Mushrooms of the Upper Midwest: A Simple Guide to Common Mushrooms

by Teresa Marrone, Kathy Yerich

Overview

Begin to Identify Mushrooms with this Great Visual Guide for the Upper Midwest!

Mushrooming is a popular and rewarding pastime—and it’s one that you can enjoy with the right information at hand. Mushrooms of the Upper Midwest is the field guide to get you started. The region-specific book utilizes an innovative, user-friendly format that can help you identify mushrooms by their visual characteristics. Hundreds of full-color photographs are paired with easy-to-understand text, providing the details to give you confidence in the field. The information, written by foraging experts Teresa Marrone and Kathy Yerich, is accessible to beginners but useful for even experienced mushroom seekers.

Learn about nearly 400 species of common wild mushrooms found in the Midwestern states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. The species (from Morel Mushrooms to Shelf Mushrooms) are organized by shape, then by color, so you can identify them by their visual characteristics. Plus, with the Top Edibles and Top Toxics sections, you'll begin to learn which are the edible wild mushrooms and which to avoid.

Get this field guide, jam-packed with information, and start identifying the mushrooms you find.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781591939603
Publisher:	Adventure Publications, Incorporated
Publication date:	02/25/2020
Series:	Mushroom Guides
Edition description:	2nd Revised ed.
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	86,025
Product dimensions:	4.40(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Teresa Marrone has been gathering and preparing wild edibles for three decades—and writing about them for 25 years. She is the author of more than a dozen outdoors-themed books, including the Wild Berries & Fruits Field Guide series (currently available for four regions of the U.S.) and numerous cookbooks featuring wild foods. She lives in Minneapolis with husband Bruce and enjoys shooting photos of mushrooms, berries and all things wild in the area surrounding their property abutting Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. A born forager, Kathy Yerich has been intimately involved with mushroom foraging for over 10 years. A proud member of the Minnesota Mycological Society and the North American Mycological Association, she has traveled the country in search of fungi. She has recently started seeing a new side of mushrooms with the discovery of macro lenses. A video producer by day, she is more comfortable behind the camera but recently got a taste of the other side, foraging with “Bizarre Foods” host Andrew Zimmern in a web series called “Appetite for Life.” She lives in Forest Lake, Minnesota, with her potter and mushroom-scout husband Fred and multiple four-legged friends. This collaboration with Teresa is her first book.

Read an Excerpt

Wine Caps
Stropharia rugosoannulata (also called Wine-Cap Stropharia, Garden Giant)

Young specimens have pillowy caps with a thick white partial veil underneath; the bottom of the veil has irregular edges, resembling a gear or cogwheel. The cap expands and flattens with age and is generally 2 to 5½ inches wide, sometimes larger. It is burgundy to reddish-brown, with a dry, smooth surface; older specimens fade to tan and can develop cracks, especially in dry weather. There is a persistent ring on the upper stem; the ring retains the gear-shaped edges. Stems are typically 4 to 6 inches tall and white or cream-colored; they are moderately stout and typically wider at the base, which often is surrounded by whitish mycelium (threadlike fungal filaments) that may be visible in the growing substrate. Gills are closely spaced and attached to the stem; they are white at first, turning grayish-lilac to purplish-black. Wine Caps grow from spring through fall on wood chips, mulch and straw, and in cultivated areas. They are present but less common during summer. Spores are purplish-brown to blackish.

COMPARE: Some Russula species (pg. 134; inedible or toxic) have reddish caps; stems have no ring and spores are creamy yellowish to pale orangish-yellow. * Brick Tops (pg. 136; edible) have brick-red caps; stems have a filmy ring remnant or no ring. * Some Amanita species (pgs. 62–67; toxic) have reddish caps and rings on the stem, but they have white spores and a cup around the stem base.

NOTES: Wine Caps are delicious; make a spore print to avoid toxic lookalikes. Wine Caps are available in grow-it-yourself kits, for outdoor gardens.

Table of Contents

Introduction

• About This Book
• What Is a Mushroom?
• How to Look at Mushrooms
• Eating Mushrooms
• Digging Deeper into Mycology
• How to Use This Book
• Basic Categories

Top Edibles

Top Toxics

Mushrooms Grouped by Type

• Cap & Stem with Gills
• Cap & Stem with Pores
• Atypical Caps
• Shelf with Pores
• Shelf with Gills
• Shelf/Other
• Spherical Mushrooms
• Cup-Shaped Mushrooms
• Coral and Club Fungi
• Miscellaneous Mushrooms

Helpful Resources and Bibliography

Glossary

Index

About the Authors

Editorial Reviews

This is a fine, information-packed handbook which will benefit both new and experienced mushroom hunters. Introductory materials provide careful coverage of the mycological science needed for a basic understanding of fungi and their world. This includes: nature of mushrooms, mushroom structure, stages of growth, the role played by mushrooms in the environment and the matter of safe eating.Layout of pages dealing with individual species is nicely organized, with an initial comment on habitat, followed by a clear, detailed description of the mushroom. In addition, there are important notes on spore color, look-a likes and other facts. Excellent color photos are on the facing pages.Very helpful for the beginner are the two sections; Top Edibles and Top ToxicsThe first presents enough easily identified edibles to satisfy the mushroomer looking for table fare. The second presents important facts about the poisonous mushrooms which hunters are likely to encounter, mushrooms to be handled with caution and never eaten.One negative: This book is an ambitious undertaking covering nearly 400 species, its detailed descriptions, accompanying notes and photos. The decision to present this large quantity of informative material in a 4 ½ by 6 inch pocket -size volume requires compression of the materials into a very small space. Reduced print size and light print tone may, for some, be a problem, especially when in the field. Photos too are necessarily small. It seems perhaps too much material for the field and a book one might prefer to ponder and profit from at home.

Northstate Mycological Club - Cora Mullen

This small book is subtitled "A Simple Guide to Common Mushrooms", and it lives up to its name. It is quite small in size: 4 3/8 x 6", with 288 pages, so it is convenient to carry on your forays. In many ways, this book is ideal for a beginning mushroomer, since it is based on the appearance of the mushroom rather than its scientific classification. It starts out with a description of the different parts of a mushroom, with many photographic illustrations and simple language. Once you have learned what to look for, the book next shows you the various categories of mushrooms, e.g., with caps and stems with gills. Moving to the appropriate section of the book (easy to do, since most pages have the category printed at the top in a distinctive color), there is a two-page spread for the more common ones, with the text description on the left, and several photos on the right. There are keys at the top of each text page in addition to the category name, showing the habitat (ground, stumps, or associated with trees), and the season in which to look for them. Less common mushrooms get just one page. The text is divided into sections for habitat, a description of the mushroom in non-technical terms , spore print appearance, the season of growth, other names, possible look-alikes that you might confuse with this species, and a note about edibility. The word "toxic" is always in bold text, so you can't miss it. Right at the beginning of the categories are the 10 top edibles and the 10 top toxic mushrooms. Finally, there's a good index and a glossary of terms. The choice of mushrooms is quite inclusive for the Upper Midwest, with more than 250 species described, so unless your mushroom is an "LBM" (Little Brown Mushroom), or has no real distinctive features, you are quite likely to find it listed here. One problem with the book is that most of the text is printed in gray. Key identification points are printed in a different color, but that is a pale greenish beige. This makes the text hard to read, and the key points don't stand out very well. In summary, if you are just getting started learning about mushrooms, and don't have anyone knowledgeable to go around with, this is an excellent first choice for your mushroom library.

Illinois Mycological Association - Fungus Friends