We have a number of large piles of rotted wood chips on our land from about five years old when we had to clear a few trees. They produced quite a few two years ago, then nothing last year with the dry fall in our area. We're happy to see them again.
On today's episode of "Death or Dinner"
It looks like white oyster mushroom which are super delicious. Theres a mushroom app called picture mushroom, where you take a picture and it tells you about it, so id check that first. If you like mushrooms then you're lucky to have these growing here!
Yes, they are delicious. A pain to clean though, there must be a trick to it that I haven't figured out yet.
Are those edible?
My friend, all fungi are edible, but some fungi are only edible once.
Oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus). I picked and dried a bunch two years ago and we've been adding them to soups and sauces. We're still alive and well.
There's at least one way to find out...
They could be pluerotus Ostreatus, or oyster mushrooms, but the best way to tell would be to see how far down the stem the gills run. They should be fully decurrent(or run all the way down the stem, essentially right up to the mycelium). Another ID point is the smell. They should smell uniquely like the oyster mushrooms at the store, which is to say kind of savory, somewhere between chicken soup and scallops. Depending on the type of wood it could be kind of sweet smelling as they often taken on characteristics of maple syrup when growing on maple trees. If you can't positively ID these as Pluerotus Ostreatus, please put aside the FOMO and the pressure from other inexperienced mushroom hunters to eat them. You should never eat anything you can't positively identify. That goes for mushrooms, plants, anything. Think of it as any other unknown item you picked up off the ground. Would you just pick stuff up off the ground and put it in your mouth? No. Furthermore, don't trust AI apps, they are notoriously bad at identifying mushrooms. They hallucinate their own facts and I could show you numerous examples of them being dangerously wrong. Especially in the case of a mushroom growing outside of its usual context. Oyster mushrooms, generally grow on trees. They have been known to colonize a compost pile or wood chips, but its not the usual. There are a lot of things these could be from the picture. As always its best not to eat something that you are not confident about. The best way to gain confidence is to get used to the process of IDing mushrooms until you can look at it with certainty and know what it is.