Mushroom Monday - Fall Mushroom Season
Published on HivePostify by @sketch.and.jam · Mon Aug 10 2026
It is nearly fall here and the hot rains of summer are bringing out the mushrooms all over the place for this #mushroommonday
While walking with my daughter in the evening she spotted some ink caps.
I believe these are scaly ink caps with a Latin name of Coprinopsis variegata. They are edible and kind of have a raddishy smell/taste to them.
One word of caution on these is to only boil them. If you pan fry them they will melt and turn into black goo. Also you can't ingest alcohol after eating them for a while as like most ink caps they have a weird element in them that reacts negatively to alcohol causing a bad stomach ache.
Our nest find was some kind of meadow mushroom lookalike.
It was bursting out of some wood chips by a tree in the shape of heart.
Now my daughter is becoming accustomed to picking them. She is pointing out the bulb at the base. The black gills kind of suggest a meadow mushroom but I couldn't see the stem ring and it seemed quite a bit smaller than most meadow mushrooms. Thus we left it to spread spores at the location rather than try cooking it.
Now for a familiar common sight around here.
These are deer shield mushrooms with a Latin name of Pluteus cervinus.
They must be growing out of a root as deer shield grow from wood and have the center brow marking on the caps with white gills and white stems. If they were much taller they could be confused with beech rooters which are also edible. They are a delicate mushroom but the stem is often too tough to each and their taste is very mild as to almost not be noticed. Thus I rarely harvest these for eating and just three barely make it worth cooking in a meal.
More soon, I'm hoping to find something exciting like chicken of the woods or lion's mane soon as we enter into fall. That's all for now, thanks for looking :-)
Tags: #mushroommonday#mushrooms#foraging#nature#photographylovers#dna#cch