I took a walk around our neighborhood after one of our many rains and it looks like a mushroom farm. Every yard that had not mowed in the last 24 hours had mushroom patches. My neighbor on the corner must have had 75 beneath a tall oak.
I am no mushroom-ologist, but I think most of the mushrooms I saw were common field mushrooms – and they are edible. Deer love them, by the way.
Fall seems to be the best time for mushrooms to pop up. It’s cool and often wet – certainly good and wet the last week or so.
My Daddy and I used to take the bird dogs out for a walk on fall afternoons and he would often bring a sack, stopping here and there to snatch a mushroom from its roots. At dinner, he would cook them and we all waited a while to see how he was doing before sampling the mushrooms ourselves. I remember that one of the best mushrooms to eat was a puffer mushroom. They grow in fields and when they dry up, you can stomp on them and the just puff away. But if you get one in the early stages, slice it and pan fry in garlic butter, it is delicious.
Morels are also a delicacy and they, too, like the fall weather.
I understand that you can buy mushroom logs that have been seeded with mushrooms and they will produce lots of mushrooms for the table. I have one in the back yard that is producing, but I don’t have anybody around to check and see if it’s really a toadstool its edibility, so I guess I’ll just let it grow.
