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ABOUT MUSHROOMS<br />
Most of the edible kinds have their favorite environments, although<br />
these are not likely to be so sharply restricted as those<br />
just mentioned. By knowing where to look for them we can save<br />
much aimless wandering. The elm Pleurotus, for example, inhabits<br />
the heartwood of elms and box elder trees especially and puts out<br />
its fat fruit bodies at knotholes or branch stubs ten or twenty feet<br />
above the ground. The oyster mushroom, closely related to the<br />
elm Pleurotus, prefers newly cut logs and stumps, and fruits so<br />
regularly and abundantly on them that in Germany people have<br />
practiced watering new stumps to induce the production of this<br />
fungus. Nearly all fairy-ring mushrooms and puffballs prefer<br />
grassy fields and pastures, where the soil has not been disturbed<br />
too much; the shaggymanes like roadsides; and morels grow best<br />
in wooded areas.<br />
In general, then, if one is hunting mushrooms to eat, he must<br />
look for them in grassy meadows and pastures, on compost heaps,<br />
on and near stumps and fallen trees, and even within hollow logs,<br />
on the ground in shady forests, on branch stubs of living trees,<br />
and all up and down the trunks and limbs of dead trees.<br />
<strong>Mushrooms</strong> <strong>Edible</strong> and Poisonous<br />
There are a number of ways by which some people claim to be<br />
able to distinguish edible mushrooms from poisonous ones —tests<br />
such as the blackening of a silver fork or of a silver coin placed<br />
in the pot where the fungi are cooking, or involving such easily<br />
visible characters as the color of the cap or the gills or the presence<br />
of a cup at the base of the stem, or the even more subtle<br />
characters of odor, texture, or season of appearance. Each will<br />
swear by his own particular test and will submit as evidence of its<br />
efficacy his own health and well-being after he has picked and<br />
eaten wild mushrooms for years. This is obvious proof that the<br />
mushrooms he ate were edible; it does not prove that those he<br />
avoided or discarded were not just as good as those he ate. Such<br />
tests will seem to be authentic if poisonous species are so uncom-<br />
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