Plenty of rain has brought out lots of mushrooms, including giant puffballs, psychedelic red and white fly agaric, field mushrooms and many more.
One of the most prized edible fungi is the penny bun or cep, the classic mushroom with a brown cap and stumpy beige stalk you expect gnomes to sit on.
Picking edible mushrooms is turning into a big pastime now that foraging for wild food is fashionable. This is more than simply picking mushrooms for your own meal; fancy restaurants and markets are also keen to get their hands on wild mushrooms, and commercial pickers have been stripping some places of edible fungi.
The New Forest and Epping forest have received a lot of attention, probably because they are easy to get to, and already the New Forest Association has called for a ban on all picking.
There is an argument that mushroom picking makes no difference to the fungus because it survives through its mycelium, the filaments that make up a network underground. But systematic plundering means fewer people being able to see the mushrooms and it causes damage – plants trampled, wildlife sites stripped for invertebrates, and trees robbed of the fungi they depend upon for feeding roots with valuable nutrients (mushrooms often grow close to trees, which act as their hosts).
The problem is we don’t know how much harm may be done to fungi by picking the fruiting body above ground. But so long as there is money to be made from harvesting wild mushrooms the fungi are going to be collected. So they need protecting.
