Agaricus Campestris

Welcome to my new blog, where I will be posting about food, baking (which I suppose is really still food), mycology (which can also sometimes cross over into the food category....) and whatever else I feel like really. My name is Kat, I am 23 and I live in Ontario, Canada and if you can't already tell I really love food. I also really love mushrooms and foraging for wild edibles. Recently my foraging interest has branched out into the study of mushrooms and fungi. I love collecting mushrooms and attempting to identify what species they are later, though I am not great at this yet. But enough rambling about me, on to my first post!

I would like to kick off this blog with a post about a mushroom I found just the other day. On my way home a few days ago I saw a white ball poking out of the grass on a small hill. I immediately assumed it was a puffball mushroom, since I have seen those growing there often before and I couldn't see the stem at all. when I picked it up though a stem was poking out of the bottom, which initially made me kind of sad, since I had been hoping for a side of puffball with my dinner that night and instead I got a strange blob I had never seen before.
Here is a photo of the mushroom after I took it inside:

The mushroom smelled basically like a button mushroom from the store and was smooth and white all over. The cap was about 2-3 inches across. The cap had a veil and was young so I could not see if there were gills or what they looked like.
Here is a photo that shows the stem a bit better:

I then sliced the mushroom in half to find pretty, pink gills that were completely free from the stem. The mushroom only stained a slight brown colour after being cut.
Here is a picture of the mushroom after I cut it open:

I had narrowed it down to a type of agaricus mushroom now, but I didn't really know what I was looking at still, so I decided to do a spore print. I left a piece of the cap in a glass cup with plastic wrap over the top overnight and when I removed it the next day it had left a dark brown spore print. With all that information I think I can say with almost complete certainty that this mushroom was an Agaricus Campestris!

Agaricus Campestris is also know as a meadow mushroom. It is edible and a very close relative to Agaricus Bisporus, which are the white button mushrooms you get at the grocery store. They have pink gills and smell delicious and muhroomy. If you have found a mushroom that you think might be Agaricus Campestris make sure you do a lot of research before eating it, there are many other mushrooms that look extremely similar! A few indications it is poisonous are a bad odour, yellow staining or if the gills lean more to an orange or purple hue.

I hope you enjoyed my first post! Look forward to many more!