I made it to the mycological show.
And yeah baby it's so hot when you talk Latin to me.
Actualllllly I was talking to a nice mature lady who was painting scenes on a
fungus called an "artist's conk" or "artist's pallette".
It's a big hard fungus that grows on trees, one side looks like bark or wood
and the other is a nice smooth surface for an artist. She told me the Latin name
and it sounded really cool.
I used to know a couple of Latin phrases back in my life as an altar
boy...Dominic Go Frisk Em and things like that.
Hiker's Notebook: Artists Conk has a good picture of a type of conk and tell's us:
"Ganoderma applanatum is a perennial polypore that can live as long as 50 years. It has been used for a variety of dietary and medicinal purposes for millennia by hominids and is considered a delicacy by modern gorillas, which have been known to fight over it, causing intragroup dissention until solved by the silverback."
Author's Note: Conks are a favorite food of gorillas in the Amazon rain forests...here in the Pacific Northwest Bigfoots like them.
A couple of interesting points I learned from one of the mycological society members:
1. Mushrooms are not disappearing because of over-harvesting by wild mushroom hunters. Picking a mushroom is like picking a fruit off a tree. Mushrooms are harder and harder to find because of (a) sprawl/development and (b) logging.
2. People can gather wild mushrooms for commercial sale but they need a license.
Mushroom hunters, like members of Duck's Unlimited, Trout Unlimited or other groups that have interest in preservation of the wild outdoors really have an important role in promoting ecological thinking across a diverse, and hopefully politically powerful, group of citizens.
I think there were probably a hundred or more types of mushrooms at the show. They were classified as Edible, Maybe edible (don't taste so good), and Poisonous. Some of the edible ones look quite a bit like the poison ones. Some of the ones that are edible don't look like something you would eat...
I took a single picture of this huge fungus that is classified as edible choice. It looked and felt nice. I wonder what it would be like cooked..
Hericium Ramosum
Colloquial Name: Delicate Hericium, Comb Tooth
Edibility: Edible, choice
Time of Year: Fall and winter
Habitat: Solitary or several on fallen hardwood branches,
logs, and stumps (mostly live oak).
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I won a drawing for a mushroom farm at the show.
Well not exactly a farm it's a plastic bag with straw or wood and oyster mushroom spores inside of it. This is a picture of it after I hung it up.
I was going to just set it on the ground but Betsy thought it might turn into a slug hotel so I made the tripod affair to keep it away from them.
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I didn't grow these chantrelles. I bought them at the 25th Street Market. They are really nice and 3 something a pound (cheaper than some plain old white mushrooms). They made a nice cream of mushroom soup, using green onions, a little fresh garlic, olive oil, soy milk, salt and pepper, nutrional yeast, crunchy toasts and a little fresh parsley for color.
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These are just a few random shots...
