My contribution to Monochrome Madness hosted by the Australian photographer Leanne Cole.
It’s fall here and the year comes slowly to its end. Fall also means, to harvest. Framers pray for good weather conditions to get the results from their year of work safe in their barns.
The cold and often wet weather is also the time of the year when the mushrooms pop out of the ground. They life the whole year in the soil and in fall their fruiting bodies come up to spread their spores.
While some mushrooms are eatable, others are (extremely) poisonous and some are only eatable, when young. You have to have very good knowledge of mushrooms, when you try to find them in the forests and decide the good guys from the bad ones. Some of them look so similar i.e. champignon and death cap, so you can go wrong very easily. I don’t have much more than a very basic knowledge in mushrooms, so I leave them alone. Fly agaric and stinkhorn are nearly the only one’s I’d recognize 🙂
As a child my father has had to go with his father to collect mushrooms in fall. They went to the forests in the early morning on weekends. They had to be back in town, before church started. The mushrooms were cleaned, threaded on twine and hung up in the kitchen for drying. During winter the mushrooms and also collected dried berries were used for food.
I remember a few mushroom collecting trips with my grandfather when I was a child, but my mother always was very skeptical in preparing them for food. But, they were always good. Even, when looking very strange like Ramaria aurea, a coral mushroom.
But, every year you can read in the newspaper from people dieing after having eaten poisonous mushrooms.
Take care!
MyBlog - solaner 
Oh, the thrill of finding a lovely, young (edible) mushroom, such as bulky, dark-capped porcini or slender, wide-spread umbrella mushroom (not sure about English names for these… i think ‘ceps’ and… hm…). It’s interesting how they vary from region to region and what people do with it. For example, I have never heard of hanging them up to dry! How excellent!
yes, that’s true, Manja. Mushrooms vary from region to region.
My grantparents hung the mushrooms up for drying them. Over the winter they were able to store them as a reserve. Fridges or deep freezers were not common in private housholds at that time. Dryed mushrooms are no longer able to go bad. But, after put them into water, they become edible again. Just the same as the Chinese do nowadays when exporting oyster mushrooms to overseas.