Just look at these Beauties here I absolutely love this time of year because this is when you
can find these Hedgehog fungus. I find they're a really reliable mushroom, you can come back to
the same spots every year at the same time, for me mid to late October and I always find these here.
Hedgehog mushrooms are some of the best edible mushrooms we have in the UK,
they're up there with your porcinis, Hen of the Woods and chanterelles.
and a good thing about them is I'd class them as one of the easiest
mushrooms to identify for beginners. they can be found throughout autumn and they
can grow in most types of Woodland. but they're most common around beech,
and you can usually find them grown in rings. you can see they're growing in a partial ring here
around this beech tree. so I've got a few spots in this woodland where I've got some really big
Hedgehog rings so you can find quite a vast number of them.
the caps of the mushroom are a creamish yellow color they can
sometimes have a bit of a pinkish tinge and they've got quite a velvety feel.
so the reason this is classed as an easy beginner mushroom
is because if you look underneath the cap, instead of having gills or pores it's got these spines,
which is where it gets its name from the Hedgehog mushroom, and these spines rub off quite easily
so as long as this mushroom is growing straight out the ground not out of wood, its a
fairly pale colour, and has spines
then it's a hedgehog mushroom and there's nothing you can mistake it with.
here you can see where I've rubbed off the spines where it's bruised it goes a browny pink colour
you see the cups of the Hedgehog have a very wavy irregular shape. that's a really young one there
you see they have a firm white flesh
they're a good mushroom for roasting whole or you can stew them. when you roast them they
go really nice and sweet they've got a lovely flavour that's fairly similar to chanterelles.
it's a good idea to just rub the spines off before cooking you don't have to but
the spines can go quite mushy in your food which isn't a very nice texture
what I like to do is take the mushrooms to a different part of the Woodland,
remove the spines and just scatter them around the woodlands because
the spines contain some spores which will maybe help some new mushrooms grow
I've talked before in my videos about harvesting and foraging sustainably I thought it'd be a
good idea to talk about it again because I know a lot more people are getting into
mushroom foraging at the moment. so for me the basic rule is never take more than you need
and never over pick a single area. now there's a a lot of mushrooms here but I'm taking maybe about
six or seven of these for my dinner tonight, it's important to leave some to regrow like I'm leaving
a lot of these younger ones here to grow up and mature. now with mushrooms you're not actually
damaging the fungus below ground when you're picking mushrooms,
the mushrooms are the fruiting body of the organism the fungus that lives below ground
so you're not actually damaging the fungus by picking them. but you are removing its chances
of reproducing, so think of it of taking an apple off a tree. it's fine to take a few but if you
take all of the apples then you're removing the tree's chance of reproducing that year.
so I'd say definitely never take more than a third of what's growing,
when you've got an absolute glut of mushrooms then it's okay to take some to preserve like
for example oyster mushrooms I've got a few spots that produce absolute thousands of
mushrooms. so then I'll collect quite a lot and preserve them dry them for later in the year.
just keep in mind there's a lot of other Wildlife that rely on mushrooms as a food source, and don't
be one of those people that go around collecting bin bags of mushrooms. as long as you do it
sustainably there's no reason to feel guilty for going out and picking your dinner from the wild
This is an English walnut tree and this time of year we can Harvest these lovely walnuts.
To identify an English Walnut the leaves are compound and they have large
oval leaflets and there's normally one larger terminal leaflet,
and the edges or the margins of the leaves are entire or untoothed.
The leaves have a very waxy feel and a good indicator for Walnut is if you break off
one of the leaflets crush them and smell them they've got a really strongly aromatic smell,
it reminds me a bit of Curry leaves if you've smelt them fresh they smell quite similar.
And that smell comes from a chemical that's a growth suppressant which is on the leaves. It
gets washed off in the rain and then it helps to suppress any growth around the base of the tree.
