Court has finished for the day.

Follow along tomorrow for more updates.

Patterson said the mushrooms she picked while living at Shellcott Road included “slippery jacks” and “honey mushrooms” which tasted “very nice”.

At Gibson Street (in Leongatha), the main mushrooms she picked were field mushrooms, she said.

Patterson said her children were with her when she was picking mushrooms and would have seen her.

She said they may not have been completely engaged in the task, but on some occasions may have even picked some mushrooms for her.

Asked what she did with the mushrooms she took home, Patterson said she would wash them, dry them, then put them in tupperware containers.

Patterson said she put some dehydrated mushrooms into a container while she was living at Gibson Street.

“Generally I would just dry them and put them into a container with other mushrooms I had going,” she said.

Patterson has been shown photos of mushrooms on the shelves of the food dehydrator.

Mandy: “So those mushrooms we are looking at there appear to be - perhaps I will ask you this, where did they come from?”

Patterson: “I believe I picked them from the Korumburra Botanic Gardens.

Mandy: “And they are not looking well.”

Patterson: “No they are not. That was a bit of an experiment to see how they turned out. They were a bit mushy inside. They just didn’t dry well.”

Asked whether she tried them, Patterson said “I don’t think so”.

Mandy asked why some of the mushrooms were pictured on scales.

Patterson said she was doing experimenting to see how long it would take to dry them.

Patterson has returned to the stand.

Mandy asked her what her process was when she picked and foraged mushrooms.

“The first thing I did was reading on a Facebook group. Once I had a good handle on what it was, I would give it a go,” she said.

Patterson has told the court she accepts there must have been death cap mushrooms in the lunch she served.

“The vast majority came from the local Woolworths in Leongatha, there were some from the grocer in Melbourne.”

Mandy asked her if it was clear where she purchased the Asian mushrooms, and she said it was not.

“I know it was in the April school holidays, I think we went there for a week or two - maybe only a week,” she said.

Patterson said she had purchased mushrooms like shitake, porchini, and enoki, or “wild mushroom mixes” from Asian grocers in the past.

She said she bought the dehydrator because she liked eating foraged mushrooms and wanted to find a way to preserve them throughout the year.

“It wasn’t just for mushrooms, I thought I could use it to preserve a number of things.”

Patterson said foraged from the Botanic Gardens in Korumburra, her property at Shellcott Road, and a rail trail, and a mud block at Gibson St from 2020 to 2023.

Patterson said she dehydrated mushrooms that she had foraged “quite soon, maybe within days” after buying the dehydrator.

She said she had also used the device to dehydrate mushrooms she bought from Woolworths.

Patterson said she once noticed there were wild mushrooms growing around her property, when she lived at Shellcott Road in Korumburra.

She said she picked them because she was concerned about her dog consuming them, and was later able to identify them - noting there are many Facebook identification groups for mushrooms lovers.

“There were field mushrooms and horse mushrooms in those paddocks,” she said.

“Yeah eventually, I did (consume them).

“When I got to a point where I was confident about what they were, I cut a bit off one of the mushrooms, fried a bit up with butter and saw what happened.

“They tasted good and I didn’t get sick.”

Patterson said from then on, if she saw the same mushrooms growing, she would usually pick them and eat them - sometimes adding them to meals for the family.

“There were lots of them in autumn, tapering off to winter.”

Patterson said she would “chop them up very small” when adding them to meals for her children.

Patterson is being asked about messages she sent about mushrooms in a Facebook group.

The messages included her saying she was “hiding mushrooms in everything” as well as pictures of a food dehydrator.

Mandy asked Patterson about a photos showing mushrooms on a shelf of the food dehydrator.

“I think I was experimenting with different ways to put them in there to see what the best results were,” she said.

Patterson told the court she developed an interest in wild mushrooms during Covid when she would go for walks through the Korumburra Gardens with her child.

She said she noticed mushrooms around early March to the end of April.

Patterson said she had always enjoyed tasting mushrooms because “they taste good” and they were “very healthy”.

She said she would get different mushrooms from grocery stores, farmers markets, and Asian grocers.

Patterson said she would visit shops “like Asian grocers” when she and the children went to Melbourne in the school holidays.

Patterson said the exotic mushrooms “taste more interesting” and offer “more flavour”.

Patterson has become emotional while being asked about her body image issues.

She told the court she has tried “every diet under the sun” and “it has been a rollercoaster over the years”.

“When we were young, mum would weigh us,” she said.

“I never had a good relationship with food.”

Patterson said she got into a pattern of binge eating food.

Asked what she meant by binging, she said:

“Eating everything you could get your hands on until you get sick then bringing it back up again.”

Patterson said the behaviour was particularly prominent in her 20s.

“It could be daily, it could be weekly, it could be monthly. It varied in intensity,” she said of that time.

Mandy: “Leading to July 2023, how often were you engaging in that behaviour?”

Patterson: “Maybe two or three times a week? Maybe more?

Mandy: And who knew about it?

Patterson: “Nobody. Everybody now, but nobody then.”

Patterson has been asked about a message she sent to Simon asking for him to help her with a tree that had fallen on her property.

In the message, she noted they “didn’t really have the relationship” at that point in time for her to be asking for favours.

Patterson was asked why she asked Simon to assist in those circumstances.

“I knew at his core he is a decent human being who would probably help me in this regard,” she said.

Patterson is being asked about messages she sent to Simon while she was in New Zealand with their kids.

She said she sent pics of their kids riding a toboggan down a luge. She said they had visited that area a number of times previously as a family of four, but this time, their daughter was old enough to ride the luge by herself.

Patterson said at that time, in mid December 2022, the child support issues were for the most part resolved.

“I remember sitting their sending those messages. It reminded me of the happy memories Simon and I had had there. I was trying to reach out and kind of communicate ‘I’m sorry, I want our communication to be better’,” she said.

“He seemed to have responded very gratiously.”

The court heard Patterson’s children spoke regularly with their grandparents and cousins on Saturday mornings while they were in New Zealand.

Patterson said her relationship with Don and Gail also returned to normal after she and the kids returned from New Zealand.

Patterson has been asked about a message she sent to Facebook friends in relation to her dispute with her estranged husband and his parents.

The message read:

“I’m so sick of this s*** I want nothing to do with them. I thought his parents would want him to do the right thing but it seems their concern about not wanting to be uncomfortable and not wanting to get involved in their sons personal matters are overriding that so f*** em.”

Asked by Mandy why she sent that message, Patterson told the court:

“I needed to vent. I needed to get my frustration off my chest. The option was go to the paddock and tell the sheep or vent to these women. But I regret the language I used.”

Patterson said she probably “played up” the emotion to get the support because she felt the women would rally around her.

“I was really upset with Simon but it wasn’t Don and Gail’s fault. It wasn’t entirely Simon’s fault - I played a part in the issue too.

“I think at the time I thought I was right and he was wrong - but I reflected it a lot when I was in New Zealand and it was wrong to involve Don and Gail and I should have approached it differently with Simon.”