By Joseph Goral
Staff Writer
jgoral@mihomepaper.com
Sydney DeLong, 14, a Lake Orion High School student, is Michigan’s youngest certified mushroom expert, earning her certification from the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development after attending workshops and taking exams.
DeLong, who lives in Clarkston, began studying mushrooms after her mother, Georgette, gifted her forager cards in fifth grade. DeLong was drawn to the cards with mushrooms on them and began researching them on her own.
From there, DeLong began exploring to inspect mushrooms.
“To me, it’s a lot harder to learn from a teacher,” DeLong said. “You kind of just have to do your own research. Google is your best friend on this.”
But DeLong’s expertise was not all thanks to Google – far from it. To become an expert, DeLong needed to pass an exam with a score of at least 80%.
DeLong’s first opportunity to take an exam was at the first workshop she attended in Mount Pleasant. While she was given the exam, she used it as an opportunity to look it over and to understand what to expect instead of seriously completing it.
DeLong said she was given flash cards and a book with each mushroom included to study. It contained information to memorize including photos, the mushrooms’ Latin names and more details.
“There are two words in a Latin name for a mushroom,” DeLong said. “The first one is the genus and the second one is the direct species.”
The exam required DeLong to remember around 40 edible mushrooms, several poisonous mushrooms and how to recognize each.
While Delong admitted to being “a bit of a procrastinator,” her mother said she never needed to remind her daughter to study.
Several months after her first exam, DeLong passed her second exam in Commerce Township.
The process also took DeLong through the wide variety of mushroom names that someone may hear and think “wow, there’s no way that exists,” she said. They range from more tame, wilted peach and coral mushrooms, to names that sound more like Halloween decorations than mushrooms, including bleeding tooth mushrooms and dead man’s fingers mushrooms – the latter being found at the base of dead or dying trees and shrubs, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
She also discovered pop culture does not always get the facts correct. In the popular video game Minecraft, players can cook white mushrooms with red caps and white spots to replenish their character’s hunger.
“In real life, it’s one of the most poisonous mushrooms in the world,” DeLong said.
Sydney’s mushroom studies also helped her in and outside of school. For example, in October 2023, Georgette and Sydney harvested 30 pounds of hen of the woods in their backyard. Had they harvested it this year, they could have sold it $700, she said.
In school, whenever her biology teacher does not recognize type of a mushroom, DeLong said she earned the title of mushroom queen by answering her teacher’s question.
“And my face went so red,” DeLong said. “I just slowly put my head down … I felt so happy.”
DeLong’s favorite mushroom is the Indigo milk cap, an edible mushroom ranging from pale blue to dark blue in color.