Saturday, April 30, 2011

Mushrooms


Today I was happily weeding in my front yard when I saw these cute mushrooms.  I don't think they would normally have caught my eye except for their golden color.  All day I have been looking for something gold to submit to Jillsy Girl's Color My World Challenge and these little beauties were perfect.

Below is a close up of part of that mushroom family.  And I love how that little pine cone was just perfectly positioned there as if it wanted to be shaded under the mushroom umbrella too.

3 comments:

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  2. those look good enough to eat! i wonder if they are edible?

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  3. So I asked my friend Ken who knows way more about mushrooms than I will ever know and this was his response:

    Well, it's hard enough to try to distinguish edibility with a mushroom in hand in the field, let alone from even a really nice photo. I can't There are a large number of little (mostly 1.5 inches or shorter probably) mushrooms that crop up, known as Little Brown Mushrooms or "LBM"s, that these might fall into. These include some halucinatory mushrooms, some very poisonous mushrooms, as well as many that are merely inedible. Many LBMs are hard to identify. Your mushrooms might fall into this class. I also can't tell from the picture if your mushroom has emerged from a persistent cup at the base, which might indicate the mushroom is an Amanita, some of which as you know are highly poisonous and some which are edible. If it is not really small, like the LBMs---say, taller than two or three inches---and lacks a cup, and especially if it is growing on or near decaying wood, it might be a fawn mushroom (Pluteus sp.), which are edible and tasty. The color of the mushrooms are sometimes variable and the same species sometimes changes color as it ages. Here is one picture, and if you google "fawn mushroom" you can find others:

    http://ih3.redbubble.net/work.3301913.3.flat,550x550,075,f.fawn-mushroom-pluteus-cervinus.jpg

    However, I don't advise anyone take any risky chances with mushrooms, especially gilled ones, since the stakes are so high.

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