Mad about Mushrooms . . .

Welcome 2021!

As 2019 was ending, I gave thanks  ...  “for what lies ahead is more challenging and exciting and engaging than I can ever image.”

Little did I know what I was prophesying!  Then, on January 1 of last year, we were joyful and excited about the New Year. Now, twelve months later, we are daring to be optimistic, cautiously optimistic about the coming year.

From time to time my mind drifts to the splendid Japanese garden where I am a volunteer gardener. Here there is a source of perseverance and of courage as we notice how winter has painted this beguiling landscape, brushing it into a symphony of colors and textures, with the realization that each season, each event is a cause for celebration. There is solace in its simplicity.

Photographer Bill Peterson beautifully captured
raindrops glistening on holly,
a promise of the wonder now and to come.

We observe how the evergreen holly leaves glisten with raindrops while holly branches are alive with bright red berries, soon to be devoured by squirrels and birds. Here and there fungi are breaking ground, seeming to traverse the pathways and tucking themselves protectively under the foliage of the holly and other plantings.

In the background a solitary stone lantern maintains its reticent vigil, beckoning and lighting the way. Nearby, but unseen, a moss-draped rock turtle, a symbol of wisdom and peace, patiently awaits the arrival of the New Year.

Thus it is that we end 2020 and greet 2021 in the stillness of this Japanese garden as well as in the surrounding woodlands where their pristine beauty rejuvenates and offers hope for an abundance of healing and a resurgence of kindness. All is at rest and awaiting the arrival of a new spring to stimulate the bounty and beauty of the garden and forest floors.

Yes, welcome 2021.  We await you with great enthusiasm!

 

Welcome 2020!

Welcome 2020 and many thanks ...

• For a wonderful mushrooming year in 2019, made memorable by anticipation and fulfillment.

    

• For the joys of sharing last mushrooming trips with my beloved husband, Steven. Even though he was no longer able to traverse the wooded areas of the coast and mountains, he took pleasure in the photographs of what I found on the forest floor and encouraged me with his wisdom and kindness.
• For the opportunity to forage with long time friend, Terry, a retired Forest Service employee who many years ago had fostered a love in me of all things fungal.
• For the sheer pleasure of sharing my fungal knowledge with others, teaching them a rational and safe approach to collecting with an emphasis on conservation and preservation of the landscape.
• For investigating and developing skills in mushroom related activities such as dyeing and cultivation.
• For the gift of living in a fungal world made remarkable by its mystery and melange.
• For the knowledge that what lies ahead is more challenging and exciting and engaging than I can ever image.

 

Woodlovers stole the show on this
stump intended to highlight the hosta.

 

 

 

 

Welcome, 2019!

     Slugs always seem to find their
                    mushrooms.

And there are two reasons to welcome it. First is the usual hope for a good year ahead, both fungal and otherwise, Second, this year, is the profound hope that 2019 will be a vast improvement in mushrooming for us over 2018, which was surely the most dismal in our experience.

That old bugaboo, lack of timely rains in the summer, was no doubt the problem. Without that fresh rainfall in early August or so, our beloved mushrooms have no impetus to fruit. It’s just that simple.

We found few Chanterelles, and a handful of Matsutakes on one delightful day, but we never found any of our absolute favorite, the Cauliflower (Sparassis crispa), despite many fruitless trips to our perennial no-fail spot on Mt. Hood. Well, no-fail until this year, the worst in our history. It bordered on being embarrassing, and had we heard of others doing a lot better, we would have been embarrassed ourselves.

There were occasional - very occasional - high points.  The best of these was our attendance at the NAMA Annual Meeting and Foray, held near Salem, Oregon this past September.  There weren’t many mushrooms (like everywhere else!), but meeting up with dear old friends Dick and Agnes Sieger was, for us, truly the highlight of the whole affair.  Dick was the long-time and very capable President of the Puget Sound Mycological Society when we first joined it way back in the late ‘70’s, and Agnes virtually single-handedly produced the PSMS newsletter Spore Prints (the best we’ve ever encountered in the field) from then until now.  They’re truly delightful people, and we are committed to NEVER allowing that kind of time elapse again without contact with them.

