Nearby Nature: Finding Fungus

Tiny mushrooms growing on a log in Woodford State Park - B. Steele

A sign of spring you may have overlooked in your yard is mushrooms. Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of larger fungi growing underground, or in a rotting log. There are some cool mushrooms coming out right now that you may be able to find in your own yard because my daughter and I have been finding them.

Holding a puffball.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, we live right in town, but we live in Vermont so even though we have an incredibly small yard, we have an abandoned pasture to explore nearby. Luckily, we have great neighbors who share this space with us, and they had the whole pasture brush hogged late last fall. This makes it easy to explore and find interesting things like mushrooms.

The first really cool mushrooms we found the other day are these round, potato looking, apple sized mushrooms. Using our National Audubon Society Field Guide to Mushrooms, we identified these as tumbling puffball mushrooms. Last fall when they grew, they were round, white and firm. Now they are dried out, brown, with the skin splitting revealing thousands of darker brown spores inside. Spores are like the seeds of mushrooms, so if you step on these small tumbling puffballs you are spreading the spores around the area. You are planting mushrooms! 

We found lots of these mushrooms, and they really were tumbling around on windy days. We didn’t see the fresh ones growing last fall because the area was overgrown with shrubs and goldenrod, but this fall we will look for them as they are edible and delicious. We decided to use them to create smoke screens for each other when we were playing, they work very well for that.

On the left - Witch's butter. On the right - amber jelly roll.

Moving into the edge area where some young trees are growing in a small space between the pasture and an apartment complex, we found some interesting and very fresh mushrooms. There is a very large red oak wolf tree growing within the smaller trees, I will write more about that cool wolf tree in a later blog. That tree dropped some branches and lots of the dropped branches had these cool brown jelly looking mushrooms on them.

 I looked them up in my field guide, which I started carrying in my backpack after we saw the tumbling puffball mushrooms. The brown jelly mushrooms have many names, but their Latin name is Exida recisa. Some of my favorite common names for this fungus are amber jelly roll, and brown witch’s butter. They really do look like jelly. These mushrooms start out as clear blisters and then they expand, sometimes attaching to each other and they turn from translucent to brown. The field guide assured us they are edible, but they do not look very appealing, unless you are a witch looking for topping for your toast. 

On a later exploration we found another variety of this mushroom, the yellow witch’s butter. These are not the same species but very similar mushrooms. We found both witch’s butter mushrooms on small sticks that had fallen off trees, so go out and look at the sticks in your yard. Do you see anything interesting growing there? 

Rebecca Roy, Conservation Education Coordinator