Early Summer Mushroom and Plant Identification

Summer is finally here and with it comes some beautiful and useful mushrooms and plants that you can learn to identify with the help of Mushroom Wonderland. Aaron Hilliard, the host, as well as the VP of the Kitsap Peninsula Mycological Society, mycology educator, and YouTube creator takes us down the forested path to ID some of the mushrooms and plants along the way.
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We will not accept any responsibility for negligence or accidental ingestion of poisonous mushrooms or plants. These videos are not intended to be a definitive field guide, but rather a starting point to become familiar with habitat, Everyone is encouraged to do their own studies, acquire literature or internet resources to safely and confidently identify wild foods before they eat them. When eating a new wild mushroom, it is advised to start with only a small amount, and make sure that it is fresh and that it is cooked thoroughly. Some mushrooms do not agree with certain individuals, and this is typically discovered on a case-by-case basis. Even the most edible of mushrooms contain compounds that can be tough for the human digestive tract to handle. Some “edible” species have small amounts of certain toxins that will easily break down with cooking. Fungi contains a molecule known as chitin that is the same thing that makes the exoskeleton of shellfish so hard, and cannot be broken down by the human digestive system, so it is another good reason to thoroughly cook mushrooms. All the ideas expressed in the comments should be taken with a large grain of salt. I don’t think there is any other field of study or science that has more misinformation being shared so freely and boldly. Mushroom Wonderland and Aaron himself have no opinion and neither encourage nor discourage the use of mushrooms containing mind-altering compounds. These mushrooms contain powerful chemicals and should be treated with a high level of responsibility. Any video topics on the habitat, natural distribution, and morphological features of psychoactive mushrooms portrayed on this channel are purely for scientific and educational purposes.
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hey how’s it going everybody welcome to another episode of mushroom Wonderland where me and my dog Gunner head out into the forest to discover what kind of wild mushrooms are growing out here right now it is late spring early summer it’s beautiful and it’s been moist here in western Washington so there’s a lot of mushrooms growing Trail side and on this channel I help to describe whether they’re edible poisonous hallucinogenic medicinal or have other uses fungi or mysterious and they’re awesome that way there’s so many uses and uh they’re just magical cuz they just pop up wherever they want and they dis here and they come and go and they’re just so beautiful and fun to study so that’s what I do here on this channel mushroom Wonderland make sure to hit subscribe if you’re not already and let’s head into the forest to discover what kind of mushrooms are growing wild out here in early summer of [Music] 2024 welcome to mushroom Wonderland [Music] so this is an interesting mushroom here it’s pretty dark colored and it would be easy to miss or mistake it for a rock when you pick it there’s some surprising features under here if you’re not really familiar with mushroom morphology but this has a sponge surface underneath so rather than gills it’s going to have a sponge and it really just feels like a sponge there’s a lot of mushrooms that have this sponge and they’re kind of generically lumped into a group called bites so this is technically a bolit that is growing in the springtime and if you notice it’s got this maroon colored stype which is kind of like rhubarb or something like that and it even has this strange like fibrous texture to it and uh it’s very lumpy on the cap and dark colored and so this one kind of a mouthful of a name this one zeris atro peruas or the Deep Purple bit but it’s also could be a mouthful if you wanted to cook these up and eat them because they’re totally edible um sometimes you’ll find a nice grouping of them and I’ve had them when they were young and really Stout and fresh this one’s kind of old that that sponge surface is kind of mushy and there’s some bugs in there so but you could definitely still eat this some people like to powder them and it’s a beautiful mushroom and uh I don’t know they can have a tendency to get a little bit slimy when you cook them so if you put them into gravy or a soup a really good way to use these spring boletes so the zero Chamis atro peruas or the Deep Purple B growing in the spring a decent edible and uh if you found enough of these you know take them home and slice them up and put them in your gravy with your dinner uh really delicious edible [Music] right here we got some beautiful spring bite type mushrooms there’s another one right there it’s got this pinkish color and this kind of like cracked looking cap you see that texture on there there’s a younger one here and these guys I’m going to leave this bigger one but I’m going to pull this one up so we can look underneath at the sponge surface this one zero chis def fractus an edible spring mushroom and so you see it has a sponge underneath that’s kind of yellowish these ones are getting old been chewed on by a bug a little bit but um it’s a sponge instead of gills and these are