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Kind of dry here this year! We usually get a lot of mushrooms, but I haven't seen a single one yet!

Saw this one yesterday, and took another photo today fully flattened out. It’s probably within the dripline perimeter of the Willow oak.

Fairy rings? We had them in the lawn years ago; found details, somewhere online, of how to identify them (Very Important!!). They were reasonably tasty but there's not much to them.

I was a community gardener several years ago. The property belonged to the park department. More than half of it was used as their storage yard for compost, soil and such.

One year, they took several weeping willows out of a park and brought the chips to pile, nearby. (I know that your tree isn't a weeping willow, AppleStar .) I checked with them and hauled wheelbarrow loads to my garden and covered the paths.

The next year, I arrived as the last of the winter snow cover was melting. There, scattered about my garden, were morel mushrooms!! Only for that year but they continued to show up for several weeks. What a windfall! Delicious ... and I was once a fairly accomplished morel harvester so was comfortable taking them home to the kitchen .

Steve

Now that’s the kind of surprise I like!

I was looking out of the window after lunch and saw another one in the full sun which was surprising — I must have walked by it several times this morning but never noticed the fully opened/flattened cap. I was going to take a closer look at it tomorrow morning, but just now, looking out of the same window, I saw a squirrel pluck it out of the ground and eat it up! Starting with the cap then the long stalk.

It made me wonder if the mushroom might have been edible afterall, but reviewing the mushrooms that grow from the ground in the sun again, white-gilled ones are suspect, and this one definitely has white gills, even the mature one that the squirrel ate (and you can see it, too in my photo, bottom-left). So pass.....

This morning, discovered these growing in the VG beds — VG-D and VG-A — which are “full sun” locations....



...every time I find mushrooms growing in the garden beds, I think to myself — I REALLY have to intentionally grow ones that I know for sure are edible.... I keep looking into it, and almost plant them, then end up not doing it.

Wondering what kind of mushroom this is. Found it next to an old shed in the back yard.

I’m trying to re-claim the beginning section of the outer spiral in my Spiral Garden which had been left alone until now because there was a big Elderberry growing there. American Elderberry can grow to around 15 feet when fully mature, but due to extreme cold here, or because this is how they grow, every winter, some of the canes will die back. Most of the time, new shoots will grow either from somewhere on the original main trunk or from the base, or even from the roots.

The big main trunk has finally spent itself — plus it looks like it was girdled by something. There are a couple of young sapling watersprout shoots that I may or may not keep.

...anyway, I was weeding around the base of it and discovered what looks like Chinese Black Woodear mushroom growing on it. They are good size, too.




I covered them back up with some of weed trimmings ...Not brave enough (or foolish enough) to try eating them though (unless I can find out definitively that they are safe to eat! )