My mushroom hunting tips
"When the moon is at the full, Mushrooms you may freely pull; But when the moon is on the wane, Wait till you think to pluck again"
I develop a bit of a one-track mind at this time of year, I find it hard to think about anything but fungi. I dream about mushrooms, I see them when I close my eyes, I fantasise that I could spend every day crawling around on all fours snouting about for the best fungi finds. My favourites (Boletus edulis, Macrolepiota procera, and Cantharellus cibarius) are all incredibly tasty, but nothing is as delicious as the dopamine hit thrill of finding them.
I’ve been foraging for mushrooms since I was a little kid (first field mushrooms with my dad, then porcini with my mum), but I am by no means an expert. What you are about to read is a list of fungi foraging tips from a very enthusiastic amateur, so take my advice with whatever measure of salt you feel is appropriate.
A shopping list
Find some good resources. I would recommend Roger Phillips Mushrooms book, The River Cottage Handbook on mushrooms, the Wildfooduk website, and first-nature.com. These are all good resources if you’re in the UK, if you’re anywhere else I’d recommend doing your research on trusted resources. Also, if you can’t afford a book, check out your local library.
Find a basket or mesh bag for collecting So that when you take the mushrooms you’re spreading the spores around after. I found the most beautiful basket for a fiver at a car boot sale.
Get a nice little knife. My wonderful friend Laylah got me a gorgeous Opinel mushroom knife for my birthday, but any pocket knife is better than none. I’m not wading into the endless pull or cut debate (I do both, just depends on my mood), but a knife is good for cleaning things up and doing cross sections.
Walking boots and waterproof trousers will make you more comfortable. If you’re covering miles and miles on your hunt, and kneeling on the ground lots (so you can sniff things for instance) you’ll be grateful for a good solid pair of walking boots and some waterproof trousers.
On identifying
Learn key identification features and the terms for them. Gills, pores, veils, bruising colours, ‘milk’, spore colour, adnate, convex, umbonate, reticulation, decurrent, etc etc etc. I am still very much learning these myself and seem to have a sieve brain for some of the terms. Also take notice of habitat, what trees are near, if they are growing in a ring or in pairs or clumps or on their own, or if they’re growing out of rotten wood or moss or in leaf litter.
Engage your olfactory system. You want to become a big nose on legs ideally. If you’re not familiar with the smell of some of the choice edible mushrooms, go into a fancy greengrocers and sniff some porcini and chanterelles. Lock that smell into your mind like a truffle pig (or dog), and then venture into the woods and tell your nose to go find the smells. Don’t forget to give your nose a little treat if it does well.
There are two good reasons to engage your sense of smell; one is that you’ll start being able to sniff out the good stuff when you go on a walk (this never fails to make me feel a bit magic) and the other is that smells are another key identification feature. Does it smell like fenugreek, aniseed, apricots, almonds? Maybe it smells sweet, meaty, cheesy, or like frozen orange juice, iodine, semen, or a fairground at the end of the night?
On apps and social media I don’t have a black and white opinion on using these resources for identifying things, I think there are pros and cons. I’ve gamed my Facebook experience now so that it’s a pleasant and educational experience to be on there. I mostly see posts from groups I’ve joined, my feed is filled with mushrooms, birds, feathers, Anglo Saxon field finds, mudlarking stuff, metal detecting finds, and plants. I feel a small sense of community from being in these groups (it doesn’t scratch the very itchy itch for irl community though) and when it comes to mushrooms I am learning from both experts (Iona Fraser, Jesper Launder, Virn Strothers, Geoffrey Kirby, etc) and idiots (people who are consistently confident and wrong teach me about leaving your ego at home when you’re trying to learn).
I think identification apps can make your brain lazy (and I can attest to this because I use them for birdsong and plants sometimes), because just pointing your phone at something and pressing a button takes away any need for you to work out how to identify something and what features to look for. Google lens and PictureMushroom will get some stuff right and some stuff wrong, and they can trick you into a false sense of security by getting lots of things right and then making potentially deadly mistakes. If you rely on them as the sole way to identify a mushroom you could spend the day on the toilet, or end up on a waiting list for a liver transplant, or be the reason for a lot of slow singing and flower bringing. There’s an app called Shroomify that I quite like, because it takes you through a series of questions to narrow things down rather than looking at any photos. It doesn’t have a very extensive database, but it’s a good way of training your brain on the identifying features to look for. Again though, do not use this as your sole way to identify anything.
Make learning the toxic fungi a priority. I was going to say something about knowing your enemy, but actually I think that’s a bit of a reductive way of looking at it. Some of them are certainly the enemy of your kidneys or liver, but they are putting nutrients into the soil for reabsorption by plants and therefore benefit you. So, instead I think it’s better framed as ‘respect the power of the fungus’. Read this account of author Nicholas Evans mushroom poisoning, or follow this incredible group on Facebook. I’ll name just a few of the important ones to familiarise yourself with if you live in the UK (although there are lots of other countries these mushrooms grow in); Death cap, Deadly webcap, Brown roll-rim, Funeral bells, Destroying angel, and Deadly fibrecap.
Learn the lookalikes. This ties in with the previous tip. Learn what mushrooms look like each other, this is especially important for any you’re picking to eat but is also just a good practice to get into anyway. I’ve noticed when people start out they are inclined to view everything as the mushroom they want to see (so all brackets become chicken of the woods for instance or everything purple looks like an amethyst deceiver) so if there is something you’re desperate to find, learn all the other things you could confuse for it. Some important ones to learn here would be Purple fibrecap, Yellow stainers, Panthercap, and Fools funnel (to name just a few).
