Mad about Mushrooms . . .

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.

Welcome, 2016!

 

Our summer included a lovely flight in a
1929 Travelair biplane over the central Oregon coast.

As we get older, we learn a few things not readily apparent to us when we were younger. At least, hopefully we do, and hopefully these lessons make it a bit easier for us to navigate life’s travails... the inevitable times when things don’t go entirely our way and we are disappointed.

In mushrooming, these disappointments aren’t infrequent: the places we’ve come to count on through years of experience for some reason fail to produce. Sometimes, this is due to conditions: the rains weren’t timely, or there’s been a dry spell, or perhaps a cold snap came at the wrong time. Occasionally, it’s because there has been wood cutting, property development or other environmental activity.

And sometimes, it’s simply because someone else got there before we did. It’s perhaps this latter situation that bothers us the most, but it can’t be helped; other folks want to gather mushrooms, too, and we ourselves have probably done this to others more often than we’d care to admit, either consciously or not. The

          Springtime brought us Verpa,
     accompanied by cottonwood seeds.

Most of all, though, these disappointments arise because things change, and it’s not always to our liking. But whether we like it or not, change will come, in mushrooming and in life.

Mary and I went to a long-time favorite Asian restaurant in Portland the other day. They’ve featured a signature dish that we really loved for well over ten years (revealing what it was might also reveal the identity of the restaurant, and that isn’t our intent). Over the years, the consistent excellence of this particular dish was amazing; it was always simply wonderful. The service wasn’t always great, and other menu items were merely OK, but this one dish was the best of its kind we’d ever encountered.

The last time we visited this restaurant, we were surprised to find that it wasn’t anywhere near as good. We certainly know that any and all restaurants can have an off day; the regular cook could be off, there could be lots of reasons. But we said something about it to one of the owners as we left, not in a mean-spirited way, but because we sincerely felt that they would want to know, and our comment seemed to be received in the spirit it was offered.

So we were mindful of this earlier visit when we went there the other day, hopeful, but prepared that things might not have improved. And they hadn’t; if anything, our beloved dish was worse than before. It's a simple dish, with few ingredients, and a change in sources was highly unlikely to have been the cause; the cause was doubtless in the preparation. They just weren’t making this dish the same way, and it really showed.

As we left, I told the owner - a different one than I’d talked to before. This time, the reaction was different, too. My comments, even though courteously and sincerely offered, were clearly not taken seriously, as if I simply didn’t know what I was talking about. OK, that’s his prerogative, and they still seem to be doing a pretty decent business, but from now on, they will do so without us. This restaurant isn’t the same one we came to know and love... it’s changed. And we won’t be back.

     Our travels last year took us far afield
        to South Dakota, and, of course, we
                    went mushrooming.

The lesson here is that restaurants we love and mushrooming places we love and all kinds of other things we've learned to love in life inevitably change with the passage of time. We don’t like it, but that’s the way it is. We can bemoan this fact and let it ruin our day if we so choose, but it will happen regardless. And how we react is the lesson learned.

We must always remember to really appreciate those wonderful places that we have come to love. Enjoy them, treasure them while we have them. Some will last as long as we do, but some will not, and will fall by the wayside. It’s simply inevitable. This is frustrating; it takes time and effort to find new places to dine and new places to mushroom and all those other things, but we simply must expend it... even though we don’t particularly want to.

We get lazy, we see no reason to find new places when we already have as many as we can handle. But then we lose one, for whatever reason; we must either find a new one or two to replace it, or we must accept having less. We must find new restaurants, and new places to mushroom, and new all kinds of other things that we lose with the passage of time, just to maintain our current level, let alone advance it.  And along the way, we’ll encounter new things, learning as we go, and in the end, we'll find new places that we'll come to love just as much.

That is our thought for 2016: enjoy and treasure our favorites, but summon the energy and curiosity to find new places and things to replace those we inevitably lose. Have a great year, and as always, thank you for being one of our readers!

Offshore and onshore rock formations make for a dramatic
land and seascape near our home in the hamlet of Port Orford.

Welcome, 2015!

Buddhist Monks, marching off to morning prayers
in Yangon (Rangoon), Myanmar (Burma)

 

As I compose this, our annual kick-off to another year of mushrooming and whole-hearted enjoyment (during a very determined January rain storm), I find myself pondering what I might write that would be worth your time to read.

I could discuss our mushrooming efforts this year, which weren't particularly successful, but as always, were rewarding in other ways and were simply a lot of fun.  But somehow, that doesn't seem quite the right direction.

       Samurai welcomed us to the Tokyo Airport

Or, I could write about some interesting travel we had, because in this respect we were fortunate indeed; a trip to the astonishingly beautiful Ireland (where mushrooms are, at best, ignored despite the fact that they are very plentiful); a long-overdue journey to the New England states, which we extended into the lovely Maritime Provinces of Canada (bring with you a healthy appetite for lobster if you are lucky enough to go!); or the autumn trip we made to Japan, visiting two beautiful ladies who were once exchange students we hosted in the early '80's and who now have fine husbands and remarkable children and made us feel so welcome and appreciated that we can never repay them; or the continuation of that trip with a visit to the spectacular country of Myanmar, which you may know as "Burma," an ancient country where tourism is a brand-new phenomenon.  Any of those would be worthwhile, and perhaps interesting, topics for our "Welcome to 2015."

