That's huge! We've been getting those big lawn mushrooms, too. Do you know what kind they are?

I don't, but I should, since I have a good mushroom field guide. But I didn't try to look this one up because it didn't have any distinguishing features. I should have at least determined the color of the spores.

Earlier this month I found a few of these Maitake mushrooms. Commonly called Hen of the Woods; they're delicious. Usually 8 to 12 inches across growing attached to oak roots.

Ron

Only in a store or can for eating. Have no knowledge of good or bad wild ones.

These were really tiny, you can see the leaves & moss for comparison.

There were huge orange ones growing around my Yoshino cherry out front this summer. Have no idea what they are but I thought they were going to destroy my lawnmower a time or two. I would never eat wild mushrooms unless I found some morels. I know what they look like, don't know any other variety.

These are great! I've never seen nor heard of Ron's (I'm glad he knows what he's doing), and never saw Casey's first one, but we have ones like the second pic. So tiny!

I've never found a morel, but so many people rave about them. My DH and I ate something once that looks like coral, and I've been told it's foolproof, but the flavor (which was so-so) didn't outweigh my nervousness. LOL

So I don't eat the wild ones, but I enjoy photographing them.

And the next day they opened... (someone had kicked all of the others to smithereens)

Funny you should ask about mushrooms ... I had just read a friend's blog about the mushrooms she's finding in the Tongass forest in Alaska where she works part of the year.

Here is a link that might be useful: Mushroom Eruption in the Tongass National Forest

The mushrooms in the Tongass National Forest are beautiful!! So are everyone else's here.

I have some tiny button mushrooms in my front yard. They have never been here before. I usually get a large cluster of mushrooms - usually in the spring - that grow on the roots of my maple tree.

In the woods where we ride our horses, there are some white mushrooms the size of bowling balls!! I don't know what kind they are, but would love to know if anyone knows what they are.

Great link, Jodi! That amanita muscaria is wickedly beautiful. It's on the cover of my field guide.

Murraysmom, your bowling balls sound like giant puffballs. Here's a little video.

Giant Puffballs

I've found, picked and eaten both morel mushrooms and black trumpet mushrooms this year.

Morels in the wild:

Morels ready to eat:
{{gwi:370962}}

Black trumpet mushrooms in the wild:

Black trumpet mushrooms ready to eat:

Also various others in the yard:

Puffballs

Unidentified white gilled field mushroom:

A faerie ring of the above mushrooms:

Bright red gilled mushrooms:

A mushroom from the Boletus family (the family containing the porcini mushroom)

Another Boletus-type:

And an assortment of others from a hike in Maine

Those dark orange ones above look kind of like the ones I found under my cherry tree, they were huge...maybe 7 inches across and hard. They made an awful noise when I tried to mow them down with the mower.

The puffballs are really startling when you hit a older one with the mower. They basically explode into a cloud of brownish/blackish spores.

Wow--you have wonderful photo ops, Bob! Great that you take advantage of them. I'm thinking maybe I'd have more mushrooms if I stopped picking them and instead photographed them in their natural state. I have a telephoto macro lens that might come in handy here. We'll see what appears after this week's rain.

Those black ones you eat might have been in my son's yard. I didn't look closely. The black color looks rather forbidding. I wouldn't have eaten them anyway . . . I guess this is where my city background shows.

Also, when my cousin Terry had unexplained liver failure, the first thing they asked is if she had eaten wild mushrooms. (She had, but so had several other people, and they didn't get sick.)

While I was serving the Risotto I made using them, my wife's uncle said that the French call them "Trumpets de mort" or trumpets of death. Aaaah! He then explained its not because they are deadly, its because they look like tiny trumpet coming out of the ground such that the dead might be playing them.

Before this year I had never picked and eaten any wild mushrooms, but after finding morels in my yard and finding out how easy they are to identify, I had to try them.

This post was edited by bob_cville on Tue, Oct 21, 14 at 20:39

There was once a couple in my neighborhood who were longtime and active members of the local and regional mushroom clubs. At the specified times of the year, they spent their weekends with fellow club members doing hikes and gathering specimens. Both had graduate degrees in science fields and were considered expert amateur mushroom gatherers.

They don't live in my neighborhood anymore. Or anywhere else. They tempted fate once too often.

I personally won't eat any kind of mushroom that hasn't come to me through the commercial food supply chain. It's not worth the risk to me.

edit to add

Those who eat wild mushrooms, do be careful!

This post was edited by snidely on Tue, Oct 21, 14 at 22:35

Thanks snidely. I think mushroom gathering is a sort of slippery slope, with morel mushrooms being the "gateway drug." They are so easy to conclusively identify and are delicious, but they are only available picked in the wild, and only found for a couple weeks out of the year. So you find them, enjoy them, and then wait an entire year for them to return. All the time being tempted and taunted by other more plentiful and more prolific mushrooms.

I think the couple you reference likely had success, studied more, learned more, had more success, and became more confident of their identifying skills, and moved step-by-step away from the safe and easy mushrooms into the larger, trickier mushroom families. Until at last they became just a smidge too confident.

In elementary school I remember reading a book on mushroom identification, and in the "about the author" section it noted that the book was published posthumously because the the author -- a renowned expert on mushroom identification -- had died from mushroom poisoning.