What Jo says, internet is a great source. And there are some excellent identification books out there, often specific by region.
One general rule of thumb is that they all should be cooked. Many mushroom types can cause stomach upset if not cooked.
The other rule is stick to the no brainer, unconfusable types, ones that have no toxic relatives or look-alikes.
Here’s a pic of shaggy mane mushrooms I picked yesterday, same story, rains after hurting drought. Unmistakable, also known as ink cap, because they degenerate into black inky goo when old, pop up in lawns etc.
Funny ya’ll are talking about mushrooms. Just before I sat down here a moment ago I was making a batch of reishi mushroom tea. I started driking some every day when the whole family got a cold last week. Mine lasted 1.5 days. Everyone else still has theirs after almost 12 days.
The more I study about mushrooms, the more intrigued I am by them and what they are good for.
Do the shaggy mane have any dangerous look-alikes. ?
Here’s source info on shaggy mane. They do warn about the one sort that people mistake it for, but I can’t imagine how they make that mis-identification.
I like shaggy mane mushrooms, as they are unlike anything else, but I suppose that’s once you are familiar with them, and their growing habits. Easy picking when they show up in your lawn, or on a manure pile.
I am building a gasifier wood heating boiler. Just wonder’ed if any one here at Dow can find the gasifier boiler heating unit that joe from up in michigan built and posted his design.IS AT.?
Thanks Andy thats the one i was looking for, i will post pics of my simple design as i get it more done in my own gasifier heating boiler thread later.
Finally got the paper we needed, we hope, and everthing is sent off to Washington D.C…The D.R.Congo embassy should receive the package today…Should hear back from them in 8 or 10 days. We’ll see what happens.
I nearly missed it. Yesterday was autumnal equinox (I looked the translation up). Days and nights were equally long all over the world. I celebrated by doing some chunking
Hi J.O.
Yes autumnal equinox is a worldwide celestial same-same.
Our regional weathermen(persons) and I however agree: here meterlogical Autumn/Fall begins the beginning of September.
I/we have now had 4 days and now again 1 day of raining now. 3.5 inches cumulative for me. More than in the previous cumulative four months. Definite drought break.
2 foot x 2 foot x 3 foot “camping fires” are now allowed. Forestry burn piles still not-allowed. Darn. Many tent caterpillars all around here in most all of the trees except the fir and the holly trees. And no way to branch cut these out and burning pile burn them up. I refuse to kill-spray as the toxic chemicals will get picked up into my free-ranging chickens. We eat the eggs and meats from these chickens.
In the 24 days of cooling down September so far I have built up and stabilized to clean burning 48 small morning and late evening fires in the wood stove. 20 days with 2x a day use of 10 pounds of wood fuel. 4 days cooler with the little foster/god-children overnight using 40 pounds of wood fuel a day so far.
With projected usage through the end of this month that will be ~1/3 of a 128 cubic foot CORD of my Douglas Fir fuel wood.
September, May, June usually work out about the same at 1/3 cord a month. Takes my driest wood to do this. With any “mushroom wood” taken in defiantly used up in September!
October, April usually be 3/4 to full one cord months. Here I can use brought in too wet of wood. November, April be one to 1 1/2 cord months. December, January, February, March can be up to two cords a month used. Needs drier wood to be able to make the hourly heat-needs. I load stack my wood shed to reflect anticipated usage needs.
Douglas Fir is a low energy dense “firewood” by weight not favored very highly. Hey! Use what you got, eh. We’ve been dong DF and Hemlock for a strong 150 years here. The "good’ USofA oft-quoted firewoods are a books/magazine fantasy for the majority of us out here in the far-far-West.
By end of heating season sometime into next June I will have made and stabilized to hot clean burning 600 fires in the one house; and maybe 400 fires in the folks old visitor house.
I guess I should clarify “mushroom wood”. Woods that are so semi-rotton and decomposed that with a little moisture and they will self-heat some and will easily grow mushrooms. The FOURTH way to turn wood-into-human-foods.
An actual selling market for this wood down into the keep-it-weird city of Portland Or.
One fellow here in my valley caters to this market demand.
Another fellow 15 miles away in the town of Ridgefield WA specifically caters to the open fire place for ambience people. He has the logs delivered to him and precisely lengths cuts to 16". Fine splits this eliminating ALL outer bark and splits/growth faults, and any discoloration. Then dries it down to 15% and under. Perfect chicken white-breast-meat wood. Sells for 3x of normal general purpose heating firewood. His split-out, non-prefect is disappeared, dumped somewhere.
