''empty husky bits that even the vermin that live off that shit did not want. ''
The term that is considered PC is 'police officers' they have forgotten their roots these days and seem to be offended at being called pieces of shit that shit-loving vermin would sick up at the thought of so much as rejecting. No idea why. Seems accurate enough to me.
Thinking of giving my nearest Amanita hotspot a looksee in the next few days, seeing as its rained heavily recently. Got rather lucky last year and found some plump ceps (boletus edulis, porcini) very, very tasty when fried in butter and given a light seasoning of pepper, maybe a tad of worcestershire sauce. But needed little. Seen some odd boletes that are not in my books also, not one I would eat even ID'ed, satan's bolete or same clade, bright red pores, big, fat turnip-esque stem, instant bluing, almost iodine-starch indigo-violet-black. Young fruitbodies little smell, slightly older they STINK like a rotting carcass. I did save a specimen for sporeprinting, to check under the scope, but my god it stank so bad I had to toss it, still fresh but a single small fruitbody quickly turned the room into an uninhabitable hotbox of eau-de-decaying sewer rat. Proper rancid, foul nasty little bastard it was, although the species itself grows quite large in the wild. Possibly B.satanoides syn. B.legaliae although the truly filthy, unbearable stench tends to make me think otherwise. Stinkhorn I can bear, (had a luxurious clump growing behind the fridge, once in my former home, called the gas repair guy out, spent hours looking, no dice, because of the eponymous stinking, unfortunately we only found the big fat clump of well-developed stinkhorns growing out of the carpet behind the vac pump of the fridge-freezer later. I'd have cracked up laughing at the poor bastard if he had only found those. just to see the look on his face and photograph that would have been worth the stench many times over when posted on the internet.)
Stinkhorns, I can live with (literally haha
) but not those bastards. Gods almighty the smell was absolutely fucking terrible. And these were fresh fruitbodies, watched since quite young, all but the youngest new growth smelled absolutely heinous.
But the boletes found locally the other year, under oak and hawthawn, very developed reticulate orange-reddish stem, yellower base, I've seen red-pored boletes before, but never anything like that, save only once. I'm going to give a shot at a professional ID if I can't track it down myself should I see it this year. And I may have a shot being the boletes are mycorrhizal. One things for sure, a fellow mushroom enthusiast I bumped into picking blackberries took a look, blinked a couple of times and didn't quite know what to say for a while before commenting.
This year has been somewhat encouraging so far, not exactly in a conventional sense. But in that I've seen the dead common parrot waxcap growing on my lawn. Which suggests given their association with mosses (Hygrocybe spp. generally) that at least the local microclimate is favourable, for what I've been wanting to do for ages, establish H.calyptraeformis in the garden, because they are rare, red listed in some european countries, and in turkey iirc critically endangered. Just been taken off british red list in recent years afaik. But I know two places they can be found, so plan is next time up there, take one, maybe two or even three caps, from the many that grow in those two places (they are in no trouble in these two specific spots, a couple can certainly be spared, in the interests not of eating, but of further culturing the mycelium in the lab then propagating it into pots of moss and grass with the hope of growing actual fruitbodies.
