I'm not really interested in eating them but I figure this is the best place to ask about identification just because I'm curious. They were so beautiful.

They MIGHT be the toxic Amanita crocea, but that's just a guess.

Here's a nice mushroom ID site, Roger's Mushrooms [please notice the disclaimer]:  http://www.rogersmushrooms.com/

Sue

thanks, that is a great site you found. I don't feel the list bit competent enough to look for my own edible mushrooms but I find them fascinating.

My roommate is a fun-guy.  I will show him tomorrow.  I think I have seen that before, but I am not sure.  He will probably know, and if he doesn't, he'll find out.

The few I know and love are the Chantrelles (we have a few patches in our woods, we tend them) and the King Boletus.  The big fat, portly things.  Good eats!

I'll list his i.d. books too.

He thinks it is a common mycena.  Of course, you are in Oklahoma, not Washington.  He said the color, shape, and clumping pattern is characteristic of mycena. 

If it is common mycena, DON'T EAT IT.  Poisonous. 

thanks! I am going to have to get a bit more educated on shrooms. I'm sure I have seen morels in the oak forested area I used to ride through frequently. does anyone here cultivate mushrooms? I know someone who got one of those innoculated logs and grew some shitake (?). but it seemed like a big expense for what she ended up with.

Paul Stamitz at fungi perfecti has done some amazing research with mushrooms.  Paul says "he is saving the world in 4 different ways."

My friend said he got 100 oyster mushroom innoculants for about 12 bucks from Fungi Perfecti.  All he had to do was inject them into his logs.  Then, when they've decayed enough, he adds them to his huge hugelkultur berm, throws some manure on there with some soil and wala.  There are holes in his berm which release warm steam consistently. 

Oyster mushrooms are edible too.

I just had to say beautiful photos - both of them! Thanks for sharing!

  i have just tried cultivating mushrooms in the bathroom. i picked something that look like a oyster mushroom but pinker from the bottom of the garden and wet some cardboard and put two heads to give a spore prints and one foot from which mycelium should grow and produce spawn, according to paul stamets,  between bits of damp cardboard that i had taken one side of the flat surface off baring the ridged surface, easy to do when the card is damp and they started myceliium running like crazy, it was hard keeping the cardboard damp though, the air here is pretty dry. They ran like crazy for some days, i put them in an open dustbin bag to cover them up and then decided they wanted air and abandoned the use of the dustbin bag and some fruit flies appeared and then the mycelium started to die back so its back to the drawing board. i hate doing things i fail at, it is so hard to pick myself up and try again.
       I wondered what was the problem, them drying out, the lack of air when i put them in the dustbin bag, i had them on a plastic tray or the fruit flies. agri rose macaskie.

There are about a half dozen of these somewhat obscene things growing outside of my bedroom window.  What are they? 

Jennifer Hall wrote:
There are about a half dozen of these somewhat obscene things growing outside of my bedroom window.   What are they? 

If you have a book or can get one, check under STINKHORNS.

      If they are stink horns my father gave me a book, the autobiography of the grandaughter of Darwin Gwen Raverat. My mother told me i had to remember the names of the writers of books and i do,seems strange to me as i often can't remember the name of even of very famouse actors,Does it matter so much what you say to your, children. I think i developed the habit of thinking back often to the name of authors to make sure i remembered them or is it that i only remember what i am told to, the mind is strange.
    Gwen Raverat had an aunt daughter of Darwin who had the strange pastime in autumn of going into a small wood to colllect stink horns to burn on the fire because they stank, to get rid of them i suppose. I understand the silly delight in the stinky, i enjoy collecting the fruit of genkos and making people smell them, they smell bad, maybe because they fall from the tree when they are already half rotten. The ones I collect are worse than normal because they come from the little spque outside my house in Madrid, from a place covered in dog mess so the morbidness of the occupation increases. I take the fruit off them and plant thestone, they grow from the kernels and also they say you can toast and eat the seed. agri rose macaskie.

So...I can finish cleaning out the beds and not worry...but if this thing can grow it might be a good place to import some better shroom? 

The stinkhorns are no value to you. 

But do they indicate a good place to try to grow good shrooms?

They are evidence that fungi can grow there.

rose macaskie wrote:
  i have just tried cultivating mushrooms in the bathroom. i picked something that look like a oyster mushroom but pinker from the bottom of the garden and wet some cardboard and put two heads to give a spore prints and one foot from which mycelium should grow and produce spawn, according to Paul Stamets 

Rose, can you direct me to the thread where how to do this is explained?  I want to replace these stinkhorns with something better, maybe something like corals, that grow around here in the fall...

