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Video: Tinder Fungi Are Edible, Medicinal And Garden Pests. Types, Description And Application. Photo
2024 Author: Ava Durham | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 00:23
There is an absolutely amazing category of mushrooms in nature: some are incredibly useful, others are edible and even very tasty, and others are terrible enemies of fruit trees. However, a combination is possible. They are tinder fungi. Their name is legion. In this article, I will talk about some edible, medicinal properties and the hated destroyers of fruit trees.
Content:
- Edible polypores
- Medicinal tinder fungus
- Polypores in the garden
Edible polypores
Liver polypore
Last year in the foothills of the Caucasus was dry and not mushroom. Regularly during the summer, I collected, for the most part, only liverwort, or liverwort (Fistulina hepatica). Our forest is oak-hornbeam, liverwort grows on oaks, settling in places where bark or wood is damaged.
The mushrooms are bright, visible from afar, with a reddish-brown upper surface, velvety in youth, shiny in adulthood, and an amazing cut pattern. Fungi have a lateral leg growing from the bark, the lower spore-bearing layer is tubular.
This amazing mushroom accumulates vitamin C, therefore it has a sour taste. Fried, the sourness is quite noticeable, for an amateur, but in pickled the mushroom is great!
It is impossible to confuse the liverwort with other mushrooms, it is edible at a young and middle age.
Tinder fungus sulfur-yellow
From the beginning of spring (in our country from April, in the middle lane - from mid-May), the sulfur-yellow tinder fungus (Laetiporus sulphureus) begins to sprout on the stumps of deciduous trees and on the trees themselves, if they are unhealthy, we also call it chicken. It is so bright in color that it is impossible to pass by. Young fruiting bodies look like polyurethane foam on the tree trunk.
And only with age does the mushroom acquire a kind of meaningful shape, very nice, as well as a brighter color with orange tones. Its surface is covered with a yellowish fluff.
This mushroom tastes best in the form of "polyurethane foam", but already with orange hues. It can be fried, boiled, pickled.
Mushrooms growing on conifers can cause mild poisoning! Can only be harvested from deciduous.
Among other things, the mushroom is very "photogenic", it is simply pleasant to show its images to friends and relatives.
Beauty is beauty, and the harm to trees from a chicken is an order of magnitude more than from a liverworm: it modestly destroys wood from the edge without causing significant damage, and the chicken mainly affects the core of the trunk and is able to bring the tree to complete death. The chicken does not rest on this and successfully continues to bear fruit on stumps, dead wood and rotten trunks. It affects fruit trees, more often cherries. So, if you notice it in the vicinity, you definitely need to collect and consume it, until the mushroom has eaten the entire garden.
You can use it not only "gastronomically": the smoke from the burning of the fruiting body successfully scares away annoying insects, and this mushroom also has medicinal properties.
In Chinese medicine, mushroom preparations are used to treat blood diseases, endocrine diseases; in oncology, they are used as an adjuvant.
Scaly polypores
Scaly polypores (Cerioporus squamosus) grow at about the same time as chickens. They are also very photogenic, especially considering the size (up to 40 cm) and the presence of brownish scales on the cap.
The bottom surface is large-pored. It is edible at a young age when the edge of the cap breaks off resiliently and has a pleasant mushroom smell. Scaly tinder fungi destroy wood, so collecting them is encouraged.
Tinder fungi mainly have lateral legs - this makes it more convenient for them to sit on a tree. But scales come across both with central and off-center legs - when they grow on stumps or lying trunks.
Medicinal tinder fungus
Tinder beveled
In Russia, the most famous medicinal tinder fungus is chaga, or mown tinder fungus (Inonotus obliquus). There are a whole bunch of tales about him, and it is not easy to distinguish the truth from creative (idle) conjectures.
This fungus parasitizes mainly on birches, although it can settle on maple and elm. It actively destroys wood, mainly the core, bringing the tree to death, although this process is not fast. The fungus develops under the bark of the tree, causing white rot. It can also live on a dry trunk. Distributed within the forest zone where there are birches.
The mushroom is strange in some way. What is called chaga and is used in medicine is not the fruiting body, but the mycelium. It looks like an unpleasant sore on a tree, a black cracking growth, even as burnt. The fruit bodies themselves will appear when the tree dies, and will look like a brown likeness of lichens, only tubular.
Sometimes chaga is confused with burl - a tree growth on a birch. But burl is, in fact, a tumor of a tree, an overgrowth of layers of the wood itself, caused not by a fungus, but by other reasons. The cap looks more "lively".
Chaga has been used in folk medicine for a long time, due to its ability to increase immunity, delay the growth of certain tumors, normalize the heart rate, reduce blood pressure and cope with diseases of the gastrointestinal tract.
It was also found that chaga activates metabolism in the brain tissue, which is important for the elderly. It also lowers blood sugar levels, and the pulp extract has antiviral activity.
In Chinese medicine, chaga infusions are used as antitumor (in complex treatment), reducing the effects of chemotherapy, antiviral (against AIDS and hepatitis C viruses), immunostimulating, antidiabetic.
