Mushrooms

As we took our morning walk yesterday, we saw dozens of mushrooms popping up all over the place at the Boggy Thicket. 

Well, not all over, but they were thick in the heavy shade between the driveway and the property line.

I know next to nothing about mushrooms.  I do know that I like to eat them, but even that only extends to about three of the half dozen or so varieties offered at our local supermarket.  The ones in the yard looked pretty good, so I went on line to try to determine if they were actually edible.

A Google search for wild mushrooms of Southeast Texas brings up a ton of hits.  99% of those are split evenly between two categories – Stoners discussing getting high from mushrooms found growing in cow patties, and folks complaining that there is no good on-line source to identify wild mushrooms.

The closest I came to a useful site was David Fisher's American Mushrooms.  I did not find anything there that seemed to match the  ones in my yard – and there is a lot said about poisonous varieties that look almost exactly like edible ones. 

Fisher does say that he will try to identify your mushrooms if you send him a picture on his Facebook site.  I might try that, but I suspect that they will be gone before I could get a reply.

Another site I found pointed out that most mushrooms are edible, but a significant percentage are not.  It warned:

 About one hundred cases of mushroom poisoning are officially reported each year in the United States, and probably many cases go unreported. While deaths rarely occur in the United States from eating any wild plants, more than 50 percent of those deaths in recent decades were caused by mushrooms.

Individuals react in different ways to edible mushrooms. What one person considers a delicacy may make another very ill. Allergic reactions  are common.

Those mushrooms in the yard are looking less appealing by the minute.