"Chicken of the woods"?

[Bill Walker]

I was trying to identify a large mushroom growth I found at the base of
an oak tree.
The best I can guess after looking through many books and websites, is
that it is Laetiporus sulphureus, or Polyporus sulphureus: "chicken of
the woods".

Whatchy'all think?

(sorry about the poor scan - I wanted to protect the scanner platen
glass from the dirt and stuff)

http://www.wam.umd.edu/~bhw/Mushroom1.jpg
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~bhw/Mushroom2.jpg

How best to store it?  Fridge?  Sliced and dried?
How would one go about propagating such a mushroom?  Comprimise the bark
of the appropriate species tree and stuff some mushroom into it?

Also:

I had collected a bunch of other mushrooms for identification, and
noticed that there were a bunch of tiny white worms emerging from what I
tentatively identified as Marasmius oreades, the "fairy ring mushroom".
(Of course, it could be damn near anything else for I know.  They were
brown/yellow, gave a brown spore print, grew in a ring in the grass near
some small planted trees, and had gills broadly attached to the stipe -
the kind of gills where not all of them are attached to the stipe.

I'll try to get a scan of the ones I dried out at 37 deg C. )

Anyway, how do most people 'debug' their mushrooms, either for sample
preservation or as preparation for eating?


Thanks for helping a fledgling mycologist/mycophile/mycophage :)

Bill