edible you could cook that up it could make a nice little meal if uh if you wanted to try them out these are totally edible but you see that pinkish color there look at that weird so that’s where a was eating on it or maybe a slug with having some dinner and uh cool mushrooms here in the springtime [Music] oh wow look at all these beautiful culta penus or culta penus this one uh these poly pores that are thin and they just grow out of the ground like this mic risal so growing with the trees around here making spores for a long time really really tough mushrooms no good for humans we don’t eat them they call them tiger’s eye in Europe here I think we call you know the the accepted American common name is the fairy stool or something like that so really cool uh nice little fruiting of these culta penus meaning um perennial they come back every year but sometimes bigger frings than others it’s a good spring for them and uh yeah they’ll just be sitting here dumping spores for you know a month or two well Into Summer they’ll dry up and just be crispy here on the side of the trail provided people don’t pick them all way it’s okay to pick one or two but a nice flush like this I know what they are I don’t need to flip it over so I’m going to leave these here just a beautiful Trailside um attraction you know get people’s curiosity going about the fungal world [Music] wow as I look right in here you see some beautiful conk fungi growing on a tree here it appears to be sweating and the sweat is actually called guttation it’s just water that’s being pushed out of the fruiting body but these These are brown rot decayers they’re eating these logs these are known as fomitopsis mountsier our Western red belted conch beautiful mushroom these ones are young and fresh and they can grow for years I would say that this fruiting body is a bit older than these younger ones have kind of just fruited recent more recently they’re doing their job great they’re taking on a lot of water it’s been raining and so they’re gutting like that and it can look really magical sometimes these are a great fungi for Ecology they are a sapro that eats the decaying wood it turns it into these cubical Stacks it just eats all the cellulose out of here so doing a great job in the forest not really of any use to humans maybe the most common fungi you’ll see in the forest of the Pacific Northwest or really anywhere for that matter they just are growing on Connor for wood everywhere but uh a beautiful addition to the forest a really tough one hard to get off of the log just leave these behind you know some artists will paint on really big ones but um I don’t have any use for them so just going to admire them from afar and leave them here to do their job [Music] in Spring we have a certain set of mushrooms that come up when the cold ground gets warmer and wet you know fungi really like it around the 50 degree Mark uh soil to start really growing a lot of spring mushrooms need that warmth before they’re going to come out of like dormy or just their mycelial state to start producing fruiting bodies and then as it gets hot and dry in the middle of summer we’re going to see less and less mushrooms there are definitely some edible forageable out here the oyster mushroom is a great spring mushroom so I’m going to head into the certain patch of woods in hopes of finding a flush of oyster mushrooms we can have a look at those and um see what else we see growing down here deeper into the forest off the beaten path um because you have to kind of get out there to find mushrooms in the spring in the fall these very Trails I’m like kicking over mushrooms cuz has something to do with these trees going into dorcy or gathering energy for winter time and and I think the fungi take advantage of that and that’s when you see a lot of the Ecto micar risal fungi the fungi that Associates with trees it often flushes in the fall right before these trees are about to go into winter so there’s some sort of a relationship there not exactly sure what it is but um just giving you a heads up there’s a lot of mushrooms out here but there’s going to be a lot more in the Autumn come late September and into October tons of mushrooms we’re still finding them out here so let’s keep walking in the woods and seeing what kind of mushrooms are growing out here said wow I just spotted this log like that was not planned talking about coming to find oyster mushrooms but look at this a big red Alder I could tell because it’s just so straight and long has fallen here in the forest and it’s got this flush of mushrooms growing on it and these are commonly called your oyster mushrooms so these ones have been here for a while they are um getting kind of dried out let me pick one you can see oh yeah they’re just writhing with bugs and stuff but they have gills underneath and the gills run all the way down to the base when they start to get kind of rotten you know you can get food poisoning from eating rotten food so resist eating rotten mushrooms but plotus pulmonarius is kind of generically what we’re calling this although that was described from elsewhere these ones sequence out to a different unique species but um you know some pretty big ones but it looks like we’re just a little bit late to the game for this particular flush and so this tree had a beautiful flush nobody came and harvested it but you could even take these and grow them on Sawdust pellets you know like tager Grill pellets or whatever