The only tree you'll probably mistake the English Walnut for is the black walnut,
which also has edible nuts. The trees look very similar but the leaves of the black
walnut have serrated margins rather than entire margins.
Walnuts
grow in green husks that crack open and then start to turn black as the nut inside matures.
I usually wait until the nut casings have fallen out and onto the ground and collect them that way,
but you do have to be lucky to beat the squirrels to them because walnuts
are probably the squirrels favorite nut. I'm
collecting these walnuts the day after a storm so they've all been shaken out of the tree,
so what I'll do is collect up a good amount and take them home and I'll leave them to dry for a
good few days to a week, and then you can either eat them raw or they're also really good roasted.
I usually look for walnuts around roadside and in Country Parks,
I don't find them too often in Woodlands in the UK.
Walnuts are really good for you, and they're very high in omega-3 and protein.
This is a common puffball a very common edible mushroom that grows in late Summer and Autumn
You'll find it growing out of the leaf litter of most types of woodlands and occasionally
in grasslands, but if you've got a puffball growing in grasslands it's more likely that
it's a meadow puffball. common puffballs have a spherical fruiting body that tapers down to a stem
they're white when they're immature and they're covered in these warts
that can be brushed off and when they are brushed off they leave a netted pattern on the cap
Puffballs are only edible when they're young and immature
you see this one's still got a nice white cap
as they mature you'll see in the center they've got that umbo and that starts to go darker and
this is where the mushroom will release its spores when it matures. but the most important thing is
that the flesh is still white and firm, if the flesh has gone dark then it's not edible anymore
so this one's fine still white nice and firm
that one is good to eat whereas this one you'll see it's just starting to
go yellow at the top there and the flesh isn't very firm anymore, that one's just past eating
and that one is still good. with puffballs the only thing they really get mistaken for
are earthballs which are poisonous, but the flesh of the earth ball is dark when you cut it in half
so really you shouldn't mistake them. so here's a patch of common puffballs that have gone over
and you can see if you're cutting in half the flesh has gone dark
and it's this one's just about ready to Spore and you can see that definitely doesn't look edible.
and these ones have spored you can see what I was talking about at the
Apex where you've got that umbo that's going dark. these ones have opened up,
the way they'll spread their spores is when it starts raining or if an animal
brushes past them then the pressure will release the spores like that
by the way you don't want to breathe these spores in,
if you breathe in too many it can cause chest problems. but it does look pretty cool
this is a meadow puffball they look very similar to Common puffballs but the stems are shorter
and fatter, and the common puffball has a much more distinct stem than the meadow puffball.
also the cap of the meadow puffball is covered in short fluffy spines rather
than the warts of the common puffball and Meadow puffballs grow in fields and meadows
rather than Woodlands. just like the common puffball you have to make sure
the Flesh of the meadow puffball is white and firm for it to be edible.
these are stump puffballs and these are edible when they're immature.
they're found in Autumn and they're very common.
as their name suggests they grow on stumps or out of roots, sometimes it can appear
they're growing straight out of the ground but there will be Roots just below the surface.
stump puffballs are a bit smaller than common puffballs up to around five centimeters tall
and there a bit like an inverted pear shape.
so they have a smooth cap,
here we have a smaller common puffball as I said before it's covered in warts.
as with all puffballs it needs to be immature to be edible you need to have a nice firm white flesh
like that that's perfect nice and white it's not going yellow or green and it's nice and firm.
so sometimes the Caps are a nice white creamy color like this sometimes they're darker
as long as the flesh is still white and firm these are still fine.
it's more common to see stump puffballs growing like this in dense clusters.
for me the stump puffball doesn't have quite as good a texture as the other puffballs
but they're probably the easiest of the puffballs to find and they
grow in large numbers so they're good for bulking out other dishes.
they don't have much of a flavor on their own but they do take on flavors quite well like marinades,
so I use them in a similar way to tofu. so I like to make a marinade like Teriyaki or a miso glaze.