The Agaricus genus of fungi provides us with some of the best tasting and prolific mushrooms of Winter. If you can learn how to identify the one bad one, you can be sure of a good feed of traditional white mushrooms.

Agaricus have large, fleshy, white caps and are, essentially, the mushrooms that you buy from your farmer’s market or supermarket.

We have five species of edible Agaricus around Gawler, two of which are described on this website. They are pretty similar and have slight differences but are all edible. There’s the Pavement Mushroom (A. bitorquis) and the Button Mushroom. A. bisporus. There are two others that I haven’t included here due to lack of clear photos – for absolute authenticity and your safety, I insist on only including foraging pics and herb pics that I have taken myself of plants and Fungi that I have used; yes everything you see in every pic has actually been eaten by me! These other two include Field Mushrooms (A. campestris) and the Horse Mushrooms (A. arvensis). Then there’s the mildly toxic A. xanthodermus. As long as you learn to broadly identify members of this genus and know what to look out for in a Yellow Stainer (A. xanthodermus), you’ll be on the right track. Each of these have their own page that you can link to from below.

Identifying Agaricus species – a broad summary

All of the mushrooms linked to by this page have several general features in common. There are slight variations between the species but generally, you will find –

• Broad white/brown cap
• Cuticle that is easy to peel
• Crowded gills that start pinkish and become browner with age
• The stem is easily separated from the cap
• Thick stem with a fragile ring that is easy to destroy
• No volva
• Brown spore print

Our local Agaricus species are –

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