A resource list to accompany our Mushroom Walks.
Please remember:
Before ingesting any wild mushroom you don't have long experience/familiarity with, please remember to:
Be 1000% certain of your identification. If you pick a mushroom and take it out of the woods to identify, remember where you found it—e.g. on a tree (what kind of tree?), growing out of the ground (in what kind of ecosystem?). These details will help with identification, as will all the kinds of noticing—including smell!
Try a small portion the first time you eat it; different bodies respond differently.
Remember that certain wild mushrooms can be toxic in combination with drinking wine or alcohol. Do your research first...
Remember the Chitins. Cook all edible mushrooms before eating.
Forage responsibly (there's an article on issues around wildcrafting HERE).
Learn more locally
NH Mushroom Company classes.
Fantastic Forage Mushroom Festival in Laconia, NH the last weekend of September.
Mushroom website relevant to this region
Caution: Take online natural history info online with a grain of salt. Make sure sources look trustworthy and/or cross check and cross check again. Sometimes a whole bunch of people keep referencing some other person whose details may not be accurate in the first place.
Mushroom books relevant to this region
Mushrooms of Northeast North America: Midwest to New England, George Barron
Mushrooms of the Northeastern United States and Eastern Canada, Timothy J. Baroni
Common Mushrooms of the Northeast, folding guide
Mushrooms of the Northeast: A Simple Guide to Common Mushrooms, Teresa Marrone & Walt Sturgeon
Common Edible & Poisonous Mushrooms of the Northeast, C. Leonard Fergus and Charles Fergus
Foraging Mushrooms: Maine, Tom Seymour
Christopher Hobb’s Medicinal Mushrooms: The Essential Guide—Boost Immunity, Improve Memory, Fight Cancer, Stop Infection, and Expand Your Consciousness, Christopher Hobbs
replay of a CLC program with Susan Goldhor
Bonus: What do Santa Claus, shamans, reindeer, and fungi have to do with each other? Read Susan Goldhor’s article, “Santa Claus (Deconstructed) (with special attention to birch trees, mushrooms, and reindeer)” to find out!
A podcast!
You can find lots of podcasts out there featuring Merlin Sheldrake, the author of the bestseller Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures, and great fungi-focused conservations with others, as well. This one presents a good overview of the many ways fungi shape our planet and lives.
A song!
Banner image: The mushroom array at a CLC Mushroom Walk. Photo: Juno Lamb