Fungi Friday - THE FLUFFY PUFF

Vascellum pratense is a lovely little fungus, very common on the meadows with short grass and various small plants, that cover some stretches of the coastline here where I live. Istra peninsula, northern Adriatic, that is.

Their growth period in this area is very flexible and a bit unpredictable. They can appear in small numbers even after the short summer rain in the middle of a dry and dusty summer, or at the peak of winter if the days are a bit warmer then usual, In spring they appear more regularly, but also not in great numbers ... and in autumn, they invade the place for a short period ...

... their fluffy appearance makes it a bit difficult to talk seriously about them :D for me, at least ...but I'll try. Like in all puffball mushrooms the spores are produced inside the fruit body, and when it is mature, no more spongy but filled with spore dust, dries out, becomes brittle, very easily gets broken and the spore can spread all around.

So these lovely little cushions are edible only when young ... when the fruit body is still white and spongy. From my culinary experience, I can say the following :) They have a really nice scent and aroma, but it is impossible to translate that in the taste. When you eat them it feels like munching a piece of nice, soft, spongy  - nothing. Eating the raw autumn air saturated with fungi aroma feels much more like really eating something than eating the actual mushroom. So I usually just watch them, sometimes photograph them and take a few sniffs then go on in search of tastier mushrooms.

The sight of a green meadow covered with these fluffy white thing is really beautiful, in this photograph is a very young and small one. I took this picture in summer, there were only a few of these puffs around. And these autumn days are sunny and relatively dry, the mushrooms can be found only in dense woods, so I can't show you a meadow covered with them.

And that's it ... this puffy fluff is finally over :D as always in these posts on Steemit, the photographs are my work.