Dave Mundy

These beauties have just erupted in my garden plus lots more, any idea if they are edible?

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Chris Woolf

Looks like agaricus campestris – field mushroom – safe and good to eat. White cap and pink gills is a pretty good guide. The poisonous agaricus has white gills. The only other one you might confuse it with is the yellow stainer – bruises a brilliant yellow – not a good idea to eat it but not lethal.
Size would be a help – bigger ones could be horse mushrooms – still good to eat – may stain a faint brassy yellow..

Just be a little careful – those might be maggot holes in the stalk. Snap the stem off and check that there aren’t any wrigglers at the top end. Not the extra protein you’d fancy.

Mike Giles

They do look just like the field mushrooms that I used to wade through ankle high bedewed grass to find when I was but a lad. Nothing used to beat them for flavour, but it’s quite rare to find a field with them growing in nowadays, at least in my experience. Bon appetit!

Pat Heigham

My mother was allergic to mushrooms, and I believe I inherited a minor form of this – anything with mushroom ingredient goes straight through me – plus, I don’t like the taste anyway, could be a warning clue!

Why is it that some menus always list ‘dawn-picked mushrooms’?
Who this bird "Dawn"?

Tony Crake

A Cautionary Tale

When I first  joined the BBC up North at Skelton, near Penrith in 1962, the whole place was on ultra medical alert as most of the TAs had gone down with a severe form of some sort of – Poisoning!

They were very ill … Local GP’s were baffled … Chief Medical Officers turned up and poked their noses into God knows what …

The clue was it was only the TAs, who went out on their bikes to do aerial changeovers.  Eventually the penny dropped: it was something to do with the grazing sheep.

Turned out one of the grazing farmers had taken matters into his own hands and scattered tons of some violent chemical around to kill off the thistles (which got caught in the sheep’s fleeces).  It was picked up by the assorted fungi growing over the 400 acres grazing and aerial systems especially the "English Field Mushrooms" – and these had been picked since the stations opened in 1943!

This chemical would stay in the ground for years…. so a Total Mushroom ban was brought into play. It rather put me off mushrooms for ever!

Tony Grant

I can’t remember precisely where in the West Country we (3 man crew) were working, but we’d booked into a farmhouse for our evening meal and B&B. Excellent home cooking, so looking forward to breakfast, if we’d managed to digest all from the night before. On our way into the dining room the following morning we passed a table in the hall with a basket full of mushrooms, yummm, we thought.

“Would you like a full English, farm-fresh eggs, bacon, etc. etc.?”

“Yes please, but don’t forget the mushrooms.”

“Oh, I’m sorry we don’t have any mushrooms just now.”

“But there are lots on the table in the hall.”

“Oh no, those are yesterday’s.”

But the full English minus mushrooms was pretty good.

And many years before that, I was on a walking holiday with a friend of mine, and we’d fetched up for the night at a pub in Banbury (we were walking the Oxford canal). In the morning we were offered the cooked breakfast, and the owner recommended the mushrooms. So we included them in the order. We got one each, and each was the size of the dinner plate on which it was served. On asking where on earth he got mushrooms that size he explained he grew them in the beer cellar, in the dark, and fed them the slops after last orders. Pretty damn good too.

Peter Cook

Many moons ago there was an extra incentive to being crewed on the straight course cameras at Newbury Racecourse.

The obvious benefit was that not every race passed by and in those far off days, directors followed horses and didn’t pratt about with all manner of irrelevant shots and so stood cameras down until needed.

The mystery benefit was the crop of field mushrooms that appeared at certain meetings on the grass strip beside the race track and the airstrip. It was advisable to get there early before the rigger drivers and of course listen out for approaching Cessnas! The important point with mushroom identification is not the white cap, but the colour and pattern and colour of the gills underneath.