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NWP Global Registry of Apprentice Ecologists - Bong Drive, Poplar, Wisconsin, USA

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Bong Drive, Poplar, Wisconsin, USA
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merickson355



Registered: December 2018
City/Town/Province: Poplar
Posts: 1
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This fall, I looked at my calendar hoping to find something to do during the last slightly warm days of the year. Something to get me out in my community. I found out September is "Mushroom Month". I have absolutely never done anything with mushrooms other then sneering when my mother tries to make me eat them but living in a rural area I thought mushroom foraging would be a fun past time. I quickly sunk in hours a day to my mushroom finding and preserving. I found out then how passionate I can be when it comes to plants and science, which lead me to my future college education.


I started by just walking up and down my own road. I live in a rural community on a 80 acre farm, I wasn't lacking the space to look. I first checked down at the creek closest to my house, and found only a few common mushrooms and a small fairy ring. I was concerned that maybe I wouldn't find much variety but I still taught myself how to get spore prints and sun dry the common mushrooms I found. Looking at my local school library, I found only two older books. Searching through one book was almost impossible without any base knowledge on mushrooms as it was mostly a foraging guide to edible mushrooms while the other half was a mushroom cookbook. I wanted to know all the mushrooms in my area though, the edible and the poisonous! The other book happened to be my dream mushroom book. Titled quite perfectly as "The Mushroom Book," it was a huge hardcover and covered everything I could wish to know about mushrooms.


This book taught me about the difference you can get with gills, the difference in caps, even the difference in stems and universal veils. The most useful part of this book though is most definitely the way it helps you ID the mushrooms. The picture I have connected to this essay is an amanita, which is a poisonous mushroom but when I first looked at it, I didn't know. This book played to what I do know about this mushroom though. My mushroom has a cap and stem shape, so if I flip over the mushroom I can see it has gills. I now have narrowed down the wide list of mushrooms to about one fourth its normal amount. The more I studied mushrooms, the more I learned which made me want to spend every minute I had studying my mushrooms.


Sadly, my amanita pictured couldn't be preserved, which is something the book couldn't have prepared me for. As I found all my mushrooms in soggy and swampy areas I had a high chance of finding slugs or maggots in my mushrooms. My amanita was then way too large to sundry as it would decay faster than I could let the sun remove moisture, but I lost it to a sadder source. After about a day of drying I found my giant mushroom was infested with maggots. I then learned the lesson of realizing these are in fact not my mushrooms, but they'll forever exist to nature. I returned the amanita to my yard and realized how beautiful the faster decay was, I could sit for a few minutes and see the decay that would normally take days. The wriggling of the maggots and the slow loss of mushroom flesh was poetic of the chaos brought by nature. I would never own this land, I could only do my best to study and appreciate.


This loss only fueled future discovery. I probably found for the rest of my month more than one hundred mushrooms which were all studied, either by picking a select few and taking pictures of the rest. I couldn't take all the mushrooms I saw, now knowing that I needed to share it with the fertile earth and the slugs and maggots around me. In just one month I have become an expert in my local fungi and have in fact had my science teacher recommend my knowledge to fellow fall foragers. My room became a small mushroom spore collection, the floor covered in multicolor paper and mushrooms with my mother's expensive glass bowls covering all of my experiments. Speaking of my mother, she's offly patient with my studies because she not only let me use her bowls but also let me use all her window sills to dry some select mushrooms and some baking pans as a reflective surface to lay them on. I couldn't have done this without her patience and her listening to my crazy ramblings.


I hope with this project I can continue to educate my community on our local flora and fungi. Either with some of my neighbors who have foraged before but steer clear of mushrooms because they're unknown or my neighbors who are beginning to grow some mushrooms in their home to eat, I hope to spread knowledge to those around about the unknown. I hope to change the image of mushrooms with foragers as being too unpredictable, and I hope to encourage my community to find free food in their own backyards. Thank you for taking your time to read this essay!
· Date: December 12, 2018 · Views: 3388 · File size: 23.3kb, 987.9kb · : 1080 x 1392 ·
Hours Volunteered: 30
Volunteers: 1
Authors Age & Age Range of Volunteers: 17
Area Restored for Native Wildlife (hectares): 32
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