um at home or just wood chips um so oyster mushroom really easy to ID decent edible and I see something interesting right here on the end of this log we have oyster mushrooms but we also have what are known as turkey tails you can see why looks like a cartoonish turkey tail that a kid might draw around Thanksgiving time and these are known as tdes Versa color so they’re going to have these white pores underneath you see little tiny holes where their spores fall out of and that is the main indicator of tdes Versa color that in Junction with these concentric color Rings usually Browns and oranges Reds even Grays blues and sometimes blacks but these are a pretty typical color pattern for tedes Versa color here and they’re very uh variable and that’s why they get the name versacolor so many different colors um but they’re very Woody you can’t eat them but you can take them home and make a tea out of them people make tinctures and all kinds of different products out of turkey tail some people even will uh like smash these into a pulp and make paper out of them so you can make paper out of turkey tails they are the most highly uh studied Mushroom in the world for medicinal properties for cancer fighting benefits if you ever heard Paul stams talk about his mother’s fight with cancer and she used this turkey tail in conjunction with other cancer therapies and the Cancer all but went away so uh beautiful little mushroom these ones are a little dry but that’s fine they’d be great to forage and put into a tea add a little bit of local honey I like to put a little lemon zest in the tea and have yourself some nice Nature tea and you’ll feel better after you do this for a little while it’s immuno regulating and boosting it’s an antioxidant and uh it’s just all around great medicinal mushrooms so turkey tail or tedes Versa color if you see these go ahead and gather them you could just dry them and process them later I have another video where I make uh instant tea bags out of them so um yeah they’re pretty common too so you know if you just find a couple like that and leave them behind that’s fine because you’ll find more if you’re in the woods for very long at all [Music] [Music] [Music] right here’s a neat mushroom this one’s looking kind of old and anit but it’s very very magical looking here in the forest this one ganad Derma applanatum or the artist conch and uh it gets this white pore surface underneath that you can scratch and it bruises an artist do beautiful work on these even my daughter has done an awesome uh art work on one of them that’s still on my shelf today these grow all across the country yeah doing its job see that just broke down this wood is probably all disintegrating because of this fungus and this is just the Fring body so this has been around for quite a while they grow for years and this one has no doubt let off a lot of spores eaten a lot of wood and it’s moved on to a different log where uh a fresher specimen might be fruiting I’m going to leave that one here but kind of a beautiful addition to the forest you know it’s tough on a single walk in the forest to get a comprehensive look at what fungi is growing out here so I’ve came across some other mushrooms in the past week that I have videoed so I’m going to show those clips right now we’re going to jump all over the place to see some different mushrooms growing in different habitats and we’ll come back here to the forest let’s check those out all right here’s a bit of an urban setting and look at these mushrooms popping up all right here very kind of brownish gold cap when I flip it over ew slug trails and stuff but they have these chalk chocy Brown gills related to your grocery store button mushroom this is a common kind of spring early summer mushroom the agaricus Augustus or the prince these are not the most beautiful specimens but you can often find these in urban settings right here in the city growing in Beauty Bark you can see there’s more kind of coming up here sometimes you’ll see a big shrump and there’ll be a large one coming up very hearty mushrooms very thick um and delicious these are good edible mushroom they smell like almonds um you know almond extract and uh really good edible but right here growing along this path as you can see Gunner passed by he didn’t pee on these but there’s a good chance other dogs have peed on these so I’m going to make sure to wash my hands and not eat these ones be aware of that when you’re in the city and another thing I noticed is these potato bugs they love to get in there we call them potato bugs or roly poy what do you call them where you’re from anyways for some reason you know even young large buttons If you look on the cover of David Aurora’s famous mushro Bible mushrooms demystified it on the cover is this mushroom the prce and sometimes the buttons are big and fat but sometimes I’ll cut them open they’ll be totally unopen but still somehow there’s roly poy or potato bugs inside of them so a nice little fruiting of them it’s a little bit dry had it been raining more I think a couple of large fruiting bodies would have came up but instead there’s five or six smaller more dried out ones these ones are way past their Prime and then we come across one other Urban kind of mushroom these ones the fairy ring mushroom these ones aren’t really growing in too much of a fairy ring but this one marasmus or 80s so in France they really like to eat these they have kind of an umet cap irregular