(Click on images to enlarge)
Lepiota procera. This monster is in my own backyard. My mushroom book is about 7.5" tall; this Parasol's cap is a good 8" in diameter.
Concerning edibility, my book says, "Choice, with caution." I think the "caution" part comes in because it can be confused with poisonous species. In fact, I first mistakenly identified it as Green-spored Lepiota, which is poisonous.
You can move the ring around its stalk. In case you didn't know, such rings are remnants of a "veil" that covered either the immature mushroom or the immature gills, and then ruptured as the mushroom expanded. Hence, in looking to identify this thing, I went to the "Veiled Mushrooms with Free Gills" section. (Trust me, if you lie down on the ground and look at the underside of this thing, the gills don't seem to attach to the stalk.)
Thanks to the efforts of a volunteer at the Merrillville-Ross Township Historical Society, I've been able to include Ross Township as it appeared in the 1908 Plat Map in the "Land Ownership" page (over there in the sidebar). I hope eventually to be able to get an image of Hobart Township as well.
In other housekeeping news, I finally finished backing up all my images — I never suspected I had some 1,400 images associated with this blog! Anyway, now Photobucket can kick the bucket, so long as Flickr stays up. If I'd been thinking, I'd have put them all on a flash drive … but I wasn't thinking. That's typical, I'm afraid.
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