The Importance of Summer Mushrooming
Summer is a ripe time for finding interesting mushrooms in Santa Cruz County (SCZ). It is not a productive time, necessarily (since most areas we frequent during the rainy season are currently bone dry), but anything you do find is that much more likely to be interesting.
I see reports coming in of Laetiporus conifericola (locally rare, but thanks to Mark Benson, well documented now), Pluteus on dead wood (always a good place to look, since the substrate holds water during the dry season), Conocybe aurea in a cultivated garden (another good place to look, since water is available even without rain).
But the species I want to draw your attention to most is Neolentinus ponderosus - the Giant Lentinus or 'Trainwrecker' that many of you are probably familiar with from late spring and summer foraging in the Sierras.
I had no inkling that it might be found in Santa Cruz, but Courtney Roach found it in Santa Clara County a few years back, at which point it was on my radar as something to look for here.
Lo and behold, two iNaturalist users posted observations of Neolentinus ponderosus from the Graham Hill Road area within a week of each other:
http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/7068361
http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/7354528
So it looks like we have a new (and spectacular) addition to the county species list.
Can you find this species in your part of the county? Look for it on the cut stumps of ponderosa pine especially, but possibly other pines (and even other conifers?) as well.
Get out there and upload what you're seeing!
Comments
Thanks for the Santa Cruz County mushroom report, Christian. That's cool about the Neolentinus ponderosus! Does its presence indicate anything about the health of that tree? Are there any mushrooms that can grow on a perfectly healthy tree with no negative effects on the tree health, or does it always indicate that the tree is weak, unhealthy, or ???
@flygrl67 – there are some mushrooms that appear to be such weak parasites as to be nearly commensal (it seems that Bay-Laurel Trees host Ganoderma brownii with little acute consequence, although I bet there is some negative aspect of the symbiosis from the tree's perspective), but in this case, Neolentinus only grows on pines or parts of pines that have already died and are in a fairly decayed state (sometimes showing 'cubical brown rot').
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