Today a trip with two friends in our local forest fouraging for mushrooms. We ate homemade sandwiches for lunch. No money spent today.
Linda, how did you learn to tell the edible ones from the poisonous ones?
I starting simple with a mushroom book and learning 1 or 2 new species per year, go out in the forest a lot and pick them a lot. Double checking with book, internet, and preferably another person. Then you'll get very good and certain at these species. I did this for about 14 years.
Last year when I knew about 15 species, I did a 40 hour course (two weekends from Friday evening to Sunday evening) to learn the 120 most common species (edible and poisonous). The course was very reasonably priced. It was difficult to absorb all the information on the course, as I new so little to start with. The whole winter I studied the course book several times and read about the same species in other mushroom books.
The whole summer and autumn I have been offered and attended several free repetition courses where we go out to pick and discuss the findings with an expert afterwards. From June on I have spent most of my free time in the weekends searching for mushrooms and trying to give determine their names afterwards.
We have a facebook group for people like me where we lay out pictures as exercices and we need to provide the name and a good description. There are experts and a biology teacher in the group who correct us.
Tomorrow morning I will do an official test. If I pass that test I will be allowed to officially check other people's mushroom baskets. I think that will become my little hussle as you can actually receive some tax free money (approx 1100 USD/year) for manning the public "have your mushroom basket checked" events on Sunday afternoon, or for manning the digital app where people can send in pictures of their findings on their phone, or for giving guided mushroom tours. I was already invited as an assistant for such a tour, but was on vacation at that point.