Wednesday 2 October 2013

Cep-tober

Well, they've finally arrived; farewell September, hail and welcome Cep-tober. A search amongst Oaks revealed a fair few Ceps, all firm and maggot free and plenty were left, too small to pick. I could have picked them but it felt wrong, and a bit greedy as I had such a good haul anyway.

It wasn't just Ceps I was hunting today, I'm giving a talk on fungi tomorrow and although I've created a sheet with some poisonous, some edible, a couple a bushcraft and a couple of shamanic species on, that's in case the pickings were meager, I'd rather have some physical examples to illustrate my talk. The forest didn't let me down. I didn't collect any poisonous examples as I don't even like to handle them due to their fatal nature.  For the edibles I collected examples of Cep, Birch Bolete, Bay Bolete, Hedgehog, Parasol, Beefsteak, Puff Balls, Oysters and Deceivers. For bushcraft the Birch Polypore and King Alfred's Cake. Finally for shamanic the Fly Agaric and Liberty Cap. There were plenty of other species available too, but I'm only talking for a short while and I'm trying to show the main 3 fatal species and edibles which are hard if not impossible to misidentify, as the group are all novices when it comes to fungi. As long as the frost holds off we could be onto a good thing this season.

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