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_OttO_ said:
Nice pics! If you want to make your life 1 million times easier, take some scissors with you and clean each specimen as you collect - it really doesnt take long in the field, and when you get home you have a bag of clean fresh mushrooms that are ready to do whatever you want with. Cleaning a huge haul after picking all day is not fun at all...

Also, honey is a nice way to prepare them dont get me wrong - but its certainly not the best way. Putting fresh mushrooms straight into honey introduces a huge amount of water into the honey (the fruit bodies are 90% water) inviting bacteria and funk.

Next time lay your shrooms out on paper or a towel, put a fan on them for 2 days and let them shrink right down before putting them in the honey. Thsi is best in a warm room with a heater or by the fire... Another huge benefit of this is that all the little mushroom bugs will die and be left behind on the paper before you put them in the honey.

Or even better, dry them out under a fan first then put them into a food dehydrator to finish off the drying process - they will be nice and crispy dry, and can be stored for months in ziplock bags.

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olive said:
Mush313, did all yours come from the mountain?

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mush313 said:

Thanks for the tips! we usually eat some as we pick so thats why we leave the manicuring till after haha

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mush313 said:
And the only reason we didnt dry them before we put them in honey is because i thought they would lose their potency? also will keeping it in the freezer stop mold?

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You will lose very little potency if you handle them gently (the less you bruise them, the stronger they stay) and if you carefully lay them out in front of a fan in a warm room for 2 days - this won't dry them to 'cracker dry' (do a search on that) but it will be much better for honey.

You know when people complain of 'mushie guts'? This doesn't happen nearly as much when they've been properly dried... Id imagine its because all the bacteria etc. die upon drying.

The other benefit is you won't need nearly as much honey!

Dont ever freeze fresh mushrooms, this will ruin them. Im not sure if it would still ruin them if they werr submerged in honey, but I suspect it prob would. The reason is that the thousands of little cells explode (like a beer left in the freezer) and open up the contents to the air once you bring them out and thaw them, which oxidises all the good stuff and leaves it in-active.

Drying properly is by far your best bet

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durantz said:
Well we've just had a fantastic rain so the shrooms should be popping up down south.

I'm yet to find any in WA so this may be the year for it.

I was wondering if anyone knows how the shrooms got into WA. Are they native here or introduced?

I was considering going further south to see if I can find some around Northcliffe or Bridgetown. If the shrooms are native then they should be growing in a lot more places than just balingup.

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olive said:
Watch 'The Magic Mushrooms of Balingup' on Youtube if you hav'nt allready.

Have heard they may grow from Harvey to Walpole.

Its up to all of us to keep spreading sub mycelium.
We wont have to drive so far.


Some stems from a recent trip -

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nice

you will not find them much further south than bridgetown
i know of people who go to bridgetown for them but any further south and you will not find them not saying it isnt possible you nevert know wat ya gonna find but your odds would probably be like 1 in billions

they are clearly an introduced mushroom wich would have been brought here with the tree farming industry in the early days even though they prefer the native bushland
and once you get further south of bridgetown tree plantations are few and far between nearly all the towns in the southwest started from timber milling however the majority of wat was milled further south has always been native bushland wich is then left to regenerate naturally and doesnt get replanted for treefarming
aswell as the fact that well over 90% of the few plantations further south are all private plantations on peoples farms and not government plantations on crown land
this makes it hard for anyone to even check around these areas without tresspassing on someones property even though it may not be the plantations in particular you want to search the native bushland around the plantations is still usually on someones property

so if your coming from perth i would not bother driving all the way to somewhere like northcliffe because you wont find anything
and thats a fuken long way to go for fuckall

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durantz said:
You guys do raise a good point.

So are we assuming that the shrooms are native to the Eastern States and were then introduced over here?

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jyubai said:The cold is quickly forgotten when you get the sight and your on the hunt.

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