Mushroom Season 2011

(The following information is intended to be supplemental to a good identification guide, not a replacement for one.)

Greetings fellow fungi hunters! 

I only managed to get out once this season, with mixed results. I headed to a previously unexplored piece of grassland situated in the transitional zone between London and Kent - a beautiful grey day, just as you'd expect. It wasn't until I'd wandered for hours and decided to give up that I found anything (I find it quite amazing to think of the odds that one man walking wibbly paths through many miles of open grassland will ever manage to find even a single of these temperamental and cunning little brown mushrooms!) I was on my way out of the fields when I was flashed by a small group of the mischievous little elves and all of a sudden my faith was renewed! Due to these little fellas in the photo below I spent another couple of hours stomping in sodden boots around this misty wonderland...

Alas I found no more Liberty Caps (and dutifully chided myself for not starting out a little earlier - I had seen another beard+backpack combo leaving the fields just as I arrived) but, just my luck, I found a few of these intriguing fellows - similar enough to the untrained eye - standing solo around the place...

Having returned home and done a little research I discovered these dudes are known as "Psilocybe Strictipes" - the clearest difference is the way the gills attach to the stem, you'll see in the lower image (if your screen isn't too high-contrast or dark) that the gills go straight from the edge of the cap to attach to the stem, in "Psilocybe Semilanceata" (The Liberty Cap) the gills are pretty much free of the stem, if they attach at all it's normally very near to the inside-tip of the cap. Strictipes also lacks a prominent nipple. I wouldn't even have touched these beauties if it weren't for the darkness of the gills - here's a little tip for all you hunters: lots of little brownish mushrooms have similar shapes to the Liberty Cap, but in my experience they all have light coloured gills, Psilocybe spores are nearly black you see, so a quick way to check if you've found something magical (in the field in the UK at least) is to take a look at the colour of the gills (as well as the shape of the cap!) and don't bother picking anything that isn't at least a dark grey in appearance.

I was also pleased to take home my first specimens of the edible (but non-psychoactive) "Parasol Mushroom". These guys are quite a common sight round these parts, and man do they taste good! They're big and beautifully textured and taste great with butter and garlic or in an omelette. You need to be cautious you don't have the "Shaggy Parasol" which some people have mild allergic reactions to - just make sure your mushroom has the scaly pattern on its stem, isn't pungently smelly, and that its flesh doesn't redden when cut.

Happy Hunting!