Damn. I’m getting hungry. Will spare my wife’s dog :rolleyes: I’ve heard if they are young, they are not dangerous. What is “young” and how do I define a species?
By the way, concerning brightly colored mushrooms, the pictures are often deceiving, color-wise (including the one I linked too). Or so I felt while searching for on-line pictures of lactarius.
(OK…I promise I won’t insist anymore about not relying on books/pictures)
When what is young, exactly? Mushrooms generally speaking? Nope. Being young doesn’t make them edible.
Or have you been told that the particular specie growing by hundreds behind your house can be eaten when young? (“only edible when young” would be a statement which would make me not considering eating them).
Mushrooms can grow very quickly. Over the course of some days. Some species can be much more tasty (not the same thing as “edible”, of course) when young, like the parasol mushroom that I eat. If you look at the pictures, the one on the top is a young (tasty) specimen. The picture just below depicts an old (less tasty) one. The differences are obvious, but different mushrooms have totally different shapes and grow very differently, so you can’t give general rules about how to tell apart a young and an old one.
In brief, no . I thought Cecil had addressed this himself, but I could not find the column.