Fantastic day

[thebeard]

Originally Posted by Geoff23

Re: Fantastic day.

woah good haul. i'd give a lot just to go out and see that diversity of fungi at the moment, recently every time i go out i only see a few different species! thats quite incredible IMO. while i personally wouldn't pick that many, if you were considerate enough to leave some specimens then i don't see the problem, though there are a LOT of mushrooms there

[cybershot]

Originally Posted by thebeard

i'd give a lot just to go out and see that diversity of fungi at the moment

No point looking near Brighton then

[Geoff23]

Originally Posted by thebeard

woah good haul. i'd give a lot just to go out and see that diversity of fungi at the moment, recently every time i go out i only see a few different species! thats quite incredible IMO. while i personally wouldn't pick that many, if you were considerate enough to leave some specimens then i don't see the problem, though there are a LOT of mushrooms there

I have been unemployed for the last two months, and I have spent two days out of every three wandering around the countryside anywhere within forty miles of Brighton. I certainly don'y usually find a haul anything like that. What I did do was to find several interesting-looking locations (about five in this case) which were within sensible driving distance of each other, and on Wednesday I visited all of them and all of them had fungi growing all over the place. There really were more of most of those species there than we took, although I am now feeling guilty about taking two of the three chanterelles I found. They aren't rare nationally, but they aren't exactly common in Sussex either. I'm afraid my taste buds got the better of me when I set eyes on those. But Amethyst deceivers, field mushrooms, jersey cow boletes, puffballs, etc...? There were hundreds of them. Plenty of russulas as well, just most of them had already been destroyed by other wildlife. The reason I ended up with a haul like that was that this week, at least in Sussex, has been a fungus bonanza - there's LOTS growing. I'm going out again today, but my purpose, as it usually is, will be to attempt to learn as many new common and/or edible species that I can.

[thebeard]

i think the furthest i've gone in wild food is eating a few beechnuts and blackberries and the odd bolete. (anything starting with 'B' it seems:P). i think one of my main problems re the 'diversity' issue is that i don't have a car, so getting to locations from the centre of nottingham can be quite difficult

[TeresaW]

I'm in the middle of Norwich, and like you (the beard), I don't have a car, so getting out into the not-so-far-away countryside is still a bit of a problem for me. But I'm lucky enough to have a SSSI very close, in fact three minutes walk away, where I can spend hours. Also a tiny patch of beech woodland right next door, about an acre, used by dog walkers and hospital staff as a smoking area. Going off the well-trodden paths exposes some interesting finds. I'm sure there are other, albeit small sites to wander around in other towns and cities.

British nature does offer a bounty of wild food still, in spite of us snatching habitat for development. As a meat-eater myself I have no problem with wild meat. I eat venison, pheasant, rabbit etc myself, though bought from my local butcher, rather than shot. Shooting isn't a passtime that appeals to me. I don't know enough about fungi to be able to eat them, so it's commercial or home-grown mushrooms for me, but berries and fruit, nuts and herbs are fantastic addition to our supermarket diets.

As said before, as long as we respect nature enough to take ONLY what we need, then there is enough to go round, and more to come. It's the commercial exploitation that bugs the hell out of me

[FungiJohn]

Please can we keep this thread on track to avoid another 'hunting thread' episode. Thanks

John

[Geoff23]

Originally Posted by TeresaW

British nature does offer a bounty of wild food still, in spite of us snatching habitat for development. As a meat-eater myself I have no problem with wild meat. I eat venison, pheasant, rabbit etc myself, though bought from my local butcher, rather than shot.

The two I posted a picture of were roadkill.

And yes, a car helps. I need to get a new one, because the one I've got at the moment is a fuel-guzzler that somebody gave to me.

[thebeard]

despite all i said about diversity in this thread, i had a walk yesterday around somewhere which isn't usually brilliant for fungi, and it was crawling with different species. good day, i'll post some pics once i've done some spore prints etc