hey guys this is Katie from 802 guiding gurus thanks for joining me today I'm going to talk about some medicinal mushrooms last year I harvested and dried a bunch of turkey tail Rishi and chaga and so I'm going to talk a little bit about how to harvest those how to properly dry them and then how to use them so let's get started so here I have samples of the turkey tail which is this one Rishi and chaga mushroom that I harvested myself and dried so with the turkey tail basically is very easy to identify it grows prolifically pretty much everywhere see if I can get a good shot of it there we go so this is a very good mushroom for cancer preventing cancer basically pretty much any medicinal mushroom or even culinary mushrooms with the exception of like button mushrooms which I wouldn't recommend anybody eat are like cancer fighting so I would recommend anybody and everybody to have mushrooms medicinal or culinary in your diet so another thing about the turkey tail mushroom when you are identifying it is that the back of the mushroom or the underside of the mushroom I should say has like these little dots it's like little dot see if I can get close up there kind of like speckles or like pores I guess you would call them there is such a thing as fake turkey tail mushroom but I find that it's very easy to tell the difference the backs of the fake mushroom are more of like lines and the real turkey tail mushrooms are more like dots or pores the top is like really smooth it's like velvety so after I harvest these typically with mushrooms that you harvest in the wild whether it be well not all of them but some mushrooms like for example chicken of the woods you would want to do a saltwater soak to get any bugs out that might be in the mushroom because bugs live in mushrooms that's just the reality of it it's no big deal but with turkey tail you don't have to do that because as you can see they're so small they're not going to have any pets in them and basically you just lay them out on a cookie sheet and put them on top of your fridge that's all I did and they dry perfectly so the next thing I'm going to talk about is reishi so this is the reishi this is the jar of reishi you can see it's cut up into strips basically how I harvested the reishi is you see it growing and I'll put a picture in this video of what it looks like in the wild or in nature you see it growing you just pop it off the tree I mean that's really all you do and with like the baby rishis which again I'll put a picture of some baby rishis that I saw you can actually eat those as like food apparently they're really good I've never tried it because I can't take a baby reishi there's just way too cute and I'd rather come back a few months later and get just one of the larger Rishi's and one thing I want to say to you guys about like reishi and Chava for example is that you don't really want to take it all just take what you need I mean same goes to the turkey tail but again that's a lot more common to find you can find turkey tails pretty much everywhere ton of it grows all over the place all over the country all over the world probably but with reishi and especially chaga they're much rarer to find and especially with the market these days people like to find them and harvest them even if they don't need them so back to the reishi so once I harvest mature reishi which you do sometime in the fall so like I think we harvested this one in September so you really harvesting time is anywhere from like September to October you'll see again from the picture they're very shiny they're almost they almost have like a polyurethane looking finish on them they're gorgeous out in nature they grow near like rivers and streams that's where we found them and so once I harvest it bring it home cut it up into strips right away so you don't want to let it dry you really want to get it cut up as soon as possible so I cut it up into strips or some parts of it end up being chunks like this and then I just do the same thing with as I did with the turkey tail I just put it on a cookie sheet and put it on top of the fridge and let it dry another thing you can do with a lot of herbs or mushrooms is you can put the oven on like the lowest setting possible I think our lowest setting is like 150 so you put the oven on lowest setting and then you just shut it off once it gets up to heat once it heats up to the lowest setting shut it off put the cookie sheet with the herbs or mushrooms in the oven and just let it sit for the night that's another option I prefer in the summer you know when it's really hot I prefer the top of the fridge method so that's reishi the last mushroom I'm going to talk about today which again there are tons of amazing medicinal mushrooms these are the most common that people talk about and that people like to consume as food and medicine but there are ton out there and I will put a slide at the end of this video with some information on these mushrooms and others as well but this is the Chava so and I do have a video or we have a video of us harvesting this chaga so China is even more so like I guess on the endangered species list you really don't want to go around harvesting it for no reason or for money you just don't want to be doing that I mean we need to respect the spirit of these plants and so we don't we don't want to harvest it unless we need it so again chaga is an amazing cancer-fighting mushroom I mean this is like everybody should be drinking chaga tea taking chocolate tinctured so what I did with the child ad again you can watch our other video Vermont travel foraging adventure but basically we knocked it off the tree and in the middle of winter too was when you want to harvest chaga that's when you can easily find it and that's the best time to harvest it when all the nutrients are kind of dormant in it because they're just kind of stored in there very concentrated so once we knocked it off the tree with a rock and you only want to harvest chaga that grows on wider yellow birch trees so we know about the trees of the rock we brought home and right away we broke it up into chunks so if you let it dry before you break it up into chunks it's basically going to be hard as a rock and you're not going to be able to break it up after that now you can still use it you can boil it and water it big chunk of it and that will soften it that's another option but you really can't use it if you don't break it up in the chunks right away so that's the chaga and then basically you just once it's broken up into chunks you just let it dry so same thing I think what we did with this choco we actually put it in front of our Renee heater and we just kind of let it dry out and you want to make sure it dries out completely so now on using these different mushrooms so what I really love to do with these you can make tinctures I plan on making a video soon about making tinctures but there's tons of videos out there on it you could make tea of course where you would just put the herb or the mushroom in you know a quart of water you know a good amount like I would say probably this little pile for like a quart of water maybe a couple more slices and just boil it but it doesn't taste very good to be honest so what I like to do is I go to the health food local health food store I get some chai wallah spices and what I have have done is I grind them up mix them run these up in a spice grinder or you could use a food processor but I like the spice grinder because I can do just small amounts at a time grind it up mix it together with the chives places and you have a chai tea so I love to make that and blend it with some almond milk delicious basically you just take like you make the triblend choice places and ground-up mushrooms and then you take like 1 or 2 tablespoons per quart of water put it in a pot to boil it and there you have delicious chai tea add whatever milk or plant-based milk of your choice really delicious and so medicinal for us so that's my video on mushrooms I really hope you enjoyed it and please subscribe and let me know in the comments below if you liked this video and if you want to see more like it please let me know we're here to share all of our knowledge related to mushrooms related to plant gardening all kinds of things so please comment like our video to our channel and we hope to see you again soon