I have found these two markets too weird for my patience levels.
S.U.
Hi Steve,
With a nice and sunny September I haven’t lit a sticker yet (Mazda is lit every day ) Even though temps have fallen below freezing at nights for the last week the old solar panels I installed back in 1995 have kept us warm enough. (Only a few extra degrees are added with electric to the tap water to burn the legs off of the bugs.) However the angle of reflection is starting to get the upper hand and I will probably start my wood heating season any day now. Almost a month later than avarage.
Not the story here. We’ve had one of the most sudden and severe autumns in memory. We went from some of the hottest, most relentless weather ever, not needing a blanket on a bed since May, until the 6th or 7th of September, since then frost, rainy, and cool, no harvesting since, snow already through most of the prairies, 40 - 50% of crops are unharvested.
It’s like someone turned a switch, like how we missed spring this year. Might be no Indian summer for us…
At least we are getting moisture for the soil, and minimal evaporation.
Crops left in the field are a double hit not only do you lose the years revenue but you also have a mess to clean up in the spring. There will be some bankruptcies from that unless the government helps out crop insurance in the USA anyway won’t much more then cover the actual cost of planting.
I’m glad I built a 400 sqft house. Last year our winter started Oct 27th and lasted into May. We light our wood stove when it gets below 70 F in the house. Right now, it’s only once per day. That was until this week. We may have to light the stove twice per day as we are expecting daytime temps in the 40’s. I now have 2 cords of 8’ sticks of Poplar/Aspen from clearing a little land around the house of which I will burn in the fall and spring. I will save the Maple and Birch for the cold winter days. This year I purchased 2 cord of Maple and Birch mix cut and split from a fellow member of the farmer’s market. It cost us the same amount of money that we made from selling our product in one week at one market. As long as I am able to make and sell Maple and Birch syrup, I will not be harvesting either species from my property. I will harvest dead and downed trees of maple and birch. I will burn as much Aspen as I can through the cold months for our warmth.
Wow! Amazing that all you guys are already talking about cold and frost and firewood. You just stppoed talking about the snow melt… LOL…By the way JO, What’s a “sticker”?
SteveU…glad ya’ll finally got some rain.
Time here to plant the late fall gardens. We had almost 4 weeks of no rain…hurricane sucked it out I guess. But finally we have rain for three days. So the early fall tomatoes, beans, etc can finish ripening along with the late crop of figs, crab apples, pears and apples. Muscadines and scuppernongs are ripe now. Putting up the crab apples today. And of course, there’s always okra. About time for something else to be ready. Okra every day can get old after a while.
No doubt there will be bankruptcies, that’s just the dicey game big farmers have been caught up in for decades now, buy bigger iron, work more land, until the weather or prices catch you. Where they had ground covering wet snow it will be a mess, tends to flatten crops and swath. We need a week or more of dry weather so harvest can be resumed, soybeans will be challenging. Crop insurance is voluntary, but generally people would be further ahead from a normal harvest, and as you say, there’s still the cleanup anyways. There’s 4- 5 weeks to hope for decent weather.
Garry, I´m sorry to hear. Unfortunately we can´t do much about the weather.
Very funny Billy!
With English as a second language my time with DOW has been as much an English lesson as a gasification one. A “sticker” is what @TomC initially accused my sawmill of being able to produce I know most things are bigger in the US but I didn´t know even stickers were 12" wide
Sticks and splinters are called “stickor” in Swedish, so the translation was never an issue. However stickers as in sticky labels we call “klistermärken” (glue-marks). See, in a while we can have this conversation in Swedish
Keep them comeing JO, l already know a voriety of wood related Swedish words, and one non wood related; Anka=duck. That l remembered becouse my aunts name is Anka
But seriously now, what size wood do you get in the stove? I can squeeze in up to 33cm long (about a foot)
) Even though temps have fallen below freezing at nights for the last week the old solar panels I installed back in 1995 have kept us warm enough. (Only a few extra degrees are added with electric to the tap water to burn the legs off of the bugs.) However the angle of reflection is starting to get the upper hand and I will probably start my wood heating season any day now. Almost a month later than avarage.