Go on a guided foraging walk. WildfoodUK run foraging courses, and they have a load of great teachers (I’m not affiliated with them at all, I just rate them). Ashdown forage (again, not affiliated) run by Iona Fraser also do courses, and Iona is super knowledgeable. As it’s not regulated in the UK anyone can offer foraging or mushroom identifying courses, walks, or workshops so I would do a bit of research and look up reviews1.
Eating mushrooms you’ve foraged
Don’t eat anything unless you’re 100% confident of your identification. If you’re new to mushroom hunting I’d recommend not eating anything you find in your first season. Take mushrooms home and do spore prints and cross sections and reference your books and the internet and learn about them.
Start off with the ones that are easiest to identify and don’t have poisonous lookalikes. Like cauliflower fungus.
Don’t feed foraged mushrooms to friends, family, or even foes unless you’re 100% confident of your identification. Seriously.
Have a healthy amount of anxiety. I have an unhealthy amount. I have to photograph all the mushrooms I’m going to cook before I eat them and then I will look at the photos about ten times after I’ve eaten to make sure I didn’t sneak a deadly one in there. You’ll take some of the enjoyment out of eating delicious mushrooms if you do this, but I reckon you do need to be a little anxious in order to be cautious.
Learn how to cook and preserve them, and which ones to cook and which ones to preserve. Some will get even tastier when they’re dried (ceps/penny buns/porcini), some are better eaten fresh (chanterelles), and a few are safe to eat raw (but lots are not unless cooked). Don’t waste good mushrooms with bad cooking, find a good book or site for recipes. I like Forager Chef.
Try a little bit at first, even if it is ‘safe’. Some mushrooms, like Chicken of the woods, don’t agree with everyone so try a small amount first of all.
Don’t eat anything unless you’re 100% confident of your identification. It’s worth repeating. Read that Nicholas Evans story again, or see this one from this month.
Other uses for mushrooms
Treating trauma, anxiety, and treatment resistant depression. You could spend days browsing scholar.google.com reading studies about therapeutic approaches using psilocybin. I found this study particularly interesting; Psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer: A randomized double-blind trial
Merlin Sheldrake also discusses the therapeutic potential of psilocybe mushrooms (also known as magic mushrooms) in his wonderful book Entangled Life.
Dyeing Check out mushroom color atlas to see some of the colours you can get from mushrooms. Here is some wool I dyed with Surpise webcap mushrooms.
Fire. You can use some fungi as tinder for fires; hoof fungus, King Alfred cakes, and Birch polypore (after charring). Europe’s oldest oldest known natural human mummy, Ötzi the iceman, had two pieces of birch polypore threaded onto hide strips found amongst his accoutrements. It’s theorised that these were either intended for use as tinder, or for medicine to treat parasitic worms.
Medicine. This would need a whole separate piece because there is so much to say, but there are lots of interesting medicinal uses, potential uses that need further studies, and big claims for various fungi. I’d recommend reading Healing Mushrooms by Richard Bray if you want to learn more. I will quickly say though, I highly rate strips of birch polypore as styptic plasters, especially when combined with a little bit of crushed yarrow leaf.
This list could be endless and I could spend all day writing about guitars made out of mushrooms, using fungi to clean up waste, or to make ‘leather’, or biodegradable packaging, or turning one into a battery, but I wanted to stick to ways most people could use them at home.
How to find mushrooms
Get in sync with the seasons. This will take a little while, but you will get to a point when you know it’s mushroom time just by the feel of the air outside. The last few years I’ve had dreams that the porcini have arrived in the days before finding my first ones of the season.2
Learn your trees. Lots of mushrooms have a mycorrhizal relationship (symbiotic partnership) with various trees. If you know how to identify a birch, an oak, a beech, and a pine tree and you know where some are you have a great base to start looking for mushrooms.
Take an offering. You don’t have to do this, but I think it is good to keep a spirit of reciprocity (and awe, actually) when you go into the woods. I usually take a little bit of dried mugwort and leave it by the threshold of a woods/forest.
Share spots with your very good friends. You can tell whoever you want where your best spots are but bear in mind they will also tell whoever they want, and so on. I do like to share my spots with friends though, because mushroom hunting with friends is more fun. It is helpful if you can make friends with someone with small children, because their eyes (the children, not the friend with children, unless they’re very short) are closer to the ground and sometimes they’re better at spotting stuff. If you can find a really tall friend they’re also great for reaching high up bracket fungi.
Make maps. Maps are fun to make anyway. Try and note down where you’ve found a good patch, places other people have told you about (a guy once told me his morel spot without me even asking!) and (though some might view this as cheating) places that people upload to iNaturalist.
Some final tips, specifically for finding my favourite mushroom; the Boletus edulis. My best luck has been by taking an offering, singing a song “Porciiiiini, I want to eat you with linguine. Porciiiiini, find your way to me”3, and looking in slightly acidic woodlands in spots where birch, holly, and fly agarics are growing.
There’s a person local to me who runs foraging walks who I’ve seen post photos of Blackening polypore and claim it was Chicken of the woods. Luckily this isn’t a fatal mistake to make, but still not someone I would trust to teach me about mushrooms.
My chanterelle song has been very successful at leading me to chanterelles too. “Chanterelly relly relly, get in my belly belly belly”. My saffron milkcap song, “Saffron milkcap, you’re anything but crap”, has been less successful.
This is such a great post. I love porcinis, but have only ever found one solitary one, last year. It would probably be my favorite, too, if I could at least find a second one. I probably need to work up a song. Or find some better porcini hunting grounds.
I really like your suggestion of not eating anything for the first foraging season. The offering's a great, idea, too, having some reverence for this place that's offering so much to you. Wonderful post!
Wonderful. Is that your notebook ? So tidy. And the chanterelle song 🎧.