NOTE: Don’t eat any wild mushroom unless you know for sure what you have. And don’t follow my example, then get sick, then sue me. Not everyone has my iron constitution or taxonomic giftings.

I’m cautiously learning my edible and poisonous mushrooms at the moment.

The first mushrooms I ever picked and ate from the wild were puffballs. Those are really hard to miss and with a few precautions (cut every one in half to make sure they aren’t baby Amanitas or something horrid – also make sure they’re white inside) they’re a safe, if sometimes rather bland, wild edible.

Then I read this book:

Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

…and caught the mushroom bug.

It also helps that this is mushroom season and there are wild Florida mushrooms ripe for the foraging. The cooling weather and the rain have made our fungal friends appear everywhere.

The other day I decided to take a stroll around the block. On the way home I wandered through an empty 3-acre lot with a few trees and a lot of weeds… and I found these:

Indigo milk caps are strikingly beautiful and edible.

Chanterelle mushrooms, freshly harvested!

Lactarius indigo makes some weird scrambled eggs.