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Snails enjoying mushrooms

 

 

The winter mushroom season arrives as always with colder weather and snow. The period of cold in between brought the mushrooms out. The velvet foot mushroom is quite common in Estonian forests; it grows most often on willows but also on gray alder trunks – whether the trees are standing dead or alive trees. It can be found on tree stumps as well as fallen trunks.

 

A beautiful honey-coloured mushroom often growing in bunches; the cap diameter is less than ten centimetres and catches attention in a bare forest even when you dare not pick them. The cap is slimy and the foot is not used for eating (it is simply too stringy). It can stand being frozen through and depending on the winter can be found even in February.

 

The velvet foot mushroom is completely edible even without cooking. In a salad, for pan-frying to feel the sweet mushroom taste. Mushrooms added to a meat and vegetable stew (even winter mushrooms) are interesting taste enrichers.

 

 

Photographed during mobile telephone testing, the Nokia flagship Nokia Lumia 920 coming to Estonia next year