Summer Honey. Description, Doubles. Growing On The Site, Infection With Spores, Mycelium. Photo

This fragrant delicate mushroom is familiar to many lovers of "quiet hunting". It grows on dead wood, as if covering with a yellowish-golden cap, consisting of many individual mushrooms, stumps and felled trunks of birches, alder, aspen. Summer mushrooms appear in June and do not disappear until September.

Description of summer honey

Summer honey agaric is widespread; here it can be found almost everywhere where there is a forest. The cap of the mushroom is from 2 to 6 cm in diameter, flat-convex, with a downward edge, and in the center there is a wide-round protruding tubercle. Its color is rusty-yellow-brown with very characteristic concentric watery, lighter and even translucent stripes (circles). The pulp is thin, white. The leg is 3.5-5 cm high and no more than 0.4 cm thick. It has a ring of the same color as the cap. Sometimes it quickly disappears, but a clear trace remains at this place. Summer honey agaric grows usually in large groups.

The mushroom is very tasty, has a delicate pulp and strong aroma. It is mainly consumed fresh for making soups, stews or for stewing. No pre-cooking is required. The hats can be dried. Legs are usually not eaten because of their stiffness. This mushroom is perishable, so it needs to be processed quickly.

False honey fungus - "double" of summer honey fungus

When collecting summer honey agarics, special attention should be paid to its records. In summer honey mushrooms, they are first creamy, and then, when ripe, brown, in contrast to poisonous false mushrooms, in which the plates are first gray-yellow, and then dark - greenish or olive-brown.

Growing summer honey on the site

Summer honey fungus is not subject to transportation, which prevents its industrial cultivation. But for amateur mushroom growers, it would be interesting. Summer honey mushrooms have long been grown in Europe, where a specially prepared mycelium in the form of a paste in tubes, which is usually sold in shops selling vegetable seeds, is used as planting material. In our country, such pasta is not produced, but you should not despair. For plantation, you can use the spores of the fungus in the form of an infusion of its mature caps in water or pieces of wood infected with the fungus.

Take mature caps with dark brown plates and place, after crushing them a little, in a container with water (preferably soft, rainwater) for 12-24 hours. Then strain through cheesecloth and pour the resulting infusion abundantly over stumps or pieces of wood with notches made on their ends and sides. You can additionally decompose mature caps with plates down on spore-watered wood for 1-2 days. Spores germinate slowly, and the first harvest of mushrooms can only be obtained by the end of the next season or after 2 years.

More intense infection occurs when using pieces of dilapidated wood, penetrated by mycelium. This kind of wood can be found in the forest in June. It is harvested from stumps, on which at this time there are fruiting bodies of summer honey. Pieces of wood must be taken from the zone of active growth of mycelium, which is determined by the abundance of white or creamy threads and a strong mushroom smell. Then they are placed in holes and notches made on stumps or pieces of wood, and covered with moss, shingles, bark, etc. The pieces can be attached to the surface of stumps or round timber using nails. With this method of infection, the first mushrooms can be expected as early as next summer.

Any deciduous wood is suitable for growing summer honey, but birch is the most suitable. After felling, it contains a sufficient amount of moisture, and birch bark protects it well from drying out. Wood of alder, aspen, poplar is also suitable. Mushroom grows worse on conifers (pine, spruce).

Usually, lengths of 30-35 cm of any diameter are made. You can also use stumps from old fruit trees, which, by the way, will completely collapse in 4-6 years. If the stumps or wood are freshly cut, then the infection can be carried out without special preparation, and the dried one can be soaked in water for 1-2 days (the stumps are watered).

Infection can be done throughout the growing season, but not in hot, dry weather. However, the best time is spring and early autumn.

Infected pieces of wood are placed vertically in fresh pits at a distance of 0.5 m from each other so that about 15 cm remains above the soil surface. The soil on the plot is abundantly moistened and mulched with sawdust. It is best to place such plots in shaded areas, for example, under a canopy of trees or in a special shelter. Greenhouses and hotbeds where humidity can be controlled are also suitable for this purpose. Under these conditions, fungi sometimes appear 7 months after planting. Fruiting usually occurs twice - at the beginning of summer and in autumn and can last 5-7 years on pieces of wood with a diameter of 20-30 cm, on larger pieces - longer.

The yield of summer honeydew depends on wood, weather conditions, the degree of growth of mycelium and can vary greatly: from 30 g of fresh mushrooms per year from one piece of wood to 6 kg from the same surface only for summer fruiting. It should be noted that usually the first fruiting is not abundant.

Summer honeydew can also be grown on wood waste (thin trunks, branches). They are collected in bundles with a diameter of 10-25 cm and, after infection by any of the methods described above, they are buried in the soil to a depth of 20-25 cm, and covered with turf on top. The plot must be protected from wind and sun.

Summer honeydew is not dangerous for fruit trees, as it grows only on dead wood.