Gary showed me where these amanitas were. I think he felt bad for harvesting the beautiful King Boletus that I had planned to photograph that very morning.
Walking the dogs in the morning gives us a chance to observe nature. I’ve been itching to take my camera sans dogs and shoot some photos of the different types of mushrooms. I got my chance on Thanksgiving Day during a brief break in the rain.
If the sun hadn’t been shining, I would have walked right past these without noticing them.
I found it interesting that these little brown mushrooms grew in a circle around a Eucalyptus tree in someone’s front yard.
At first these blended in with the gravel. My wife says, “They look like gravel.” I says, “They are gravel,” and scraped them with my boot. Ooops.
Another type of mushrooms growing on old gravel road.
Chanterelles…the only type of wild mushroom we will eat, except for the King Boletus, but in my humble opinion, the Chanterelle is the best.
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Another chanterelle. This mushroom is so tasty, if you know where to find them, you don’t usually tell anyone else. I protected my spot by harvesting all I could find.
Mushroom growing on very old tree trunk
King boletus, a few days old
You can tell how wet it’s been here.
A big bunch of mushrooms growing on a log. I wish I knew if I could eat them.
More mushrooms on a log
It’s amazing how many kinds of mushrooms there are if you just open your eyes in a wet wooded area.
- Salamander climbing over a branch
These mushrooms appeared abundantly in an area logged about a year ago.
Ironically these cultivated logs have been staring blankly at me for over two years. I don’t know how many 5/16″ holes I drilled, tapped spore plugs into, and melted a wax seal on, but it was a bunch of them…I had to keep letting the drill bit cool down.
There are Terry’s successful mushroom logs. He probably followed the directions.
A real beauty
A look at a shitaki from the top
Looks like these logs popped out a bunch of tasty mushrooms.
My daughter introduced me to Terry after meeting him and his wife at the coffee shop she worked at when she lived in the San Francisco Bay area. “Dad, this guy is into Top Bar Beekeeping AND mushroom logs.” (A rare combination, I thought.) “I’ve got to meet him.” He often sent packets of bee information to me. One of those packets contained Slovenian Beehive art. The photo of bees crawling in and out of a carved face as a front of a hive led to my Bee Beard log hive.
For more very fascinating mycelium check out the hugelkulture bed.
Terry mentioned Paul Stamets. I love the guy. Okay, I don’t really know him, but give a listen to this TED talk and you will love him too.
Adventures in Natural Beekeeping 