margin these whitish to kind of fleshy colored Gill color and growing in lawns you can see they got this little umbo see that little bump in the middle that’s called a umbo and uh they’ll often grow in clusters and clumps and a big fairy ring again beware dogs pee on these areas so you might not want to eat these although these are also a good edible a a forgeable mushroom here in the spring and uh These are nice some nice specimens you know these younger ones I’ve seen them dried uh in Europe they sell them dried they’re really quite a delicacy uh in France tough little mushrooms tough mushrooms you know the the stems might even be too Woody but you know you can go to big soccer fields and stuff baseball fields and these will be everywhere huge rings of them really cool right down here on the side of this Trail where this tree fell down I see some smooshed mushrooms look at that these whitish colored mushrooms with dark gills these ones uh known as candio mes candol anus so um a sap probic mushroom that has dark spores so it might look like a salocin mushroom you know hallucinogenic mushroom or whatever but kolio mcy in edible not really much in the literature about people wanting to eat these but if you look at the edge of the cap it has these little appendages hanging off of it they call that a appendiculate margin and they’re always this kind of just mauve tan color lighter colored caps and they’re very like hgra and as they dry out when they um when it’s dry out and they have these dark purple brown spores so CIO mces in the saal AER inedible but growing this time of year so if you see those with the dark Spore print good chance that it’s a candio mces these little guys got clobbered by the by the falling branches so anyways let’s keep going into the woods [Music] [Music] what’ you see buddy what’ you see what’s that let’s pick it and have a look whoa look at that phop porus a gild bolite this one very bright yellow gills there’s quite a few Guild bites which is kind of weird you know but um this one inedible they only usually grow singularly usually at the end of winter here we are going into summer and it’s growing so yeah it’s a spring mushroom pH aorus there’s a couple species but this one’s pretty common in the Pacific Northwest and uh yeah Guild B eats like idious and these and uh there’s a there’s a few others that I can’t come up with right off the top of my head but kind of this grayish brown with black spots not really a very attractive looking mushroom and so we’re going to leave that there but kind of cool phorus species this is also the time of year in these Conifer forests that we find monotropic plants so that’s plants that don’t need chlorophyll a long ago they ditched their ability to photosynthesize they typically live in these dark Forest settings where not typically a lot of sun comes in so they were struggl in for sunlight so they decided they were going to attach to A fungi and then feed off of it Like A Parasite so these are interesting plants and they’re very beautiful a lot of them are in the same genus as like blueberries and stuff axium um but they could be growing Trail side like right here we see some of them coming up and we’re going to take a look at all these different little monotropic plants that I see growing along here because a lot of times people think are those fungi and no they’re not they’re actually plants but but they’re parasitizing certain fungi so finding these mushrooms or so finding these plants can sometimes lead you to good mushrooms in the Autumn but in the spring and early summer is when we’re going to see these monot tropes popping up they’re all over the place let’s have a look at some of them this is a very interesting plant that grows here in the Pacific Northwest it’s actually commonly called The Gnome plant is a Moher trof that is uh parasitizing A fungi Underground so I’m not exactly sure which fungi but the gnome plant doesn’t contain chlorophyll so it’s got this pinkish color which is really kind of neat here’s a whole nest of really young ones that are starting to pop through the Moss and they’re not fungal although you might think so if you just see these on the forest floor often associated with russula suis maybe matataki some tricoma these uh plants actually grab onto the to the fungal structure underground the mycelium and they derive their nutrients um from the symbiotic relationship between the fungi and these trees big Douglas fur tree here so a nice grouping of these like you know you might call it a nest of gnome plants uh this is a monotypic Genus so it’s only got one species in the genus pretty cool this is another one of those Moher trops this one called pineap another mohed tro not using Sunshine for its energy it’s it’s just a parasitizing fungi underground it grows these really unique looking clusters of pinkish and yellowish flowers so this one related uh in a way to The Gnome plant and the ghost pipe because of its microheterotrophic nature uh just leeching off of other organisms for its uh food has been working for a really really long time for these so really cool one pine sap so those are super cool it’s just crazy how um Nature has found ways to adapt and overcome and all of these complex relationships and I feel like we probably just barely know the half of it uh if we’ve even scratched the surface at all so monotropic plants just another lifestyle of an organism here on Earth that is fascinating to me and I love