              Urban mushrooms were
                   a bit more plentiful.

The lack of mushrooming (and the rains that cause them!) DID have a benefit for us, personally. As most of you know, we moved last summer to the Brightwood area on the western slope of Oregon’s Mt. Hood, and although the home we bought and moved into was wonderful in almost every way, it desperately needed for the huge deck to be sanded and a heavy coat of stain applied. While we were at it, we re-stained the house as well, along with new gutter screens and a few other outdoor odds and ends, including Mary’s renewal of the once-proud landscaping, which had fallen into neglect. So, every cloud has a silver lining. At least, we guess so.

But those things are behind us, and as we look forward to 2019, there’s no need for the rains to hold back. Indeed, they certainly don’t seem to be doing so thus far this winter! Keep it up, Oregon! Let’s have a good spring, abundant Morels and Boletes, and keep it going in the fall.

That doesn’t seem to be too much to ask of the Mushroom Gods, does it?

As always, in 2018 mushrooms delighted us
with their rainbow of colors.
 

Welcome, 2018!

It's that time of year when I sit at my computer to compose a message to our dear and loyal readers and fellow mushroomers.   Hopefully, they'll find something in it that inspires them, because it is always my purpose to do so in these pieces.  The pursuit of wild mushrooming is, in itself, inspiring; the forests in which we seek them, the beauty in those forests, the things we learn about them by researching what we've found and by what we learn all on our own, all of these are inspiring and are good reasons to get out there and look for these jewels of the forest floor. 

Setting goals, like mushrooming on Wind Mountain,
keeps our hobby fresh and invigorates us year after year!

We're getting older.  Both of us are now in our 70's, and we don't get around as well as we used to - particularly yours truly.  Yet, throwing in the towel in an activity we've loved and been fascinated by for so many years is simply not an option.  We won't explore and search for new spots as aggressively as we once did, perhaps, but we'll still do it, and will be especially thrilled when our explorations - guided by what we've learned over the years - meet with some notable amount of success.

The forest floor always delights - imagine mushrooming in
a land where wild cranberries form a carpet beneath our feet!

So, to those of you who are still in your primes, we tip our hats and offer congratulations.  Enjoy it and milk it for all you can.  Take care of yourselves and preserve your physical health for as long as possible; it's not a given, and can change at any time.  Know that eventually, it will change and when it does, try to make the best of it. 

Even when there are no edible mushrooms in the refuge,
Douglas iris beckon us into the woods to share in its beauty!

And for those of you who are more like us, don't give up.  The more sedentary you are, the more sedentary you will be.  Keep at it to whatever degree you can; persevere against the aging process and continue as long as you possibly can.  It may be difficult, but the alternative is worse.  Look back on the wonderful memories you've created, but make some new ones, too!

Thanks for the memories, dear readers, and here's to the multitude of memories we'll all collect in the years to come!

Foraging draws us into the landscape
where we become lost in the magic of the moment!

 If you'd like to keep up with what's happening in our fungal world, please visit the category ALL THE LATEST MUSHROOM NEWS from time to time.  Look forward to meeting you there!

 

 

 

Welcome, 2017!

Visiting a Norwegian gingerbread village
was a delightful way to end the year.

You may not have heard, but 2016 - the fall mushrooming part - was cancelled on the south coast. At least, that's how it seems. After a far-from-red-hot 2015, we thought that the year just ended had considerable promise, with timely rains in late summer and other signs we viewed as favorable and auspicious.

But apparently, no one told the mushroom gods. The lobster mushrooms were scarce. The chanterelles - whites, goldens, pig's ears and black trumpets - were few and far between any place we sought them and where we'd found them many times before. Boletes and Cauliflowers were even scarcer. Our killer spots for Matsutakes in the Mt. Hood area yielded only a few. We've yet to see any significant fruitings of hedgehogs or winter chanterelles (yellow feet), and our traditional Super Bowl foray for these last of the mushroom season gems looks like it could be a bust this year.

