other members of the blewitt family there's one called the lapista saudida which is uh pretty common and looks a lot like this and i'm sure the mistake has been making by macon made by many foragers in the past thinking they've got bluits when they've picked sordidas uh no problem there the saudia is edible it's just slightly more delicate almost translucent at the edges of the cap but i've probably picked them in the past thinking that they're blue it's as well uh there's a member of them the webcap family the bruising webcap cortonarius purpurescens i think or papurious that looks a bit like this as well although it's even more vibrant purple again that's not a bad mistake to make because that one's eaten by some people it's not considered highly toxic i think it might give some people a tiny bit of gastric upset but it's not a dangerous mushroom so at this time of year if you've got this coloration on a mushroom of this kind of size you know not a tiny little thin stemmed mushroom then you've got more than likely anyway one of the blewits and they've also got uh the blue it's anyway not the bruising webcap uh quite a distinctive almost perfumey smell so a little sniff it's not mushroomy it's more kind of like i say perfumey and when you cook with these mushrooms as well that'll come up from the pan also when you cook with these mushrooms they hold a lot of fluid um a lot of water so if you're trying to do fried mushrooms with your blue it's what you have to do is keep kind of flicking the water out of the pan if you cook them fresh because a lot of water comes out of them and if you want fried mushrooms you have to flick that water out just to stop them and stop them stewing basically if you're making a mushroom sauce that water is actually quite useful and quite tasty though um now this is uh a little way into the season for blewitts i have a little tradition where i go out picking blewets on christmas day and we find them in january and february as well so take a look at this mushroom and remember this one look in leaf litter and particularly where the leaf litter hasn't been disturbed so i used to think these mushrooms uh used to grow with things like holly and and brambles because i would always find loads of them underneath holly and brambles the reason for that though is that they're places where people don't walk so in the leaf litter that's in places that are undisturbed right now through november and december and january and possibly even february you are likely to find yourself some blitz you can also collect them up with loads of that leaf litter and uh spread them around your garden and apparently uh that's called a blue it bomb and uh you can by doing that grow some of your own bluits these are definitely a mushroom that's going in my foraging bag today they're one of the real tasty ones one of the real salt after foragers mushrooms but there's more just around the corner so we'll go off and have a look at those too before we do though we'll have a look at some other interesting mushrooms first it's not just wax caps and other edibles that we're finding today we're finding some really interesting stuff too and uh here's one of those that i would definitely put in the interesting category making this little grave here look very pretty these are the sort of flowers i'd like on my grave so uh when that happens please plant some um although planting these and getting them going would be quite difficult this is one of the uh clavulanoids i think is how you'd uh pronounce it i think this one might be clevulanopsis fusiformis um it's in the clavaria sort of family of mushrooms and they're lovely to see because they're reasonably rare they're part of a system called the czech system actually which is used to grade pastureland and grassland it's uh chegg is an acronym for clavaria or clavarioids uh the h is for hydrocybes which is the wax caps that we're seeing today e is for entoloma and g is for geoglossum i'm not going to show you any entolomas but i will show you one little geoglossum in a minute and what the chegg scale is used for is to grade how natural i suppose any grassland or pasture land is because certain species of mushrooms within those genuses or families that i mentioned just will not grow in any grassland that's had any fertilizers or or pesticides or fungicides used in that area so by finding certain mushrooms in your grassland you can kind of without doing any soil tests just gauge how natural i suppose the area is so yeah that's the chegg scale and seeing as many high grasabies wax caps as we have today along with the geoglossums i'm going to show you and this little clavaria that we've got here clavulanopsis means that what we've got is a really old untouched bit of grassland this is a special place and wax caps like we're seeing today don't grow in this profusion in many parts of the country we're quite privileged in herefordshire and wales to have the huge array of wax caps that we've got that's because we've got so much untouched pasture land around here but because that kind of land in the uk is shrinking we're using more chemicals in our farming and more of our farmland is being built on and you know basically habitat loss means that quite a lot of our wax caps like the crimson that i showed you a little while ago and the scarlet they're they're mushrooms that might well end up being rare in years to come and there are some wax caps that are already on the red list that's what i keep saying stick to the more common ones anyway uh one chemical that they obviously don't seem to mind is embalming fluid um here we are these are the g's from your chegg scale these are some of our geoglossums little black tongue fungus growing out the ground you can see dotted all over the place now there is a mushroom called dead man's fingers which uh would be quite apt to be growing out the ground in a graveyard this isn't dead man's fingers though dead man's fingers grow out of tree stumps now don't eat the geoglossums or your dead man's fingers there's just mushrooms everywhere in this place at the moment this is another one of those clavarias i think this is clavaria fumosa again indicating that we've got ground here that's not been touched by chemicals um in the in the recent past and beside it we've got probably for me anyway the most beautiful of the wax caps well there's a well it's a little group of the red wax caps i consider to be absolutely stunning i'm reasonably sure that this is the scarlet