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Uk Liberty Cap / magic mushroom season 2017

There are. Conocybe species may bear some resemblence to libs, and they too in some species contain amatoxins in some species, such as C.filaris. This has a ring, but it can be transient, and degenerate to little more than a band on the stem, and sometimes degrade entirely. It often has a longitudinally striated cap, but it can resemble P.semilanceata, although the prominent umbo on the cap of the latter species is usually distinctive, as well as in older specimens a thin blackish violaceous ring around the inner base of the cap at the inside edge due to the spores. Spore color of C.filaris is, like Galerina, rusty orangey brown, but it is a grassland species and is extremely poisonous, again, due to amatoxins, as present in Galerinas and some Amanitas like the death cap and destroying angel.

In either case, taking the proper care and performing a spore print, laying each mushroom cap out on foil, with the stem sliced off and placed in a known position next to the cap will weed out these deadly lookalikes.

And oops, just noticed, that was not the intended pic. These are the ergot sclerotia, harvested during the autumn during the growth season. Species-Claviceps purpurea, the ergot of rye, harvested from various hosts, all of them being wild grass species. Not something that can simply be consumed however, they require a considerable amount of both expertise and good fortune in strain selection and development, as well as skill in the areas of microbiology and chemistry. And take quite some time, as well as care to be taken with the culture broth itself, since any playing host to a productive strain and accumulating alkaloids will be extremely toxic; and I'd sooner not have bodyparts rotted off by gangrene.


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I beg to differ there mate. I would say C. filaris look bugger all like libs. The gill colour is a dead giveaway...

Furthermore, I said: "there are no toxic species which CLOSELY resemble P. semilanceata".

You said: "Conocybe species MAY bear SOME resemblence to libs"


I rest my case. :)
 
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Worst season for P. Semilanceata i've ever experienced.

Humans. We get what we deserve!
 
Worst season for P. Semilanceata i've ever experienced.

Humans. We get what we deserve!

I personally think the species is in decline. When I were a lad, they grew fuckin everywhere. These days I have to travel for an hour to find a measly handful...
 
I personally think the species is in decline. When I were a lad, they grew fuckin everywhere. These days I have to travel for an hour to find a measly handful...

I know man. It's a fucking disgrace. I think they're actually becoming extinct in this part of the world.
 
Dramatic changes in land use are hastening the decline.... pollutants, overgrazing, continual NPK 'improvements' to pasture, fungicides, herbicides, suburban sprawl; far fewer locations around here in 25 years as result of all that.
 
I simply mentioned Conocybe to remind people that P.semilanceata is NOT idiot-proof. Better to give advice and offer knowledge which (hopefully) turns out unneeded than for me to withhold the knowledge I may freely offer for the taking and have somebody lacking it, need it, and end up chowing down on a bunch of amatoxic mushrooms. What is the worse of the two outcomes? a post that takes no effort on my part whatsoever, to proffer knowledge that has been ingrained in my wetware as deeply as the haemoglobin in my red blood cells since age 4 (not joking either. I learned to read by teaching myself using Phillips's textbook. ) and a minute or two to type not saving a life, or somebody remaining unknowing of the potential, who is very new to picking then dying or ending up on the liver transplant list and suffering horribly, just because a grizzled ol' git of a mycophage was stingy with what he knows and is happy to teach?

My money is on the poor bastard shitting his liver out in milkshake form and doing it from both ends simultaneously whilst his kidneys fail and his plasma electrolyte levels go so screwy it causes his brain to swell, assisted by hepatic encephalopathy with, given it isn't your typical Amanita, a likely non-recognisance of the typical signs of amatoxin poisoning by medics, IF the patient presents in time for agressive treatment to reduce the untreated fatality rate from at best, a fifty-fifty chance of survival and at worst about 90 percent death rate (estimated given the fatality rate of toxicity as a result of consumption of the more typical amatoxin sources, Amanita phalloides and A.virosa)

Personally I'd rather have been offered the info and known to watch out if I were as green as the grass I was poking around in regarding mushrooms, than have somebody who knew, be too lazy to provide the information that allowed me to avoid making myself a case-study of the above. People mistake FIELD MUSHROOMS and HORSE MUSHROOMS....fucking AGARICUS species for Amanita spp., which have WHITE gills (with of course the exception of Amanita chlorinosma which has greenish gills, at least when the spores mature enough to color the gills)

That, IMO is a really, really REALLY elementary, n00b type of mistake to make. Making a mis-ID of a grassland group of species (for the most part of the Agaricus genus) that contains, bar the lethal species known in tropical africa, Agaricus aurantioviolaceous, at worst, a bunch of mostly somewhat off-smelling, yellow-staining species which will make you, at the very worst, pretty sick to the stomach, bad GI upset) and at first pink growing to chocolate-brown gills for afaik exclusively mycorrhizal species with usually white gills, and a very few with orange, plus one species with greenish gills. ) That is a mistake I wouldn't have made when I was out of fucking diapers, yet people have made it. Point-people can, and do screw up, when they are new to mushroom hunting, all the more so. Or foreign. (notably southeast asian natives coming to the UK and US, then consuming Volvariella speciosa, or rather, thinking they are, and getting one or other of the whitish and damnably nasty Amanita species.

And as for the earlier post I missed about the bumper harvest of ceps-lucky bastard. Found a nice few myself this year, not a bumper crop, but did find this year an exceptional year for Boletes of various kinds, got a LOT of larch boletes and slippery jacks, as well as Xerocomus badius/formerly Boletus badius, the bay bolete, aka good eating, if you get to them before them bloody fungus gnat larvae turn them to shit. Found shedloads of those three, interspersed with the odd cep during a walk round a reservoir thats mixed acidic pinewood and deciduous soil, when I was out there to bag the sacks full of Lactarius deliciosus (saffron milkcap) that I keep that spot high priority for to check out every year, since those buggers are GOOD eating and then some. Was a good one this year too, got plenty with caps as wide as side-plate type dinnerplates, and not old manky ones but good, firm, fresh ones with just a hint of green tinge here and there belying their youth.

