Hey welcome to UK Wildcrafts so I’ve be taking a walk through this mix woodland, we’re in October and we’ve had a lot of heavy rain so there’s mushrooms coming up everywhere, and I’ve seen these couple of mushrooms here which I could tell straight away they’re from the agaricus family there’s a few giveaways that I’ll show you in a second. This is this family that contains a lot of your edible mushrooms ones you’ll find in the shops sort of like your button mushrooms the chestnut mushrooms and the Portobello so there’s a lot of good edible mushrooms in this family but there’s also a few that will give you a bit of a bad stomach, and I’ll show you some of the little tests you can do. First of all to tell it’s from the agaricus family most importanly got check the base as you do with all mushrooms and there’s no egg sack there there’s no like volva which we find on some of the more deadly species and also it’s got a skirt halfway up that used to join to the cup when it was younger and most importantly the gills that’s are like a pink colour rather than white, white ones will be a lot of your deadly like amanitas like the death cap but with the agaricus yeah they’re pink and they’ll go dark brown with age sometimes even a black color. Another important test to do is the smell if it’s a edible species like your horse mushroom or your field mushroom they’ll have a nice Pleasant mushroomy smell sometimes a bit of an aniseedy smell but the more the poisonous ones they can have the more chemically smell and yeah this one doesn’t smell too good, but a very important test you want to do when you’re checking a mushroom from the agaricus family is you want to scratch the cap. And you see where it goes yellow that means that this mushroom is a yellow stainer which is actually a poisonous one it’s pretty much the only difference you can tell from this and an edible field mushroom or horse mushroom so yeah very important scratch the it goes yellow don’t eat it.
Categories