Keen mushroom picker Thea Yates, 80, has issued a warning about eating unidentified mushrooms.
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Now is prime mushroom picking time and she regularly harvests mushrooms in fields on the NSW south coast to cook for herself.
This week she thought she had found some nice horse mushrooms near the Narooma tennis club at Bill Smyth Oval.
But upon closer inspection, the mushrooms had green gills underneath, instead of the normal brown gills.
So to be on the safe side, she decided against eating them and instead has attempted to identify them by looking them up online, so far without any success and their identity remains a mystery.
She did a spore print of the mushrooms, which also turned out green, and she took as a further warning against eating them.
“My grandparents taught me to pick mushrooms and so far haven’t had any adverse reactions, but then again I am very cautious,” she said.
She would love to hear from anyone that can identify her mystery mushrooms and in the meantime issued warning for people not to pick and eat their own mushrooms unless they were trained to recognise the safe varieties.