Your gardening photos

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No, not chillies - they are all leaves off the same tree. 🙂

It's a fruit tree, a persimmon (var. Spider).

I'll pm you later about them.

Meanwhile, can someone identify these amazing looking mushrooms, please?

Ditto, never seen it before in real life.

I also found tons of armillaria mellea, which, if prepared properly to remove the toxins and if found on "healthy" ground (i.e., not on from a polluted area), is very tasty indeed and very digestible (we've eaten it for generations). I'll have my work cut out, this afternoon.

I'll post the pics later.

I have no idea, for now (if you're referring to the coral mushrooms), I found them for the first time today near the base of a dead walnut tree under a fallen branch. This was in the field, mind you, not in the garden.

Ah, right! Yes, that can definitely cause big problems, that's why when I pick the mushrooms I pick the whole lot, root base included, unlike I'd do for other mushrooms. I also have no qualms about carrying them in closed containers (e.g. cardboard boxes, plastic bags, bowls, etc), again, unlike other mushrooms that I'd carry in a basket or a colander to let the spores through. Anyway, eating them (the mushrooms, I mean) is as good a method for controlling them as any.

If I spot them, I also remove their root system (hyphae) whenever I can, they can creep under the tree bark and grow there and kill the tree. You can come across the hyphae throughout the year, but the mushrooms are only autumnal. They also grow along tree roots. I have lots of tree stumps around the place and also dead trees still standing, so I don't mind if they grow there or on stacks of fallen branches/ pruned wood (the underside of which is a haven for hedgehogs, you can see their tracks in the dew on the grass, in the morning 😊). I actually pour the water I use to wash them and the trimmed bits over it.

More pics - the black "thunderbolts" are the hyphae, you can also clearly see them on the tree trunk with the mushrooms.

Bumper crop, today, and I didn't even look that hard, I just found them (lots of them were in clusters in the grass).

Guess how I'll be spending my evening?

Let's say that even if you don't manage to clear everything, at least you can prolong the life of the tree by a fair few years. In the past I've removed some large strips of bark from trees (there was already a dusty, crumbly, soil-like material under it, just like when ants get under it, so it was detached from the wood), ripped off the hyphae as much as possible, cleaned the wood as much as possible and covered the exposed areas with that waxy polymer thingy used for grafting.

"All mushrooms are edible. Some mushrooms are edible only once."

--Terry Pratchett

😁

That was some slog. I finally finished cleaning and blanching the mushrooms at half one in the morning. I know they absorb water as they cook, but the total weight was a lot more than I expected: 3.25 kg! I almost filled the bowl of the stand mixer with them.

Today I'll cook some with oil and garlic and stick the rest in the freezer.

I might stretch to a Quorn Wellington.

Yes, on that note, apologies to everyone, I dragged the thread off topic big time - aside from everything else, this is not the "stuff I found in my garden and cooked" thread.

.False Morels (gyromitres). That article is scary but very interesting, thanks.