After I read that Emma had spotted an autumn toadstool on her walk, I had a yearning to go on a mushroom/toadstool hunt in the bush. So last Sunday I took my family out for a ramble around a bush track on the Woodville end of the Manawatu Gorge, looking out for autumnal fungi. I was not disappointed!
There were some wonderful red toadstools.
Bright orange fungus:
Tiny ethereal mushrooms (hard to photograph! This one was not much bigger than a pea and I liked the way it was growing upwards towards the light from underneath a log.)
Warty armies of toadstools:
Odd phallic looking ones with speckles:
I don’t know enough about wild mushrooms to know if any of these are edible, so I let them be and just took photographs.
After our walk, we stopped for a simple picnic of pikelets and feijoas.
Back home in the fridge was a package of field mushrooms my friend Nat had picked from her farm. I cooked them in garlic, onions and lots of green herbs, stirred in cream right at the end of cooking and ate it on pasta. Amazing.
And of course, I can’t go anywhere these days without spotting a dahlia:
Helen Lehndorf 
Not sure about the others, but the red toadstool is toxic. Beautiful pics – especially like the one of the white mushroom rising from the dead leaves. Also, feijoas, yum! We can’t get them here (North Carolina) and it’s one of the foods that I really miss from home. One day …
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I remember missing feijoas when I was in the UK. Sometimes I could find feijoa jam in places which sell ‘ethnic’ foods – it was made in South America, where the feijoa comes from. I don’t know if that helps!
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Love the pic of your skirt juxtaposed next to that wonderful toadstool 🙂
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