Mushrooms - to eat or not to eat, that is the question

Hi,
Spotted amidst the pine needles on the track up to Te Mata peak.
Would love to forage & gobble, but the fear factor is high when unable to identify properly.
Can anyone identify these?
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php? [IMG]http:///Users/paulmaberly/Desktop/the trail up to Te Mata Peak.JPG[/img]

that link does not work, your facebook settings must be set to private

I know the feeling!
A few years ago a friend gave me what she described as a Horse mushroom. It was the size of a dinner plate and I baked it with butter and garlic and served it up with dinner. It was only as everyone had finished that it occurred to me that I might have poisoned the entire family as I had NO idea what that thing was.
Since then I have vowed to not eat any foraged mushrooms. Its just too risky. I seem to remember a news report that several Europeans die every autumn from eating the wrong wild mushrooms.

I wouldn't touch any with a white spore print but don't think they are all poisonous just that the most dangerous ones are, Amanita phalloides (death cap) 1 teaspoon is fatal and is found growing near oaks usually has a greenish or olive-brown cap but can have whitish cap.

I think anyone collecting fungi should get themselves a good book, some of them you don't get a second chance.

Interesting topic. I have read somewhere that young puffballs are edible, but I believe that if you don't get educated from childhood, by a grown up who knows what they are picking, then it is best to treat all fungi with great caution. Mushrooms however have a warm earthy smell and the best way to educate your nose, is to buy the cultivated ones and get to know the smell. That's usually a good way to be sure. Mushrooms have smell as above and toadstools for instance smell a bit like sickly lollies/perfume like.
And Horse mushrooms are just large "normal" mushrooms. Biggest one I ever found was in England and three of us shared it for breakfast. it was as big as a large dinner plate.

Yes young puffballs are edible but there is another one that looks just like it that's poisonous [xx(]

there is no other way to learn mushroming then to actually go out with someone who knows what they're doing and learn from them.

Even learning from scratch through books won't be good enough IMO. Books are a good tool once you have some experience collecting mushrooms you already know, and you want to widen your options.

Asking people through any website is just asking for trouble.

Who in their right mind would take the risk of telling a stranger that the mushroom on the supplied picture is without any doubt edible?? i would not.

I found these the other day, they look very much like an oyster mushroom, especially when I looked at the underside. Although not growing on wood, that place is where we have had wood waiting to be cut up for a while.

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kai;513253 wrote: I found these the other day, they look very much like an oyster mushroom, especially when I looked at the underside. Although not growing on wood, that place is where we have had wood waiting to be cut up for a while.

And that's just the trouble. They may well be oyster mushrooms, but unless you know and without a shred of doubt, then it simply isn't safe to assume.

Well, I have to admit that when we lived in Norway we went foraging many weekends and did it by the book.
There are more varieties of mushrooms there than any other plants
We used to come home loaded with different varieties and we found the books really good and useful, but maybe more comprehensive than here
All that stopped after Chernobyl as small plants comprising mainly water ie mosses, berries and mushrooms had really high radiation counts.
I mentioned the mosses not because we ate them but because the reindeer, moose etc live off them and some communities relied solely on these as their meat source

You were very brave Muri!
I've just watched River Cottage winter is coming (or something) Hugh goes out mushrooming with his foraging pal and finds several promising mushrooms which turn out to be poisonous to varying degrees. I'm leaving it to the experts!

We have been picking up to 4 buckets of mushrooms a day, and have peeled and frozen a lot, and eaten mushrooms nearly every day, and given away to all our friends, but then we know what we are picking, and what not to touch. The only downside is one of our young cattle showed signs of facial exema, so had to put zinc boluses into all the young ones, and they are now all doing really well, even the one with the signs of exema.

This the the 1 St year we are living in a LSB so everything is new till next year. Anyway, mushroom. We found heaps of them around the paddock, dare not eat them, a neighbour came over telling us its edible, so they came with buckets the next day and harvest it all, next week I pick it myself and took it over, and there they are alive smiling n happy to have some more. So next year, the mushrooms are mine. Lol.

PabloM, on the other hand, has not been since he first posted!

Peterkit, have you been shown the difference between Field Mushrooms, and the other ones that have white tops and white gills, which I understand are poisonous? Puffballs are edible too, but you've got to be rather hungry to bother with them, Inkcaps might also be edible, but some people can be allergic to them (.
When you have put on enough lime to make the soil right for pasture, your mushroom problem will disappear (.