Know Before You Eat

WHAT, WHERE & WHEN

• decomposer on live or dead deciduous trees, standing or fallen

• clustered, overlapping rows

• white to pale lilac spore print

• throughout North America

• Oysters grow year-round, even in snowy winters. In warmer weather they grow fast, get buggy, and pass their “harvest-by date” pretty quickly. So best harvested in cooler weather.

FIELD ID CHECKLIST ALL MUST BE CORRECT

● They project out from a deciduous tree trunk or stump.

● Caps the size of your palm to fully outspread hand, sometimes larger.

● Each individual mushroom overlaps two mushrooms below it, like shingles on a roof.

● Gills continue along the stem.

● Gills are white.

● Stubby stem doesn’t rise to meet the center of cap as with most gilled mushrooms; it comes off from the side.

● Smooth cap color ranges from bright white to gray to brown, making them stand out from the darker bark of the deciduous trees they grow on.