In Japan, it is also used to treat nephritis, stomach ulcers, salt deposits in bone tissue, blood purification, and as a pain reliever.
The simplest application is an aqueous infusion of dried and powdered mushroom.
Larch tinder
Larch polypore, larch sponge, or Russian mushroom (Fomitopsis officinalis) grows on conifers, mainly on Siberian, Daurian larch, and can be found on cedar and fir. That is, it is common where these trees grow.
It destroys trees relatively slowly (conifers protect themselves more effectively), and can grow for a long time. Record holders can live on a tree for 50 years or more. Accordingly, they reach large dimensions. This tinder fungus has a familiar hoof-like appearance.
It is known in places of growth no less than chaga, and its application is quite wide. For medicinal purposes, young mushrooms are harvested, still soft, with white, not hardened pulp. Picking in late spring or early summer. Adult mushrooms become very hard and accumulate twice as much resinous substances as young ones.
Mushroom preparations improve liver function, help normalize metabolic processes, have sedative and antitumor properties. Externally used as a hemostatic agent.
Tinder fungus
Among the medicinal tinder fungi there are also very photogenic ones, for example, the multi-colored tinder fungus (Trametes versicolor). A common mushroom that prefers to settle on old wood, rotten stumps of deciduous trees. Sometimes found in conifers. Aggressive to trees - spreads quickly and leads to the formation of heart rot. But handsome! Discovery, photo shoot and gathering are welcome.
Grows actively in summer and autumn, mainly in groups. The surface of the mushroom is multi-colored, velvety, it is difficult not to notice it. The pulp is light, thin with a pleasant smell.
The preparations of the multi-colored tinder fungus are used as an antipyretic and anti-inflammatory agent in the treatment of pulmonary diseases. Also, the mushroom is good for restoring and strengthening immunity, activates the functions of phagocytes. It is used for liver diseases, is effective as an analgesic, medicine for osteoporosis.
In Chinese and Japanese medicine, it is actively used in the complex treatment of cancer.
Polypores in the garden
It is very upsetting to meet a tinder fungus on the trees in your garden. This means that the onset of the disease a few years ago went unnoticed, but now we urgently need to think about how to extend the life of trees and not lose plant varieties. It will not be possible to completely cure, because it is impossible to determine where the fungus hyphae have penetrated from the outside.
A real tinder fungus, or a blood sponge
The true tinder fungus , or blood sponge (Fomes fomentarius), settles on many deciduous trees. Of the fruit, he prefers apple and pear. Spores can easily enter the garden from neighboring trees if they have fruit bodies. The tinder fungus settles most often on dead, dead trees, stumps, as it decomposes dead wood.
It settles on a living tree if there is dead wood affected by bacteriosis. In this case, the spores of the tinder fungus germinate, and together with the bacterial infection, the fungus is engaged in the destruction of the tree.
The fruit body of a real tinder fungus is perennial, inside it resembles a cork. A characteristic feature of a real tinder fungus is the ease of separating it from wood, especially if you hit it from below.
Sporulation occurs at the end of summer, until this time it is advisable to remove all detected fungi. They are used in a variety of ways. Beekeepers use tinder fungus as a long-lasting ingredient in smokers. Having acquired bees, we ripped off all the tinder fungi in the surrounding forest - indeed, they smoke well.
The inner tissue of the fungus was previously used in folk medicine as an external hemostatic. Hence the second name - blood sponge.
The Japanese, of course, found anticancer substances in this tinder fungus.
Plum tinder fungus
Plum tinder fungus (Phellinus tuberculosus) grows on trees of the Rosaceae family: plum, cherry, sweet cherry, hawthorn, cherry plum, apricot. Found on apple and pear. Spores germinate in a humid environment on dead wood, gradually penetrating into living wood and destroying it with their enzymes.
The shape of the mushroom is most often as if "smeared", a kind of flattened hoof. The mushroom is hard and woody. At a young age, light brown with a velvety surface, later gray or dark gray, cracks. Causes core rot in a tree.
No benefit has yet been found from the mushroom, except that it destroys old wood.
Polypore flat
Tinder fungus (Ganodérma applanátum) in the garden affects apple, pear, plum. Already unhealthy trees are infected with it. The usual habitat is dead wood: stumps, dead wood. Fruiting begins in late spring and lasts until autumn. Mushrooms grow, as a rule, not high from the ground, are rather large and flat in shape. Sporulation of the fungus is abundant, therefore, if it grows in a garden or nearby, it must be removed.
Creative personalities have found an original application for the mushroom: pictures are painted on the mushroom. The bottom surface of the mushroom has a peculiarity - if you drag it, for example, with a stick, the line will turn brown. Because of this property, the fungus has another name - the fungus artists (artist's conk). If the artwork is well dried, the drawing is preserved for a long time.
The flat tinder fungus is actively used in medicine. Fungus preparations have immunostimulating and antitumor properties, enhance the effect of antiviral drugs. It is also used in the treatment of diseases of the cardiovascular system, neuralgia, hepatitis, gastric and duodenal ulcers, in the complex treatment of tuberculosis.
With all the useful tinder properties, it is better to go to the forest for them, and not plant them in your garden. Both the forest is good and good for health.
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