This wasn't just us; we heard many such comments. Commercial mushroom buyers are scarcer than in previous years. Typically, we’ll encounter commercial operations in our travels from Brookings through Bandon and up into Coos Bay, where it’s not unusual to count at least five locations for the pickers to choose from. But not this year.

Nonetheless, it hasn’t all been horrible. We found some specimens we'd rarely - or never! - found before, including the colorful Agaricus californicus.

          Unexpected weather brought
               unexpected mushrooms.

But overall, it was, quite simply, a less than memorable mushroom season.

For hobbyists like us - people who gather mushrooms for their own pleasures and tables - a down year or two is mostly just disappointing. However, for those who harvest forest products for a living, and for those who depend on supplementing their income by gathering and selling wild mushrooms, a lean year has a much greater impact. One friend, for example, has always counted on the income from fall mushrooming to pay for gifts for his kids at Christmas. This holiday season was less cheerful than normal.

I could offer reasons and explanations galore, but this "expert" - and as time goes on, I don't think there really are any true experts - is going to blame it on the capricious mushroom gods and just express hope that next year, things turn around and we get a bumper crop. The climatologists offer hope for a more normal year - the strong El Nino oceanic phenomenon is over, and the La Nina to follow has never really materialized - so hopefully we can expect something more like normal in 2017.

On the other hand, what we are seeing in the opening days of 2017 suggests anything but: Portland is just now starting to dig out from over a week of frigid cold, with up to a foot of snow in places, followed by an ice storm. This was the worst winter storm in more than twenty years, and Mary and I got caught right in the middle of it and can certainly vouch for its severity. So much for global warming, eh?

Now, what to do when the mushroom season is a bust?

          A second flush of Blue Oysters is
                    just beginning to show.

• One possibility is to get into cultivation. Although Mary and I have never reaped bountiful crops from our cultivation efforts, there are lots of kits available that seem to work pretty well and are fun to experiment with. We recently inoculated a bag of straw with Blue Oyster Mushrooms, with help from Ron Bossi of the Wild Rivers Mycological Club, and they fruited beautifully. These lovely Blue Oysters were the highlight of our New Year’s Eve dinner.

• Another possibility is to use this time to hone one’s mushroom identification skills. We believe that this is particularly important in a season with so many reports of mushroom poisonings. Frankly, we’re quite perplexed by the number of amatoxin incidents that keep cropping up in the news. For example, there were a cluster of death cap cases (seven individuals) in one small area in California over a three day period!   What’s happening to cause all these poisoning cases? Perhaps the relative scarcity of edible mushrooms could have prompted some people to take chances they otherwise would not.  Perhaps the poisonous mushrooms looked similar to the edibles these individuals had foraged and consumed in their native land. Perhaps the collectors did not have the knowledge to distinguish a particular edible mushroom from a look-alike. Did they understand, for example, that if you set out to collect Matsutake, you must be able to differentiate this choice edible mushroom from the look-alike Amanita smithiana, which is highly poisonous?

• Yet another possibility in a slow season is to rededicate oneself to giving back to the hobby. There are lots of ways to do this. If you aren't yet a member of a mycological society convenient to you, join one now and become active:  volunteer for different jobs, help with identification, lead a foray, mentor new members, participate in the annual exhibit, serve as an officer.  In your community, make sure the public library knows you and has your contact information so that they can refer patrons to you who have found mushrooms and want help identifying them (assuming, of course, that you are qualified to do so). And ensure that others understand the personal responsibility they bear in gathering wild mushrooms, properly identifying them, consuming them, and sharing them with others.

With this message of “giving back.” we thank you for your loyal readership of our website, and wish you good health, happiness and a bounteous harvest in 2017!

If you'd like to keep up with what's happening in our fungal world, please visit the category ALL THE LATEST MUSHROOM NEWS from time to time.  Look forward to meeting you there!

 

Meeting "popcorn" and his lovely
daughter gave us reason to celebrate
in 2016 even if the mushrooming didn't.