Winter mashroom / Zimska plamenjača

Description:

Flammulina velutipes is a delicious (or at least quasi-delicious) edible mushroom that can often be found when there is nothing else available. The "winter mushroom" refers to this fungus's predilection for cold weather for fruiting, this were found in the beginning of December. Its cap can be in diameter from 2 - 10 cm. In youth specimens the shape is hemispherical then it becomes convex and finally fully stretched. It has smooth, shiny, skin moist and cap, that becomes sticky and elastic when the weather is humid. Only the young specimens can be velvety.

Habitat:

Grows (parasite) in smaller or larger shrubs at various deciduous trees, their trunks, stumps and so forth. It can also appear on the still-living diseased trees. Perhaps it is more common to find them growing on willows trunks but it also grows on cottonwood, linden, locust, walnut, beech, elms, hornbeam, in fact there is almost no deciduous tree on which this mashroom cannot settle down. It can grow on conifers (juniper). This one have been found on hornbeam stump. Some Croatian names also indicates its tendency to grow on stumps (Baršunasta panjevčica).

Notes:

"Velvet stem" or "velvet foot" refers to the black fuzzy base of the stipe. Enoki and enokitake are Japanese names for the cultivated variety of this fungus, but the white-stemmed, small-capped mushroom in the store bears little resemblance to the wild form. Enoki is cultivated in jars in the dark. As the mushroom fruits, it seeks the light and grows long and thin, preserving its energy until it finds its way out, much like an etiolated bean seedling finds its way out from under the ground.