Spinning wheels (at one point, I’m pretty rusty now)

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9ft would usually be accumulative over the course of a winter, it snows for 5 or 6 months in northern BC, but we did get 6ft in 2 days once and that was a shit show. I would give the Letharia dye another try, the last time I did it I don’t think I used a mordant but you could use alum or something. I would skip the pressure cooker and just do a hot water bath, then you don’t felt your wool socks down into little baby boots.

These guys are edible, you could definitely candy them but I would be hardpressed to find enough to make it worth the effort. No flavour to them but a fancy little mid-hike snack.

I did end up eating a few of these, they tasted like water but the texture was surprisingly pleasant.

Definitely magical and exciting to come across all sorts of fungi, take them home and learn about them. I often take friends and family out to find edible mushrooms and I end up picking the least amount of the edibles in the group because I like to fill my basket with mushrooms I have never seen.

We typically get a lot of snow, sometimes 9ft in a single winter or more but the last few years have been pitiful. This was at a slightly higher elevation (I am at about 500 metres). I often see people in washington and oregon find this mushroom throughout the winter, I thought it would be later for my area but not the beginning of June.

I originally got it for ID’ing mushrooms with spores and other microscopic features like cystidia and it hasn’t disappointed in that regard. I would say it is probably still better to hunt around for a high-quality used model but I am happy with how it performs for my needs. I’ll just mention the things I have issues with because other than that the miscroscope is great (coming from an amateur). The main issue I have is the quality of the objectives, you can see my photo has some chromatic aberration (this photo isn’t using one of the original objectives but the stock ones are about the same level of discolouration). However, for my first scope they are more than acceptable, but I am looking to switch them out this winter. Another minor issue I came across was in making a dark field filter, I did end up making one but it was a major pain compared to other people’s experiences with different scopes. All in all I am really happy with it as a beginner and if I ever decide to upgrade to a new scope I will know what to look for and what sort of features I like. Microbe Hunter’s review of this scope is great if you haven’t seen it yet.

These look excellent, good job.

I find that the timing has to be just right for your location. We find them usually beginning or middle of june, sometimes later, but most people associate them with the month of may as in the “may mushroom” and see people south of our location finding them earlier, even april. These morels grow right up against my house so its a warmer and wetter microclimate so you won’t find them in the mountains yet because it hasn’t warmed up enough. We also check our spots a couple times a week, especially after finding them in the garden. I look for Verpas, a morel lookalike that fruits usually a couple weeks before we find the real morels. I also take in to consideration other things like precipitation, previous winter’s snow fall, and how hot the spring has been in my area.

We see them most years but they’re very spotty when the spring is abnormally hot or there wasn’t much snowfall.

Thanks!

That’s fine, no experience needed. I am actually not all that great at ID either, I just know the most common species in my area.

We could do with a lichen community, just saying. Definitely fits within mycology but lichenology can easily stand on its own.

Nice, they sort of grow around my area but are very elusive

We have a fruiting chamber set up, its an old grow tent with ventilation, lights and a fogger. Honestly, if I wasn’t for the heavy spore load I would say this would grow well on a counter top. This is my first reishi grow so I am not very experienced with this species so take that with a grain of salt.

They absolutely do hahah

Not yet, I do regularly have reishi powder or extract in my coffee though but I’ve never had homegrown.

These take a bit of getting used to for sure and quite some time before the mycelium matures. I thought they’d never get there. Substrate is straight hardwood fuel pellets. I inoculated these in November and they colonised within a few weeks but I left them until they began to sort of grow antlers (actually left them longer because I got busy with work). I started fruiting them 4 weeks ago give or take. Temps were probably around 16-20°C normally. I bumped the humidity down to 60 or 70%.

They look almost identical to each other but I believe G. tsugae tends to favour conifer, I grew this on hardwood.