It’s 😎 Equinox Day 😎 — autumnal, here in the northern hemisphere; vernal, in the southern — and it’s been unusually humid (yesterday morning, a bank of fog rolled in around 10 and then rolled out about 15 minutes later), so I have another crop of boletus mushrooms, big — about 4 inches across — yellow-brown plates, here and there throughout my little garden strip. One of them, peeking out from the edge of the ivy:
From my 11/8/23 posting “There are boletes in the bottom of my garden”:
Actually, following on two days of extraordinarily humid weather locally, there are boletes [boletus mushrooms] everywhere in my little garden strip, from one end to the other.
They’re mushroom-forming fungi with small pores rather than gills on the (spore-bearing) underside of the mushroom. They mostly live in symbiotic relationships with trees or shrubs, but their little spores are easily wind-borne, and they seem to have established quite a beachhead on my patio. Sometimes even growing in the cracks between the patio tiles (where fine debris accumulates), which is seriously unsettling, the stuff of bad dreams.
September 22, 2024 at 2:55 pm |
Are these the edible ones ( Boletus edulis, Boletus aereus and Boletus barrowsii; bolets, Steinpilze, etc.) or the nasty kind?
September 22, 2024 at 3:09 pm |
It turns out to be hard to identify a random bolete. What I’ve got is pretty clearly neither any of the delicious species nor any of the truly nasty ones (because there are plenty of photos and identifying information about these), so presumably an unpalatable species that wouldn’t actually make you sick. I have not, in fact, found a photo of any Boletus species that looks at all like the one I’ve got. But I’ve got a lot of it.