Found it to be a good year for ergot (Claviceps purpurea) too, not that you want to just pop those in your mouth and chew on them. From several different places distant to each other, so hopefully good variety of genetic material for crossbreeding experiments amongst the other experiments planned for those wee pointy purple parasites :)

Last year, got lucky enough to find what I'm almost certain, was (now Rubroboletus) Boletus satanas, too, on a local field. Keeping me eyes out for them this coming year (saw them last year, year before and year before that but not this year, big, fat red going to yellow, reticulated stems, as fat as the caps, turnip shaped and with a stench so foetid that a single fruitbody I brought in had to be removed from the house, because it stank my bedroom up something vile, enough to almost make me throw up.

And that takes some doing, considering a few of the things that have escaped the confines of the flasks and test tubes now and again, that have really taken the biscuit when it comes to barf-fuel. I've smelled a few of the nuclear options when it comes to puke-a-licious. And B.satanas has a reputation amongst the scarlet-pored Boletus spp. with big, fat, reticulated, bicolored stipes for packing a revolting reek of decaying flesh. Which is exactly what these buggers smelled like.

Keeping my eyes out every year in future, so I can, hopefully, find more, and both do enough examinations, chemical tests and microscopy to get enough data to rule out or justify my sending in samples to kew gardens for professional ID and take as much in the way of spores as I can, and attempt to culture the fungus by saturating samples of soil taken from the regions close to the fruitbodies hopefully already host to the mycelium, and cultures of the oak trees they naturally associate with, try culture them like they do with truffles. Not that anyone wants to eat them, but because they are so, so SO vanishingly rare as for some to consider them near extinct in the UK, and scarce across europe too. So anything, anything at all I can do to propagate the species, despite its high toxicity is a good thing, from a conservation point of view, got something similar in mind for one of the waxcaps, a couple of spots I know for, Hygrocybe calyptraeformis, a pointed, pale pink, edible waxcap, never eaten them, but do plan to try and grow them (they form an association, unusually for a mushroom, with moss species) and are on the EU red list of endangered species, but I know two spots where they are locally prolific, so a few fruitbodies can be spared, IMO, for the purpose of furthering the survival of the mushroom as a species, in the name of fighting against its extinction. Probably at least for the devil's bolete, or, if I'm wrong, one of its nearly as rare or equally so, as B.satanas, going to be one hell of a challenge but hey, as they say; if you choose a job that you enjoy, then you'll never work a day in your life.
 
You're in the west Midlands conurbation? I'll come over for ? in melted butter.

I still have tons from last yar that I haven't tucked into yet.
this what I meant and I can never resist a double post nor a double entendre

Nor a double bass nor a triple paste of posts
 
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I was pretty gutted when I realised it said "edited by tranced". From that point onwards I knew I'd be foiled.
 
Can anyone confirm that a food dehydrator is efficient enough to dry truffles?
According to my logic it should be.
 
Might just possibly brew up some fly agaric tea later. Underrated wee buggers they are IMO.

Would you be willing to share your technique for that kind sir? I've always fancied trying them but never known how to prepare them properly.
 
Sure thing. Heat cure is essential before use. Thats the first and foremost thing to know about them. The second is to calibrate a dosage per batch (unless using small quantities, or cooking with them (I use them most actually in the kitchen, cured, and powdered as a base for my special spice mix for steak and chili, where the amounts used don't amount to psychoactivity)

They vary, according to season and according to the area, etc.

Basically stick the caps (I don't bother with the stems myself, more of a pain than they are worth, but thats just me) upside down (it can help, if you have enough to use a spoon to gouge away the gills, they come off quite easily if forced sideways, using the spoon horizontally.) thats because of the high water content of the gills, makes them a nuisance to dry/cure. Which is more or less the same thing.

They start out (naturally speaking) containing a neurotoxin, ibotenic acid, and this, in common with many other neurotoxins that act as agonists of ionotropic glutamate receptors (its an NMDA agonist, and used to lesion brains in various nasty ass scientific procedures via microinjection into areas of study) it ends up as a GABAa receptor agonist, for the GABA binding site itself (benzoz, barbs, Z-drugs, neurosteroids, loreclezole etc. don't, these are all allosteric modulators whilst muscimol, the decarboxylation product of ibotenic acid is an agonist at the GABA binding site)

Not altogether uncommon, quisqualic acid for example, an AMPA receptor agonist apparently becomes a GABAa orthosteric agonist too when decarboxylated (or rather, lose the excitotoxic properties, anyhow, cure by slow dessication, high shelf of the oven, lowest flame that can continue burning, upside down (cap surface downwards) and occasionally turn so as not to burn them or make them overcook. ready when quite dry and are between slightly cartilaginous and brittle, I'd not dose more than 5g to begin with, simmer in a little hot water, the kitchen will turn a really odd smell, like honeyed meat, you can't hide it short of a gas mask although not unpleasant.

Then line a sieve with something to serve as a filter, old T-shirt if thats the best you can do, or gravity filtration though a sieve lined with kitchen roll, although I tend to vac-filter the crap out, its just for the convenience of being able to go direct from buchner to clean flask to cup (I've about 5-7 or so so not too problematic), add sugar (I prefer honey personally) and then down the hatch. Fucked it off tonight though due to the muscarinic effects, and either more or less fluid production via perpherally selective antimuscarinics would me shitty. Don't know what he did but I think my old man let loose something he shouldn't, ugh, can hardly breathe.
 
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