Bushcraft Foraging: St George's Mushroom

Description

In this video we look at the St George's Mushroom, how to identify it and talk about eating it. Foraging for mushrooms can be dangerous or even deadly so a one hundred percent positive identification is absolutely necessary when dealing with them.

The St George's Mushroom unlike many others grows in April namely around St George's Day (23 April) which adds makes mixing it up with its autumn lookalikes very difficult.

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Video Transcription

hi guys it's Mike from mcq bushcraft here and welcome to another video about today wandering through the woodlands doing a bit of foraging looking for different types of edible fungi that are very common in the spring months and some throughout the summer and I found dried saddle dried saddle polypore Eskimos this is quite a nice edible of actually got one in my bag here I gathered a few of the younger ones to actually eat very easy to identify nice taste as well and there's nothing that really looks like it at all at any times of the year that could be poisonous but there is another type of mushroom that I'm looking for and it's st. George's mushroom and I was walking through this woodland here this area that's been cleared very slightly and I found a very large ring of st. George's mushrooms that I'm right on top of now and I've got one just in my hand here and it's quite a tasty mushroom in a respect more that more texture than it is taste honest edibility

much like the mushrooms you find in the supermarket it's the agaricus the same kind of texture it remains firm when cooked and it can be added to various dishes and can really improve them quite quite nicely especially if you like edible mushrooms let's have a closer look at the ring that I'm standing on right now you'll understand what I mean momentarily about the ring that's forming around me there's actually a very very large ring all the way around me that I can almost follow and trace through the leaves at the edge of the mycelium the actual fruiting bodies the fungi are the mushroom is forming and if you look very very closely in the leaves you'll start to see the mushroom forming a ring and we're actually following this ring at the moment which is the edge of the mycelium is effectively what you call the root structure under the ground the actual fungus what we're seeing is just the fruiting body fruiting at the edge of the mycelium obviously helped it grow and expand as the nutrition has been used in the portion behind it and in ten years time this ring will be even bigger

when we can keep following this rains and rains all the way back to where we started and here we go but if we look at the characteristics of this mushroom we can see that it has white gills and white gills is often something people avoid when foraging is is something that you always read that you should avoid on a mushroom when you're foraging and it's really that written rule that when people are going out looking for mushrooms and they find one with white gills they leave them alone like the destroying angel in the Death Cap for example you can see in the names that they're not ones you want to eat for the dividing factor for this mushroom is the time of year it's May and no other mushroom that grows like it that's poisonous in an environment like this that I'm in will grow similar to this mushroom will look like it so the destroying angel the Death Cap the two I mentioned they'll be in the autumn in August and September so it really is the time of year that divides this mushrooms from the rest of them and obviously its characteristics as well which we can cover also if we look at the mushroom more closely you can see it has tightly packed gills and they're free of the Stipe so as they come towards the stem which is often called the Stipe of the mushroom you can see they then cut under and they don't actually join to the Stipe completely it also has a slight roll rim at the edge of the cap which is another good feature for picking out the mushroom getting familiar with the way mushrooms smell is a very good way of identifying them also saint-georges mushrooms have a very Neely smell almost remind me of flour sometimes that's slightly damp some say that it smells a little bit like cucumber there is a little bit of that there but it mainly is just a damp smell a damp mealy smell and it is quite a nice smell but you can see how knowing a bit about mushrooms can really enhance your palate out in the field just having a bit of knowledge about them allows you to go out and forage things and if you have certainty about you and you really know what you're looking for it does expand what food you are able to eat but I'm gonna get these in the game bag and continue my search that the day maybe I shall find some more rings even though I've just gathered this much here there are four or five times the amount of this surrounding me now so I will leave those to do their job and just take a small selection for myself thanks for watching guys I'll see you very soon in another video take care