Season
What is fruiting in December
13 of the species on this site fruit in December, and 2 of them are deadly. Seasons here are the ones on each species sheet, and they shift with latitude and with the year: a warm autumn runs late everywhere. Treat a month as a prompt to look, never as confirmation of what you have found.
Out this month and deadly
Deadly galerina, Death cap. These are listed first below rather than buried, because the reason to know what is fruiting is at least as much about what to leave as what to take.
Deadly
Deadly galerina
Galerina marginata
A rusty-brown spore print on a small brown mushroom growing from rotten wood. There is no field character that settles this one. Take the print.
brown spore print
Deadly
Death cap
Amanita phalloides
White gills, a ring, and a membranous sac at the base. All three together, in a mushroom growing from soil near trees, and you should stop.
white spore print
Toxic
Common earthball
Scleroderma citrinum
Thick warty rind and dark marbled interior. A true puffball is thin-skinned and pure white inside, like a marshmallow.
black spore print
Toxic
Fly agaric
Amanita muscaria
Red cap with removable white warts, and a bulb with concentric bands rather than a sac.
white spore print
Toxic
Sulphur tuft
Hypholoma fasciculare
Yellow-green gills. No edible clustered wood mushroom has them.
black spore print
Not worth eating
Chaga
Inonotus obliquus
Black cracked charcoal-like mass on a LIVING BIRCH, rusty orange inside.
brown spore print
Not worth eating
Turkey tail
Trametes versicolor
Fine WHITE PORES on the underside. The many look-alikes have a smooth underside, a maze-like one, or a rusty one.
white spore print
Edible, with conditions
Honey mushroom
Armillaria mellea and the Armillaria complex
Dense clusters on hardwood, white spore print, dark hairs at the cap centre.
white spore print
Edible, with conditions
Wood blewit
Lepista nuda
Lilac gills and stem in autumn leaf litter, with a pale pink spore print.
pink spore print
Edible
Enoki, velvet shank
Flammulina velutipes and F. filiformis
The dark velvety stem base, on a sticky orange cap fruiting in midwinter on wood.
white spore print
Edible
Yellowfoot, winter chanterelle
Craterellus tubaeformis
A hollow yellow stem under a small brown funnel with blunt ridges.
white spore print
Choice
Hedgehog mushroom
Hydnum repandum, H. umbilicatum
Teeth instead of gills, on a mushroom growing from soil. Nothing dangerous shares this.
white spore print
Choice
Oyster mushroom
Pleurotus ostreatus and relatives
White decurrent gills on a stemless or side-stemmed fan growing from wood.
white spore print
Just starting
Nothing new this month; everything fruiting in December was already out in November.
Last month for these
Deadly galerina, Death cap, Common earthball, Fly agaric, Honey mushroom, Wood blewit, Hedgehog mushroom. Gone by January.
A month in a table is not an identification. Every edible species on this page has at least one lookalike, several of them serious, and the season overlaps too. Take the spore print.