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Foraging Pocket Guide: Food for all seasons from Britain’s woods, meadows and riversides

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The best mushroom knives have a sharp pruning blade, are easy to use, and are smaller in size. Combined, these qualities create an effective and efficient knife for mushroom foraging. A magnifying glass allows you to accurately identify any mushrooms you find in the field, so that you can confirm they’re safe to interact with prior to collecting them. Accidentally collecting the wrong mushroom can be annoying at best and dangerous at worst. Of course, you can’t eat everything you find growing outside - some poisonous plants can make you very ill. But there’s something exciting about setting off on a culinary treasure hunt to find new edible plants for dinner.

If you’re looking for one mushroom species in particular, or just a specific type of mushroom, use the magnifying glass to differentiate between the specimen you found and similar ones. Field guides can provide you with details to look for. The best mushroom foraging bags allow for air circulation and are sturdy, decently sized, and easy to carry. Whether you use an individual mushroom brush or one that’s attached to your mushroom knife, a brush is an important part of foraging. It allows you to clean your mushrooms prior to carrying them, helping disperse spores and other debris. What is a Mushroom Brush?

Your foraging bag should preferably have a reinforced bottom so that the weight isn’t entirely focused on the center of the base. Depending on how many mushrooms you collect, this can be vital. Folding magnifying glasses, also called hand lenses and similar to a jeweler’s loupe, are the best options for practicing safe mycology. They’re portable, easy to use, and provide you with just enough magnification to get the job done. Glasses with 5x or 10x magnification are the most popular choices. Why Bring a Magnifying Glass When Foraging for Mushrooms? While useful, this means that you won’t be able to thoroughly clean your mushrooms in the field. Instead, wait until you get home or somewhere with running water. However, please note that the best book can vary based on personal preferences and the specific region you're interested in. It's a good idea to also explore other well-reviewed options, such as "Food for Free" by Richard Mabey (Collins Gem). If you’re feeling funny about a plant, trust your gut. There are a lot of toxic plants out there and even foods that look friendly, like mushrooms and berries, can be extremely toxic if the wrong ones are foraged.

The paper you use can be light or dark, depending on the mushrooms you’re looking for and the expected color of the spores. If you’re unsure or just want to be prepared, you can bring wax paper, clear paper, or glass or plastic slides. There are a few key elements that you should look for in any foraging bag. We’ve already briefly touched on air circulation, but there’s more than that to a good mushroom foraging bag. What Makes a Good Mushroom Foraging Bag?

There’s more to identifying mushrooms than just looking at their size, shape, and color. The scales, gills, rings, pores, and other parts of a mushroom can all look similar or even identical to each other at first glance.

Remember that you’re not the only one who needs free food. There will be wildlife living in around your foraging spot, which need to eat the plants and fruits more than you do. With so many different types of mushrooms growing around the world, magnifying glasses can play a critical role in identifying the mushrooms you find and what they can be used for. Edible, medicinal, and poisonous mushrooms can often look alike. But with a magnifying glass, you’ll be able to see the key differences between the species. Mushroom spore prints make great mementos of your foraging or fun art prints for your home. You can experiment with the prints themselves, frame your field prints, or do something totally unique. Spray them lightly using a preservative and they can last for years. You should lightly clean your mushroom brush after each use in the field and do a deep clean semi-frequently to remove debris build up and bacteria. Depending on how often you forage for mushrooms, this can mean cleaning your mushroom brush weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or even bi-monthly.When you know what to look for you might find that many of these things are growing in your own garden; even some of the gourmet mushrooms. Blewits and Fairy Ring Champignons are frequent garden invaders, and others like Wood Ears and Oyster mushrooms are easy to introduce. Mushrooms come in all manner of shapes, sizes, colors, and varieties— in fact, there are over 14,000 species of mushrooms currently in existence. Some are edible, some are medicinal, others are hallucinogenic, and a few are even deadly. So how can you safely forage for mushrooms? Though you can use any mesh bag for mushroom foraging, make sure it’s sturdy enough to hold any specimen you may come across. Try to use a bag that’s at least 10” deep and 10” in diameter. This should fit almost any mushroom you come across, no matter its size. Liz Knight, a foraging instructor and author of Forage, suggests investing in a good foraging guide book, or going on one of the many walks hosted by foraging instructors to get an idea of how to recognise plants. Fun fact: it seems like ibotenic acid and muscimol have a chemical structure analogous to glutamic acid and glutamate, so it is said that they too are flavour enhancers. But I suppose neurotoxins aren't the safest spices to cook with?

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