My passion for mushrooms is a new-found obsession: I first entered the fabulous world of fungi a few months ago, around May, when I went on a Food for Free walk in Meanwood Park, Leeds, with the forager extraordinaire, Mina Said.
There aren't loads of mushrooms that grow at that time of year. But Mina introduced me to one or two, and my attention was instantly caught by the oozing bright yellow larva that is Chicken of the Wood (which I went on to dream about several times, like a woman possessed, until I found my own magnificent hoard a month or two later).
Since then, I’ve been spotting mushrooms everywhere! One of the most exciting discoveries I’ve made is that bloody loads of mushrooms grow in the gardens and patch of woods of my home in Leeds. Two spots in particular are teeming with a whole variety of mushrooms, including boletes, ink caps and some slippery ones that have the texture of a dog’s wet nose.
On my way out, or coming home, I'll often spend five or ten minutes mooching around dark corners of the garden, poking at the leaf litter with a stick, and generally examining the odd stuff that I find (the most bizarre being the fungi, surely not edible, that's growing out of the cracks in an old wooden bench).
What's interesting is that I've lived here for nearly three years now, and this summer was the first time I've seen a single mushrooms here (or any where else for that matter).
It's not that they didn't exist before, it's that I had never looked close enough at the wild spaces around me to notice this whole other fungi world going on, having a party all of its own...
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| My first hoard of wild mushrooms |
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