Last fall, my husband asked Jocebeane if she knew what to call people who study mushrooms -- she replied, without hesitation, "Strange." (the real answer is mycologist!)
Well, the Beane family is indeed strange because we are fascinated by these crazy fungi. We had a particularly wet summer in 2007 and by the fall all sorts of mushrooms were springing up in everyone's yards. Baby Bean and I rushed to the bookstore to get some field guides and began trying to identify them. Some people get interested in mushrooms because they want to find wild edible sorts, and many of the guides are geared toward this. We NEVER eat mushrooms we find, as they are notoriously hard to identify with certainty, and many poisonous kinds look much like edible kinds. Mushroom study is kind of a frontier science, as many are still unidentifed, and scientists still don't understand mushrooms completely. Much information is still collected by amateur scientists and some of the best guide books are written by amateur experts. (by amateur, I simply mean non-professional).
We have had wet, cool weather for weeks, so mushrooms have been springing up everywhere! Here are some from our yard:
The only way you can make a certain identification of a mushroom is by taking a spore print of the cap. You remove the cap of the mushroom and place it on white or black paper (depending on what color spore you think you may get), then cover it with more paper and weight it down for about 12 or so hours. Here is a spore print of the mushroom above; it is not an accurate spore print, as I made it about 12 hours after the mushroom was picked, but it is interesting:
Doesn't the print look like a pressed pansy? And look how dark the cap has turned! Weird!
I think Alice thinks the whole thing is kind of weird!!
