Mushrooms

Recently we have been learning about mushrooms and have gone on a couple of walks to find some.

Did you know that mushrooms don’t have seeds? They drop spores so we picked a few and made spore prints with them by putting the mushrooms on white paper. Some mushrooms drop brown ones, some drop white ones and some drop cream ones. It was quite an interesting experiment.

We learnt about the parts of a mushroom, the life cycle of mushrooms and where they grow (mushrooms grow in shaded damp areas, some grow in mossy areas, some grow on dead trees branches and some grown up live tree trunks).

On one of the walks we saw lots of different edible mushrooms from blewits, which are pretty as they are purple/pink underneath, jelly ears, which are very weird as they look like ears stuck to branches and some type of bracket mushroom which grow off the side of dead or living tree trunks.

On another of our walks we saw red mushrooms (Fly Agaric), which was the first time we’d ever seen them and it was very cool. We didn’t pick them though as they are known to be poisonous.

We are not brave enough to eat any though as you have to be 100% sure if they are edible or not.  We will keep looking and learning and maybe one day we’ll be able to eat what we find.