    Jenjnifer Hall. You get instuctions on how to grow mushrooms in paul stamets book "Mycelium Running" though maybe another book of his has more on just growing mushrooms.
     So as to make sure you want to buy it, you put  -Paul sSamets, "Mycelium Running"-  into google and then of all the tittles that come out on this book, you open up the one that is forth i think on the list, it is the one put in by google, there is a picture of the front cover of the book and in the green letters at the bottom it says, google books,  half the book is there, two pages in every three or something enough to read about how to grow mushrooms and a different set of pages on a different days, i think, though in the end you you want to get the book and have the whole lot. It is an easy to read, really interesting book.
  Some one had a lot of good tips on growing mushrooms on a forum here, like taking bits of turf out from a good patch of pasture and putting them down on a bad bit, upside down. I have seen on videos some big wig australian permaculturist doing the same mayvbe the one who kept horses and really stuck his neck oout for permacluture and nealry got it choppped of had a really bad time before things worked for him in the end, tazking out turf an dputting it upsid edown in a place without good grass, takes the usefull mycelium of your good grass and gets it running were the pastures are bad, i believe-
    There was also on a forum  the advice that if you put a hose to drip with a micro drip for ten minutes everyday, sun or rain, for two weeks, you get fungy were it drips and then you move the hose on to another bit of grass. I have to look for the posting and say which of the people here wrote it and be more precise about their advise.agri rose macaskie.

Thank you Rose, I will look around this site as I have time and see what I can find on mushrooms as well as take your advise about reading the book.  

As a side note...my chickens found and devoured the stinkhorns.

Do they stink as they are meant to? it good if you have found a use for them.

You can also find out about growing mushroooms tapping the words, "growing fungi" into youl tube there are lots of videos on growing mushrooms and fugi there. I think its a bit like suddenly reading how to grow plants, it might take a while to become a good gardener, on the other hand there are much more efficient people than me, so there might be people who just start growing a lot of fungi immediately.

  It is really worth looking for paul stamets book, going to a boookshop and ordering it. He tells how to use fungi for bettering soils for getting rid of pollutants and for eating and though it might not be possible to do his things when you buy the book, because you don't have time or money, if you have the book you can start to use it when you do have time. agri rose macaskie.
 
   

Jennifer Hall I have found which forum it is in an dwho wrote the bit about leaving a hose dripping on the lawn for a week or two reain or shine an d you'll get mushrooms, it is jeremy bunags second post in the forum "happy fungus ball". He says a soak hose i have to look up a soak hose, i don't know what it is. agri rose macaskie.

rose macaskie wrote:
Jennifer Hall I have found which forum it is in an dwho wrote the bit about leaving a hose dripping on the lawn for a week or two reain or shine an d you'll get mushrooms, it is jeremy bunags second post in the forum "happy fungus ball". He says a soak hose i have to look up a soak hose, i don't know what it is. agri rose macaskie.

Rose, a soaker hose used to be a hose with lots of little holes in it, now I think they are a permeable material that sweats out water.

I did not notice a stink from my stink horns, but didn't get up close and smell them.  But I suspect my chickens could smell them and dug them up looking for yummies. 

I will try to get me the book you speak of.  Growing mushrooms is not high priority but worth the time and effort to learn.  I will probable buy something as well as wild collect.

Jennifer hall, Thanks for the info about the soak hose.
  It is not so much growing mushrooms that attracts me as his using mushrooms to better pastures, maybe thats does not originate from him but from some other mycologist but i think he talks of it and to reduce pollution.
      He uses Brazil mushrooms to eat up e.coli bacteria these fungi attract them and then eat them! These come out of manure or sewage if you have any seepage from manure heaps or from animals grazing, you probably know more about them than i do you have animals. He had an e-coli problem on his land, it seems he started a sort of permiculture type farm in Washington state and had some problems with too much e.coli running off from his land he kept cows and also sewage from his house drained into the estuary at the bottom of his land, his e-coli problem got cured by his bed of Brazil mushrooms, incredible.agri rose macaskie.

