Lords of the Dark Earth

I started a 6 class continuing ed course at the University of Toronto last night, on mushroom identification. It's called Mushrooms, Lords of the Dark Earth. I suppose the title is supposed to attract participants. More properly, it might be called: Mushrooms: basic identification for the interested amateur.

We're going to learn about:
The various uses of fungi
Basic mushroom terminology
How to make a spore print
How to use field guides and keys
Useful print and on-line resources
Where to find and how to collect mushrooms
Identifying mushrooms and other fungi of our bioregion
Translating scientific mushroom names
The basic life history and common species of slime moulds

On Saturday, we meet at a regional forest north of Toronto, where we will gather and identify mushrooms. It would be nice if we had some rain this week to encourage fruiting, but it doesn't look like it.

Over the summer, I've been out mushroom hunting quite a number of times, but the species I've been chasing are limited. I've picked chanterelles, lobster mushrooms, hedgehog mushrooms, or sweet-tooth, and a few boletes. I've only picked one agaricus, and that was from my neighbour's front lawn. He's had this edible variety fruit a few times over the season. My interest in the class is to learn to identify mushrooms I haven't collected before and to strengthen my overall mushroom knowledge.