bringing this stuff to you guys here on mushroom Wonderland um I’m going to be teaching some introductory mological courses at Olympic College in brem and so if you’re in the area it’s only like $79 a person it’s three Wednesday nights the last three Wednesdays in July and that’s just for summer quarter and if it goes well we’re going to do fall and just keep going and build a myology course at Olympic College so I’m really excited to be able to do this I was referred through the mological society I am not an academic myologist so we’re just going to stay really introductory talking about what is fungi the history of micology um identifying wild mushrooms and how they grow cultivation and ethnomycology so it should be really cool just go to Olympic College just Google that and continued education so these are non-credit courses but uh just for Community involvement and people who have an interest in mushrooms it’s now available here in Kitsap County Top by Yours Truly I’m looking forward to it so super stoked if you want to come on that Journey with me and we’re going to learn a lot I’ve been working so hard on this curriculum so uh going to be super cool so please do that let’s keep going wow we’re just walking down the trail came to this log look at this amazing fuzzy fungi with a bunch of metabolites coming out of it this is like fungal urine kind of wow it’s very soft and this stuff contains all kinds of unknown chemicals I don’t even know what this fungus is but I just think it’s cool we call that gation so far more colorful than the uh fomitopsis mounier back there this uh fungi is excreting a lot of metabolites and and you can just see how this fungi is climbing on its substrate growing on this Moss really interesting I’m not sure exactly what this is I’ll put it into I naturalist and I’ll plug a name in here if I find something out but just thought that was really cool to see this gutting so much it looks like it’s really loving it out here so cool red Alder yeah check this out on this little stick oh we’ve got a nice nice little fuing looks like four fuing bodies here so this little stick is infected with the fungus pispas tubet formus so there’s kind of a funny little joke on one of the identification forums where one of the uh moderators and a really really great uh amateur myologist Yan Wang has uh sequenced a whole bunch of these cuz they can look so different but they all come back as piece of piece to biformis so kind of a funny little deal whenever I find these I think of that and those Facebook posts but um you know there’s four of them here the piece of piece badius seems to be more of a winter mushroom and these ones you can find when the weather starts to warm up hence why they’re young and verile and fresh you see that porous surface under there these are just letting off a lot of spores beautiful little Fring of them I’m going to leave them here in the woods wow so right here we have a pretty interesting uh flush of little mushrooms well these might not be interesting to everybody but I think they’re pretty interesting these are a species of kosi um kassab fragilis and it’s actually a pretty rare mushroom that only fruits in a couple places in the country according to the website I naturalist and that’s a website where you can take observations photos of these mushrooms right here put a Geo location and nice uh detailed photos and uh then it can tell people uh online where these might grow here’s some of the younger ones they’ve got kind of this purplish reddish cap very beautiful and when I pick one and look underneath it’s going to have all kind of orange gills but these are going to get darker with age and eventually they’ll drop a pretty dark orange spor print we can see that leaf right there where the spores fell out of this one and landed on that leaf so there out here doing a good job there’s a pretty nice Fring of these and I know that these are Kos fragilis because I have sent in samples to be DNA sequenced and they came back as kosby fragilis although if that is the correct um itss barcode is still in question related to some deadly mushrooms so not one that you want to eat not known to be hallucinogenic I just thought they are kind of neat um and they’re growing really well here on the side of the trail so so these are sapro trophy meaning they’re just eating decaying matter growing here in the wood chips and they really like this you can see that kind of sweeping cap the way that cap shape is that’s pretty indicative of Kos and then they have these kind of swooping gills that get fat towards the bottom and then kind of fan out sort of like a an umbrella or something so I like these mushrooms I think they’re pretty cool um if you see them make sure that you upload them to in naturalist so that we know where all they’re growing yeah we keep [Music] going so if you hop over to mushroom DW wonderland. got these cool new shirts wait this is backwards isn’t it hold on there you go got these cool new shirts MW mushroom Wonderland got some mushrooms growing in there kind of slick kind of sleek so represent help support get yourself a t-shirt or a coffee mug or a hoodie over at mushroom DW wonderland. comom you could go to patreon and get a $5 membership and you can follow on all of the other social media platforms I’ll put all those links in the description again thanks for joining this episode of mushroom Wonderland watch out for the next one until the next time much love [Music]