Some folks do the print half on white and half on black paper, with the paper’s taped together underneath. I often do prints on white paper, but this isn’t useful when looking for white spores. Putting a drop of water on the cap may improve spore release. Let it sit for a few hours to a day or two. For mushrooms that don’t have a stalk, like shelf fungi that grow out of the sides of trees or logs, just be sure to place the side that was facing the ground down on your surface. This may be a piece of paper, cardboard, aluminum foil, or maybe a piece of glass or wood. Place the cap bottom-side-down on a flat surface. It’s easy! For mushrooms with a cap and a stalk, pop the stalk off without damaging the cap. So, these prints will all look different. Others have tooth-like structures under the cap that release the spores. Some mushrooms release their spores from little holes called pores under the cap, rather than from gills. “Gilled” mushrooms make a spore print with a gilled pattern: A bunch of straight or somewhat straight lines radiating out from the center of the print. You can also play with spore print patterns. For example, many mushrooms will give you a round spore print, while others may be more irregularly-shaped, like Oyster Mushrooms, or crescent-shaped like shelf mushrooms. You can also play around with spore print size and shape using different mushroom species. The other main reason for making a spore print is because they’re beautiful! You can make spore-print art: Cards, posters, collages, wherever your creativity takes you.ĭifferent mushroom species have different colored spores-white, rust, salmon, cream, olive, brown, black, etc.-so you can make colorful spore print collages. I’m not going to get into how to do this because it’s a bit more complicated than the standard spore print. The print is a way to collect and store spores for growing later. Sometimes spore prints are actually for trying to grow a mushroom. (They also have different gill coloration.). But Horse Mushroom will have a brown spore print while a Destroying Angel will have a white spore print. For example, deadly Destroying Angel Amanitas. (If you’ve ever looked at the underside of a Portabella mushroom, then you know what gills look like.) The problem? There are other mushrooms with a white cap and stalk, a ring around the stalk, and gills under the cap. Horse Mushroom also has gills under the stalk. Horse Mushroom has a white cap and stalk and there is a white membranous ring around the stalk. Consider, for instance, a tasty edible called Horse Mushroom ( Agaricus arvensis, scientifically-speaking). Why in the world would someone want to make a spore print? One of the two main reasons is because mushroom foragers such as myself want to be sure of the identification of a mushroom. Spore color is one important factor in identification it can prevent someone from making a potentially deadly mistake when foraging for edible or medicinal mushrooms. When you make a spore print, you essentially get a big pile of spores so you can see what color they are. But spores are too small to see individually with the naked eye. They are usually released from the underside of a mushroom cap. What’s a spore print? Well, first, mushroom spores are how mushrooms reproduce. Her website is For more information & to learn more about Anna and her work, visit the Oshada Natural Health & Durango School of Herbal Studies on Facebook! Long term goals are to introduce herbs to folks who aren’t already on the bandwagon, including allopathic medical professionals, and to empower her clients with herbal traditions augmented by critical evaluation of current research. She is an avid plant harvester and medicine maker, preferring weeds, mushrooms and only the most abundant native plants as her allies. Marija is passionate about learning and teaching and has a clinical practice while leading classes and workshops locally and online. She studied herbalism with Pam Fisher at the Ohlone Herbal Center in Berkeley, Kathi Keville at the Green Medicine Herb School and with others. Before falling in love with herbalism (and mushroomism) she worked a dozen years as a biomedical scientist in cancer biology and infectious disease research - first as a research technician at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, then as a doctoral student at the University of Washington Department of Microbiology, and finally as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Anna Marija is an herbalist and scientist in Durango, CO who spent her childhood wandering the woods of suburban Philadelphia.
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