Mushrooms

[R. Richard]

There are deaths every year among mushroom pickers who don't pay attention so good. That's part of the appeal, you can go dangerous game hunting in your back forty and not have to hire a professional hunter.

Anyway, this is a mushroom farm.

http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii177/1volupturary_manque/mushroomfarm.jpg

Some how, I had envisioned a mushroom farm as a dark, sinster cave, with gnomes tending the crop and the Wicked Witch of The West cackling in the background.

 

[ishtat]

I would quite happily take RR on a mushroom hunt. I know the good ones - and the not so good.

 

[SweetWitch]

Whaddaya mean "analogues"? Chanterelles are edible, damn tasty, and easy to recognise. White shrooms are farmed and available everywhere. King Bolete, Portabello, Rufous Milkcap and many more doesn't take an expert to spot. Especially not on a market.

For a self proclaimed tough guy, I find it amusing that you seem to be intimidated by fungi.

You forgot the tastiest 'shroom of all--the Midwestern Morel. I go gathering every spring and we gorge ourselves on them.

 

[R. Richard]

There's this folk tale that people learned what they could and couldn't eat by watching the animals. In the case of mushrooms, that's a bad idea. Squirrels will happily gorge themselves on mushrooms that would kill off a whole family of people.

Squirrels and toxic mushrooms[/b/]
By Ned Rozell

Fairbanks reader Darleen Masiak recently saw a red squirrel carrying an Amanita mushroom across her deck, presumably to stash it in its midden for the winter. She wanted to know how such a small mammal could survive after eating a mushroom that is toxic in large doses.

Fungus expert Gary Laursen of the University of Alaska Fairbanks confirmed that forest squirrels, both red and flying, cache Amanita mushrooms as well as other 'psychoactive' mushrooms that affect the central nervous system. He has dug into squirrel middens in the boreal forest and has found many samples of the mushrooms. He said a biologist recently contacted him and told he'd seen grouse digging up and eating mushrooms that would be toxic in large doses to humans.

"Many animals are known to go after the psychoactive mushrooms," Laursen said.

Brian Barnes, a physiologist and the director of the Institute of Arctic Biology, said a squirrel's liver might be able to detoxify the active agents in the mushrooms, but he knows of no evidence for this. Barnes studies arctic ground squirrels on Alaska's North Slope. He thinks young male ground squirrels might be eating lots of fungi, including potent ones, as they stir in their dens from hibernation. The squirrels often emerge from hibernation fatter than when they went in.

"I wonder if, while in their cold and completely dark hibernaculum, arctic ground squirrels are eating psychoactive mushrooms and whether they respond by experiencing hallucinations, feelings of well being, and laughing fits, as do humans (or so I'm told)," Barnes wrote in an email.

 

[john-the-author]

Some how, I had envisioned a mushroom farm as a dark, sinster cave, with gnomes tending the crop and the Wicked Witch of The West cackling in the background.

Oh, no, you were right, RR; they're just on break. They turned up the lights for the picture.

 

[Liar]

I never did trust squirrels.

Wanna take this outside?

 

[john-the-author]

Wanna take this outside?

<drinkspew!>

 

[matriarch]

That makes some sense. I had no idea where they got the mushrooms they sold. I was afraid that some minimum wage idiot was making the decision as to the safety of a mushroom.

I am finding this so hard to believe?!! You had no idea how mushrooms are farmed? By the millions of pounds, all over the world?

Wow!!

 

[matriarch]

Found this on a website called Hobby farms, on a page that shows you how to set up your own home grown mushroom 'farm', on some logs set in a frame. Amazing.

This was a 'be careful' notice:

Collecting Mushrooms Commercially
To collect wild mushrooms, you must be careful and know what you’re doing. It would be best to find a teacher who can give you the benefit of their experience, but mushroom collecting is not nearly as common in the United States as it is in Europe and Asia.

The truffles from France and the Porcini from Italy are two well-known collected mushrooms. One species that is particularly abundant in the woodlands of the United States are the Morels. As a commercial collector you must be a registered business, and you must let consumers know that the mushrooms are collected.

Mushroom farming, smallscale.

 

[SlickTony]

My husband and I used to have a friend from PA, which, as I was told, is famous for its mushroom farms. He worked in one of them.

I've always thought it would be lovely to find morels, but I don't think I live in morel country.

One scene in Willa Cather's My Antonia that has always stuck in my memory is when the protagonist's family is given a sack of dried objects by a Bohemian immigrant family they are trying to help. The mother keeps saying "Very good for cook," but doesn't have enough English to explain what they are or what you do with them. The protag's grandmother, with whom he was living, had no idea what the things were, didn't want to mess with them, and threw them in the stove. Later on he learned that they were dried mushrooms. The ignorance, the waste; I almost cried.

 

[glynndah]

Some how, I had envisioned a mushroom farm as a dark, sinster cave, with gnomes tending the crop and the Wicked Witch of The West cackling in the background.

She isn't allowed to cackle. It shrivels the 'shrooms.

 

[R. Richard]

She isn't allowed to cackle. It shrivels the 'shrooms.

Aha! But she is there.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Aha! But she is there.

But damned hard to find! I even went looking for her . . .


http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii177/1volupturary_manque/capadocia.jpg

 

[glynndah]

Aha! But she is there.

But damned hard to find! I even went looking for her . . .


http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii177/1volupturary_manque/capadocia.jpg

Yep. For some reason she's developed this silly fear of houses...

 

[R. Richard]

If you want to find the Wicked Wirch of the West, you need to think ruby slippers and yellow bricks.

 

[vrosej10]

God I miss mushroom hunting. I grew up in the country and we used to do it whenever the weather was right (mushrooming is not necessarily confined to autumn in Australia). We only go field mushrooms where I lived but they we so much better than the insipid things you get in the supermarket. When I discovered dried shittake mushrooms, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.

 

[SlickTony]

Mmmmm....shiitakes...

 

[Weird Harold]

If you want to find the Wicked Wirch of the West, you need to think ruby slippers and yellow bricks.

Nah, Ruby slippers will only lead you to a back lot in Hollywood, the real slippers in Oz were Silver.

 

[R. Richard]

Nah, Ruby slippers will only lead you to a back lot in Hollywood, the real slippers in Oz were Silver.

True, the silver slippers of the book were changed to red for the film, because they showed up better for the film.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Of course they were silver. The Wizard of Oz was a political tract and silver was the issue of the times.

 

[vrosej10]

Mmmmm....shiitakes...

They are pretty damn good. I love them in spaghetti bolognese (affectionately called spag bog in aussie. We do love it so much; it practically the national dish). It's a weird fusion cuisine thing but it works really well.

 

[Weird Harold]

Of course they were silver. The Wizard of Oz was a political tract and silver was the issue of the times.

You've been following your cousin Smoky around where the wildfires are burning cash crops, haven't you.

His biograhy doesn't paint L. Frank Baumas the type to recite political tracts to his children as bedtime stories -- bedtime stories which were where Dorothy's trip to OZ first took shape.

 

[DesertPirate]

I had mushrooms for dinner last night. I sliced up some big portabellos and onions, marinated them in olive oil, cracked peppercorns on them and threw them on the grill with a huge steak. If that will kill it's just going to have to kill me, because I'm not giving them up.

I'm in your group for sure!