Fungi Identification / Confirmation?

Before we left church this morning, my daughters were playing on the playground and the older one called out to me, "Hey dad, there's a lot of fungus over here!"

Curiosity piqued, I came over to take a look. Sure enough, all around one of the slides which sits in the shade of a couple of large trees, there was a decent group of mushrooms... a variety I was quite unfamiliar with.

Some time spent on Google led me to the possible name "Old Man of the Woods." Many/most of the pictures and descriptions seem to fit, but I still wanted to ask for confirmation.

According to one of the websites I looked at for info about Old Man of the Woods:

The scientific name, Strobilomyces floccopus, roughly translated, means "wooly mushroom that looks like a pine cone"

I thought that was pretty funny... and also oddly accurate...

It is said to be a mycorrhizal mushroom which has a good relationship with trees and especially oaks apparently.

When we go back to church this evening, I am thinking of taking either a bag or tupperware or something to harvest some of the mushrooms into and spread them around a few different places at home.

If I still had things set up for mushroom growing and breeding, I would take a couple of spore prints too, but for now I think I'll just settle for trying to get them growing here on my property.

Always cool to discover a new type of mushroom and hopefully be able to add some good quality fungal diversity to my soil as a result!

When we went back tonight, we got a pretty nice haul of those mushrooms - whether they're the Old Man of the Woods or something else.  

My girls had a really fun time helping me look around for them and pick them 😀 and we ended up finding a few each of about 3 other varieties of mushroom while we were out there.

They enjoyed it enough that I told them we could do it at home sometime too. It's one of those things that has been on the back of my mind to do for a while now, but didn't really get the extra motivation to actually do it until seeing the mushrooms I hadn't seen before at church. And then seeing how much fun the girls had (which isn't at all surprising, because they love that sort of stuff) is extra motivation to do more of it.

After we got back home they went out to take care of the animals and our 4 year old came back in asking where I had put the mushrooms because she'd found a couple of tiny ones she wanted to add to the collection while they were out there! 😁

Great story. That sure looks to be an Old Man of The Woods to me, and they aren't likely to be mistaken for anything else. The one thing that stands out as odd to me is that you found a number of them growing in the same place; I generally find them to be solitary mushrooms, but that is just in my limited territory. In fact I count it a lucky year if I spot one or two when I'm out looking for Black Trumpets- they are fairly rare in my area.

I shy away from eating boletes myself, but The Old Man is edible, if not choice.