On a lovely stroll through Richmond park today I stooped occasionally to poke about the undergrowth looking for magic mushrooms. I never find any and today was no different. Such behaviour feels very conspicuous in this popular park and picking any discoveries would have been a fraught experience (my cover story if challenged would have been that I was looking for stag beetles). This sort of thing is so much easier in Derbyshire. On the subject of paranoia, an Apache helicopter flew over at one point, a most unpleasant sight.
Anyway, check out one of the fungi I did encounter. Quite fearsome looking, I'd never have guessed it was edible, but according to some probably not very reliable internet research by me, it's a parasol mushroom (the name becomes more appropriate later on in its development) and is quite tasty. It reminds me of one of those German hand grenades.
23 minutes ago
Don't magic mushrooms only grow on cow dung, or have I gullibly fallen for an urban (rural?) myth?
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like a bit of a myth to me Kippers, I hope you haven't wasted too much time delving in cow dung. I don't think there are any dead giveaways, though I've noticed they seem to grow in fields with reed grass in them. But unless you've had a location passed on to you by an ancient hippy it really is like looking for a needle in a haystack.
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