Fungi Friday - Slowly Starting to Be Fall

Here are some finds for #fungifriday by @ewkaw

It has been raining quite a bit here lately. Whenever it rains in summer and fall keep an eye out for bird's nest fungi. They are everywhere on the forest floor and quite small. The little eggs that are revealed after the top dries up are the actual spores and they are spread by raindrops when they land into the cups.

One of my friends farther north found a load of these pear shaped puffballs.

Farther south they only start growing next month. I'm hoping to find a huge batch like this. They are quite tasty and you can freeze them for storage after cooking them.

Here is some orange peel fungi. Quite bright and fairly common when it is warm and humid around here. It is also technically edible but bland and tasteless.

Here is something that looks like an oyster mushroom, but it is not quite a mock oyster. I believe this is Crepidotus mollis aka Soft Slipper Mushroom. Some guides say its poisonous other say its edible. I stay away from them and they are also quite small to harvest for a meal.

Here is the start of a polypore. It might be a turkeytail but at this size who knows what it might end up being.

This appears to be true turkeytail. True turkeytail tends to grow in horizontal planes like this. Many of the other lookalikes tend to curl upwards.

This appears to be slightly old and dried out crown tipped coral. Sadly I didn't get to it in time as these are one of my favorite mushrooms for taste and texture. They are tricky to forage though, if you get to them just a bit too late they taste bitter. You need to find them about a day or two after they have started growing.

Now for some LBMs (little brown mushrooms). There are thousands of different mushroom species in this category that probably can only be identified by DNA testing lol.

That's all for now, thanks for looking :-)