  Do you remember in the rubber tires forum i think it is yours someone says rubber actual absorbs pollutants. Probably it was on a sight the link to which was given in the tires forum. Well paul stamets seems to think that sacks of fungi will do the same, that if you put lots of them were you have lots of air pollution then they absorb it. I am not very sure of my ground here, i could not really believe it when i read it, it is not that i did not believe it i trust paul stamets work, he seems to be a really good scientists I just felt insecure and as if it had not been really explained to me maybe i read half of it on internet and not in his book which i have not finished reading yet but when i read about tires absorbing polluting substances then i thought this is a thing that some things just do and the idea started to sink in more.
      I just like contra-pollutions ideas because of a generalised anxiety about pollution, after all it has been a theme all my adult life. Maybe his techniques could cure the bit of my land that some neighbor burnt with herbicides were only moss and one other plant grows. He has developed strains of some fungi that break down things like herbicides. agri rose macaskie

Rose,
before my other-half took over the plantation the guy sprayed stuff trying to kill the cogon grass (an invasive grass horses will eat but is super hard to kill) and the spots are "sterile" even now several years later...and they just keep spraying stuff around.

I want to try growing mushrooms on my pet stump.  I will startfilling the bed with good horse poo and keep it wet this spring and see what hapens.  If I have to I will try catching some wild spawn or might buy some special kind.

rose macaskie wrote:
I just like contra-pollutions ideas because of a generalised anxiety about pollution, after all it has been a theme all my adult life.

Was there some sort of catalyst, some special event, that got to you?  I may have mentioned some books have influenced my life, mostly science fiction.

was there any special event that got me started . jennifer Hall.
  Pollution has always been there for all of us hasn't it. I rememberthe intense sort of gilrls at school th eones who liked to atlk about he end of the world talking about pollution and such. The hippies ecetera i sort of considered myself hiippy i am a pretty watered down hippy.
  My mother always was sort of ecological and interested in farming and good soil and such things, it is in my blood.
      I sometimes think that when your grandmother has a farm it makes you prick up your ears in scoool on farming subjects because of a tiny bit of unease about your relations business, not that her farm went badly. It is not like a safe job it is a business that could go wrong. I don't know if this is psychologically right that concentration is easier on subjects in which your interest is more vital. Knowing farming in England gave me insights into farming here nand so  i wanted to criticise the things i saw being done here and i wanted to tell the rest of the world about their great agro sylvan pastoral tradition that i talk of in a forum called managing oak trees in the forestry bit of these forums.
    Comparing one nation with another gives you insights, i started reading agricuture up when i realised that the bare land here was not due to the climate, when i saw a place that was not grazed or mowed, where the grass grew long and thick one winter and then i realised pastures recover from drying out in summer and the lack of pastures here and in other bits of mediterenean i had seen was due to something other than the weather, overgrazing.
  I would never have written like this if i had not gone to yoga as i see it, i was too half diffident about myself , i thought i was quite good at somethings but i was pretty unconfident in someways. My mother always used to say, only families like the so an so's, pointing to families with a longish tradition of scholarly interests are really good at scholarly work and so i sort of thought such things weren't for me but i think the yoga teacher i had thought othewise but as that sort of thing can be a bit magical, any claim that he has pushed me is ridiculouse unless you accept some pretty strange comunication methods. So who knows how that happened.
  paul stamets claims to be a magic mushroom warrior well i would if i was brave say i was a sort of warrior whose begining was yoga not mushrooms. It is brave to say really way out things.

  I had collected a lot of information because it is my nature to do so if something catches my attention and the bare lands here did, without even realising i have done so and i was not sharing the information I was diffident about my ability to change anything and was sort of pushed to get out my stuff. i did try complaining to the authorities here may be withsome sucess,may be they took somenotice of some of the things i said but not all of them. which was my real reason for studying all this .
      Maybe thats what empowering women means, society has somehow made women not try for the harder things and so to get them to try for it is to empoower them. This works for class differences and race ones to. I did try to paint good painting though and i still like them and look back on that with sorrow for leaving it.
    Buddhism requires that you teach others. Don't give them fish, teach them how to fish. Maybe teach sounds arrogant but there are the younger than yourself who can't know everything you do and those who are too busy to spend their time researching.
  There is just diffusion of knowledge. If you want something to be spread, then it is important to have as many books out on that subject as possible. It does not matter that someone else wrote it already, write it again, present it in a new way, your bit of writting might get to some one the other persons did not reach.
  Researching is another bit of the puzzle , i think my schoool was good at teaching me to research things. it is not difficult but practice helps in everything. I took my preuniversity matriv¡culation from schoool, art thesis very seriously an dreseached it well that i should have got so seriouse on that bir of work probably helped me with other things later. from school art thesis very seriously so may be i have some credit., for learning to research . That my mother respected reading such a lot was an important formative fact and that She made a fuss about us reading good books made me start to wonder why on  book was good and another not which made me think. It setrt me thinking thinking critically about boooks. I have not read much science fiction the day of the trifids an algernon . Science fiction is a bit tough.agri rose macaskie.

Might be the same as original post? Found outside my workplace today in Kansas City, MO.