conserving our fungi

[rich59]

Seeing some of the fungi harvesting - especeially fomes fomentarius - going on I was just wondering whether we need to consider the impact on the environment. Is there any way of harvesting useful parts of fungi while still allowing dispersal of the spoors now and in the future so that we and future generations still have plenty to go around.

I imagine that the only active part of fomes is the bottom surface - shedding spores. Any way one could harvest some of the dead material but leave the connection to the mycelium in the tree wood and the actively growing bottom surface?

The same goes of other fungi.

 

[spamel]

Well, I don't know if it is the correct way, but I saw the FF off across the way, leaving the part attatched to the tree. This leaves a strip of FF about a centimetre thick on the tree. I went back a while later and it was regrowing, so it must have worked! It had 'scabbed over' and looked like a flatter version. Again, I don't know if this is the normal way of collectin them, but I hope I have helped keep the numbers up.

 

[gregorach]

I'm not 100% sure, but I doubt it would really make much difference. Fungi are a bit like icebergs - mostly hidden beneath the surface. The actual part you can see is only the fruitbody.

With hoof fungus, the fruitbody grows slowly over a number of years - so by the time it's worth harvesting, it's already probably been spreading spores for ages. With many of the other fungi you're likely to want to harvest, the fruitbody appears very quickly. So as long as you don't keep going back to the same patch and completely clearing it out, the fungi should be fine.

Still, it's good to think about these things, and harvesting more carefully certainly can't be bad!

Unfortunately, the only FF I can find in my area (so far) is at least 20 feet off the ground, on a tree I'm certainly not going to either climb or cut down...