Day of the...mushroom?

Yep, today we celebrate the humble, delicious, sometimes deadly dangerous mushroom.  Today is...no, actually TOMORROW is National Mushroom Day, but either way my bow is perfect for both the day and the season.  This is NOT the bow I'd planned on wearing, but...oh well, that can't be helped.  The black parts are really navy blue, LOL.  This one was another gift, so I don't know which Etsy shop it came from, but it's comfortable.

Mushrooms are some of my favorite living organisms.  I do enjoy eating them from time to time, but I also like to watch them grow.  There are so many different types, so many of them look different, and yet they all serve the same purpose.  My favorites to find are puffballs (they're fun to squeeze) and those little brown mushrooms that drive mycology students nuts.  Ornithologists have "little brown jobs," botanists have "damned yellow composites," and mycologists have to deal with "little brown mushrooms."  Click the links; all three terms are a real deal!  Furthermore, all three are a common sight here in the Bootheel.  Only the mushroom link connects y'all with the Missouri Department of Conservation, and indeed my lawn is often full of small brown mushrooms during the right time of year.  But there are also plenty of sparrows and wrens, and the field behind the library often has goat's beard, one member of the damned yellow composite group.  MDC advises that most little brown mushrooms in my neck of the woods are not fit for consumption, though I wouldn't anyway.  I don't fancy a slow, painful death from Amanita poisoning, so I avoid eating wild mushrooms of any sort, even though morels are common in parts of Missouri and it's legal to gather them.  I've never even eaten morels, though I hear they're delicious when sauteed in a dab of butter.  But even they should not be eaten raw.  So weird.  Anyway, I just avoid picking wild mushrooms altogether.

Now PHOTOGRAPHING mushrooms???  I love doing that.  I devoted a couple'a posts on my doll blog to mushrooms once (because why the hell not?), and I'll share the spoils from that post here too.  These date back to September of 2020.  These floral-looking 'shrooms were growing in front of the library...

...and these were in my front yard.  The biggest one looked like a satellite dish.

Mushrooms in my front yard don't oft get this big, thanks to my hyper dogs and my own klutzy rear, but I gave these a wide berth and they grew huge.  That particular blog post can be found HERE; I include a little more info and (as usual) some opinions.

Fast-forward to September of 2022, when my home life was calming down but I was still running around like a chicken with its head cut off (long story).  I found this chonker growing out of a stump in front of the high school.  Notice that there's an older one lying beside it.

I took my favorite American Girl doll to that stump and posed her with the mushroom to give a better idea of the size; for the rest of y'all, it was about the size of an average man's clenched fist.  As I snapped pictures I thought "What a great place for doll photographs!  I don't have to bend over, and there's houses ten feet away so I'm semi-safe.  I can bring all my girls to this stump, weather permitting."  Then two days later the city pulled the stump up and that was the end of that.  Bummer.  I am very fond of tree stumps, and I prefer that they be left alone to go the way God and nature meant, but some folks don't.  I just know that if it were my stump I'd want it left alone.

Then last March I found these growing out of a tree at Elder-Snider Cemetery, up on Crowley's Ridge.  This one was growing straight out of the tree...

...while these appear to be growing out of an underground root.

I predicted that the tree's days were numbered, since fungi usually only feed on dead or dying things.  Sure enuff, the last time Mama and I went out to the graveyard the tree was dead.  I took this picture on September 16th.

The blog post regarding both tree mushrooms can be found HERE.

Mmmm, now I want some mushrooms for lunch!

Happy Mushroom Day,
RagingMoon1987