A Great Start

    Yesterday I made a short visit to the Warren at Shouldham and tho it's a rather quiet time of year for fungi, I was really pleased to finish the trip with a first for me. Not only are these early summer visits a continued source of fresh air and relaxation but also a great way of finding what I consider to be areas that have good promise later in the autumn months when a large selection of our mushroom and fungus friends are bountiful. I look to see where certain trees grow as that is a huge advantage when looking for fungi. You can waste many hours just walking through woodland with the hope of finding some interesting mushroom or fungus, but knowing which tree has a relationship with which fungi may often save a lot of those wasted hours.


    To do this we need to learn our trees and which fungi are found close to then. So now I'm trying to teach myself this important part of the hobby by using these early scouting  walks.

   The Warren is a large area of woodland covering many acres, the area is divided into different sections, some with young trees maybe just around 10 to 20 years of age, others full of wonderful mature trees such as Oaks, Ash, Birch and Beech. There are grassed areas edging some of the woodland that seem to be a haven for the beautiful Earth Star, over the end of last autumn I was lucky enough to discover a good wide range in all their stages.

   Yesterday was a lovely walk and one on which I explored a couple more new areas. You see with the Warren being such a large expanse of woodland, I've still areas to unearth and to be honest, the more I visit the more I realise just how little I have discovered. It was in one of the areas new to me that I stumbled across a single Blistered Cup Fungus (Peziza Vesiculosa), as seen in the picture below. As you can see the inner cup has some blister-like effects thus I guess why the common name.


   A real first for me which was a very nice bonus on a hunt on which my expectations were very low. So another name ticked off on my "wants" list.

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