wax cap but over here we've got a baby showing a little bit of yellow at the bottom of the stem got another little youngster there and these amazing colored ones here now a way of differentiating showing that you've got the scarlet wax cap over the uh crimson and the and the splendid is as i showed you with the crimson there'd be white flesh there and hopefully what we'll see is the flesh not the gills the fleshy part of the mushroom is bright red and i think that means that we've got a scarlet uh it doesn't really matter i do like looking at these mushrooms but i i'm not picking the rest of these i'll take this one home because they are edible but i leave most of the scarlets behind because while the scarlets are around there's normally a better one just around the corner which i'm going to show you in just a minute all right sorry about the chainsaw noise in the background we've been waiting here about tim wow listen to that as soon as we start filming he's stopped that's perfect uh here's some more of our wax caps just quickly before he starts up again probably the crimson wax caps everywhere around here this graveyard's been a fantastic find these are some little orange wax caps could be the miniature wet normally the miniature's got a kind of scurfy top but here's something that's not a wax cap and is a good edible these are our goblets pseudo-clitorcybe sciatiformis now i don't know if it's one organism but if you follow this round here past even more wax taps we've got this beautiful one here and then some more here and i'm just going to pick this one and show you now the goblet is a good safe edible you can see this fibrous stem with this colouring and the goblet shaped cap now at this time of year this is a nice safe good edible to go looking for but not as good as my favorite find of the day which is just down here these are our meadow wax caps and in every stage of growth really so we'll pick this little one first and show you there's our orange capped meadow wax cap with the stout stem which is just slightly off-white a little bit orangey and the gills are a lighter shade of orange than the cap this is how they start off this is how they develop you can see the gills are quite the current actually on the young one at least they look quite de current but as they mature they become less so and very widely spaced and then eventually they'll look like this one those girls have gone very current again they're variable nice orange cap lighter than when young the lighter gills and the lighter stem now uh this is koofa phylus protensis it used to be a hydrocybe but they farmed it off into another genus a coup for phylus and i think that might be because it's not actually that closely related to the wax caps it's one that doesn't mind chemicals being used quite so much so this is a really common mushroom in our meadows all over the uk i do also find it in woodland as well which always surprises me and worries me a little bit so i don't tend to pick them from woodland because i know they're supposed to grow in grassland but i do find them i'm pretty sure in woodland as well the meadow wax cap doesn't have a waxy texture at all when you cook it it's just a really lovely mushroomy mushroom and when you find them you often find them in profusion there's about 20 in this little group here and there's a lot more in the field just around us so out of the wax cat family i'd like you to leave most of them behind just look out for the snowys and when you're sure of your id with the snowys go for those uh and the meadow wax cap is one that i think everyone should go foraging for they're a really common mushroom and really really tasty so a lovely one to finish on but there's just one more that i want to show you before we finish and here we are this is where i wanted to finish just because it's such a show stopper i did just introduce you to the meadow wax cap i'm now going to introduce you to the king of all meadow wax caps down here is the biggest one that eric and i have ever found that is a meadow hex cap to match all others and he's still got ice on the top these are mushrooms that can take a bit of freezing at this time of year that kills most other mushrooms off so there we go there's a haul of some of our meadow wax caps this one obviously got a bit tied down look at how crazily he's grown around in a big circle and some more beauties all around here there you go all right finish off with this and uh there was one with a huge stem as well eric where was that one just there oh there you go another lovely meadow wax cat my favorite finds of the day so just to finish off i don't normally do this but like i said at the beginning of the video we've got a lot of new subscribers so i just wanted you all to know we're an educational company we teach people about wild food all over the uk we go everywhere from dartmoor and kent up to scotland and lots of different places in the middle as well running our courses and we've also written a book which i want you all to know about because we're very proud of it the foraging pocket guide which does just about fit in a reasonable size pocket i hope you've liked this video i'm gonna try and do more videos like this as often as i can but i'm also gonna still keep doing all those little shorts as well just to put into our website so thank you very much for watching if you uh like the video please click the like button that's something to be happy about uh so are the mushrooms that i've been finding uh today and over the last couple of months though so i'll show you some of those cold hardy mushrooms now and the rest of the videos or the rest of this video is kind of a little bit cobbled together from the other times i've been able to get out um please forgive the sketchy video editing as well now i'm going to start off with a really common edible that i've done a bit a video about before start again new year everyone if you're watching this you've made it through 2020 so that's a good thing uh since we're in lockdown my wife is holding the camera at the same time as holding my nine-month-old baby who you might be able to hear squeaking [Music] i look at her is it because i was looking at the camera not at you oh do you want to wear her nose just weird should we hang from a tree

Channel: Wild Food in the UK Ltd

Views: 194,894

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Id: JS5GX3SWkOc

Length: 43min 53sec (2633 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 11 2021