The summer’s drought followed by the rain of the last few weeks has paved the way for a really good mushroom season. If the heat stays away, it looks like it will be a great mushroom season.
Mycologist Michael Krikorev advises to keep an open mind when you go out and pick mushrooms this autumn.
– Chanterelles are not everything. There are trumpet mushrooms, blood risks and kremlins.
But if you want to find chanterelles, you need to train your eye. A common mistake is to “set your eyes on yellow,” he says. Then you only see leaves. Better to set your eyes to orange instead.
Most common mistake
The most common mistake beginners make in the forest is to pick carelessly and, for example, pick a lot of chanterelles without checking carefully and then miss that you have also accidentally brought poisonous mushrooms with you. For example, toadstool, a deadly poisonous mushroom, thrives in the same environments.
– If you pick up all the funnel chanterelles without looking at each one, then it can go badly, says Krikorev.
You should look for this in the forest
If you pick mushrooms with tubes on the underside, such as Karljohan mushrooms for example, you can be sure, because there are no dangerous poisonous mushrooms in that group.
– Then we come to another group of mushrooms, we have a large group called shivlings. If you look at the underside, it has discs, and then you are immediately in a dangerous group, but also the group where there are most edible fungi. But all dangerous toadstools have discs.
One of the edible shivlings is a blood risk, and there are no inedible mushrooms that bleed a carrot-colored juice, Krikorev advises. Then if you break a mushroom that bleeds carrot-colored into burgundy juice, they are good edible mushrooms.
– They are delicious and have a musty taste. If you like strong taste, you should take blood risks. Karljohan also has a clear strong taste. If you don’t like it, you can try kremler, they are brittle and crispy and do not resemble mushrooms at all in texture.
The confusion mushrooms to watch out for
There are three common and dangerous mistakes you can make in the forest when looking for mushrooms. White fly agaric can easily be mistaken for snowball mushroom.
– Many mushroom pickers say that “I only pick chanterelles and mushrooms”. But there are 40 different mushrooms and some are mildly toxic. But the worst thing that can happen is getting white fly fungus.
The deadly poisonous insidious fly agaric can easily be mistaken for green cremla.
– It contains amatoxins which can cause permanent liver damage and death. The Green Kremlin is very similar in hat color.
Poison hooding can also be easily confused with variable tufting.
– If you want to pick mushrooms, learn these three poisonous mushrooms. Then you have come a long way. We have 5000 mushrooms in the forest and only 100 are edible mushrooms. We have about 5-6 deadly poisonous ones.