We at Moelyci Farm have run a fungus foray each year for the last few years, which has been very popular. I think it caters for people's primitive hunting instinct. This is a great place to hunt for fungi. Wales is probably the most important country in the world for grassland fungi. You won't find our wax cap fungi almost anywhere else in the world.

It's a combination of having a mild, oceanic climate and a lot of hills which means you've got well-drained sites, many of which are difficult to get to. They have therefore managed to escape the worst effects of modern farming and haven't been agriculturally improved by pesticides, liming or other intrusions.

One of the exciting things which came out of this year's foray was discovering a really important growth of grassland fungi which we hadn't spotted before. This is a chance find which you make when you get the experts together at the right time in the right place.

We're grazing that field with local Welsh Black cattle which must have brought it back into the right condition for the fungi to fruit - it was rank and overgrown before. The plant may have been growing there for centuries - the mushrooms you pick are just the fruit which pop up above ground.

This field we've discovered is not just the site of one rare species, but a whole assembly together in one place. One discovery was the lilac fairy club (the clavaria zollingeri) - a little clump of lilac/purple, slightly branched fingers sticking up out of the ground.

So if you notice quite a few different colours of fungi in a field, that might mean that you've potentially come across one of these interesting sites of special interest that Wales is known for. The fungi are quite neatly colour-coded - a few shades of white, red, orange and yellow tell you that there are a variety of species there.

Wales is a small country in the midst of other countries. It isn't geographically isolated, but is home to these very unusual fungi.

I tied in all the interest in the fungi foray with a fungi feast, to bring in the culinary aspect of mushrooms. During the feast we decided to bring in examples of foreign varieties of fungi, cultivated on blocks of straw and woodchip. The blocks are sterilised, innoculated with spores of the particular variety, wrapped in plastic and kept in a chilled place to shock the spores into life. Then they're kept at a constant temperature and humidity until the mushrooms pop up through slits in the plastic. This is all to mimic the rotten wood on which they usually grow.

Cooking Moelyci mushrooms.
More fungus foraging.