Identifying Mushrooms and Toadstools

Paul Nichol was a guest on the recent Coastal Forager course, he is one of the UK's foremost fungi experts. He has just revised his excellent identifying guide book 'An Initial Guide to the Identification of Mushrooms and Toadstools'. It is a dichotomous key, rather than a guidebook with pictures and descriptions. To use it, simply have your specimen and your chosen colour guide book to hand. Starting on page 8, and then working through the yes / no answers in the book, it will bring you to the genus of the mushroom in question. Then it is much easier to look through that section of your colour guide, rather than randomly trawling through the whole book when you have yet another small brown capped mushroom to look up. Some fungi genera have hundreds of members, such as the Russulas, which our woods are full of right now. I wholeheartedly recommend this little book to all budding mushroom-heads (!) and aficionados alike. The book can be bought directly from Paul, you can contact me for his email address or mail address for a nice signed copy. Alternatively he has just started selling them here on Amazon.

With my long-standing love of fungi rekindled, I am planning ahead to next year and some T'ai Chi buddies have asked if I would lead a few forays, and they would do the driving. I will be very happy to do that. I plan to book an extra day on the end of my September and / or October Aberdeenshire dates so that we can go into the woods with our knives and baskets. I know several good sites on Deeside. In the past I did go mushrooming here in the South, but as I was not the driver, it will take me a little time to remember where it was we went. I will do my research and give months of notice for the planned days so that those of you with proper jobs can get the day off as it is likely to be a Monday or Tuesday that I will do in Scotland. The near-London day could be a Saturday or a weekday, or one of each. Anyway, do get in touch if you fancy joining the gang.

Lastly, finances allowing, I plan to go on more courses with Woodsmoke next year, and I will post the details as soon as they are online. I would like to do the Woodlander, Coastal Forager (again, with waders and more fishing tackle!), Blade, (2 days each of stone age flint knapping, bronze age smelting from malachite and iron age steel knife making, from scratch,details to follow) and perhaps the Autumn Harvester course, just for the sheer delicious experience, even though that's probably my area of some skill already. I would be delighted if any T'ai Chi family wanted to come along too, ask me for details.