Fungi Friday - This Week's Finds

Here are some more summer finds from this week for #fungifriday

Look at this interesting guy, it looks like a mix between a blooming flower and a puffball mushroom. These guys are called earth stars. They start out as an egg then bloom out to reveal an internal puffball that opens up to spew the spores everywhere. I'm not sure which specific Latin name this one has but it belongs to the family of fungi called Geastraceae.

Here is a bright find on the forest floor. Almost a neon orange.

The common name is orange peel fungi and their Latin name is Aleuria aurantia and they are edible. They don't taste like anything and have a cartilage texture, so at best they can be used for garnish.

Here is some fresh looking false turkeytail aka Stereum ostrea. You can see it peeling upward which is a tell-tail sign it is false turkeytail.

In contrast here is some real turkeytail, it is much more thick and doesn't curve upward. This stuff is medicinal with a high vitamin D content and anticancer compounds in it. You can boil it in tea or soak it in alcohol like tequila or vodka to extract the compounds out of it.

Just another beech rooter. These are quite common here during the summer. You can always spot them easily because of their long stem and upward turning cap. They are technically edible but not too interesting for taste and you can only eat the cap because the stem is too tough.

Here is a strange polypore hatching off a broken branch. Quite soft and fresh. I wonder if it will turn into a shelf or just become a crust of some kind when dried out.

Just some neon green lichen. Quite a few lichens have antibacterial properties. Native Americans used to use them with bandages to put on wounds to prevent infections.

Now on the same branch I see some turkeytail growing. So from one branch you can get antibacterial properties as well as anticancer properties. Quite a bit of medicine is out in the forest.

That's all for now, thanks for looking :-)