Season
What is fruiting in January
6 of the species on this site fruit in January. 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.
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
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
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 January was already out in December.
Last month for these
Yellowfoot, winter chanterelle. Gone by February.
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.