                       A hot air balloon drifts above
           the ancient temples of Bagan, Myanmar

But as I think about these and many other things that made 2014 a special year for us, I find that what I really want to say is "thank you."

Thank you for being able to live for another year in a place I truly love with a wife and life partner that I love even more.

Thank you for friends and loved ones who enrich our lives every day, people who genuinely care about me and about whom I care deeply.  We share with each other both our troubles and our triumphs,  and we - all of us - know that we are there for them, and vice versa.

                   Inedible, but incredible!

Thank you for the opportunities we've had to build a comfortable lifestyle, affording us the resources to indulge our love of travel and to enjoy new activities as well as old ones, of which mushrooming - and all its aspects - is one that we particularly enjoy, and is the central subject of this website.

And, last but certainly not least, thank you for the opportunity to share this enjoyment with you, our readers.  We never imagined when we began this modest effort that we would acquire a loyal readership that comes back to us, time after time, year after year.  But we are sincerely grateful for it.

 

"Sally, the Dog" greeted us at the free campground,
Shire Camping, New Brunswick,
which is "open to the friendly and respectful public"!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome, 2014!

"May you live in interesting times," goes the well-known Chinese curse.  We now hope for a bit less interesting 2014 than 2013 proved to be.

  Ubiquitous work boats filled the waterways
                    of the Mekong Delta.

The year started out interesting enough.  A trip to Vietnam, a spectacularly beautiful country that had been on our "bucket list" for years, was more than interesting enough; we traveled all over the country, seeing aspects of it that we suspect folks who go there on packaged "tours" miss entirely.  We came away with vivid memories and a real affection for these people, who welcomed us as graciously as if our two countries had been staunch allies for centuries.  The scenery was varied and astonishing, the history fascinating and the foods were absolutely scrumptious, as well as beautifully presented.  Markets, which we were drawn to, were especially interesting, full of all kinds of exotic foods, including many different types of mushrooms, of which we recognized exactly none.  In general, the cities were beehives of activity (Ho Chi Minh City, as an example, has roughly 10 million people and about 7 million motor scooters, most of which appear to be in use at any given time; traffic is simply chaotic,  with the motor scooters careening madly about like Harry Potter and his chums playing "quidditch!").  Looking back on what we saw, we have little doubt that these industrious, hard-working people are well on their way to prosperity and modernity.

  Vietnam was a beehive of activity 24/7!

As with most travel these days, the "getting there" part was predictably unpleasant.  Why do airlines bother to advertise, when they then proceed to do everything they can to make the experience as unpleasant as possible?  It's a mystery to us.  Nonetheless, once there, the country was worth all the travails of modern air travel; we highly recommend it as a destination.

The rest of our travels were shorter trips; they included a lovely May trip to Crescent Lake in Central Oregon, where our hoped-for encounters with Morels and trout went largely unfulfilled.  It was beautiful, however, with an evening lightning show over the lake for good measure.  From there, we headed south to explore around Klamath Falls, with hopes of seeing (and photographing!) the unique mating dance of the Western Grebe, of which we'd seen films but had never witnessed.  Wonder of wonders, our timing for this turned out to be perfect, and we saw a number of displays of their crazy, synchronized dance and even managed a photograph or two, making the trip for us.  We never really expected to see it.

  What's more beautiful than a morel?

A trip to Mount Hood in early June led to the best day of Morel gathering we ever had.  It was so much fun to encounter this often elusive species in numbers, and we confess to a bit of greed on that foray, although I hasten to add that none of them went to waste!

In late spring we had begun to plan in earnest for a big trip in the fall, so it came as something of a shock when a routine annual echocardiogram - I'd had a slight heart murmur for years - suggested to my outstanding doctor (who specializes in reading "echos") that the time had come to actually do the surgery that we'd all known was eventually coming.  Tests were run, plans were made, and the surgery was scheduled for mid-September.   Now things got interesting, in the sense the Chinese imagined when they originated their famous curse.

Conditions for a fine fall mushroom season seemed to be in place.  I regretted my bad timing as August transitioned to September and we started to find Chanterelles in numbers on our property; it seemed inevitable that we would miss most of a great season, after a poor season in 2012.  Timing.

It's hard to believe for those of us on the downhill side of 60, but these surgeries are now so common that they're almost "routine;" almost, I say, because when you are the subject, there is nothing "routine" about it!  Nevertheless, I was calm as the day approached, confident in the medical team that would operate on me, opening my chest cavity, handling my heart, replacing a defective valve and performing a bypass while there.  I'll confess, though, that my outward calm gave way to some internal jitters as the hour approached. 

A happy day for both of us,
the surgery now behind me.

My lovely wife (and the best mushrooming partner a man could ever ask for) was with me every step of the way, sleeping in a chair in my intensive care unit room (which was too small for a more comfortable "bed" for her), and on a cot when I was moved to a regular room.  She could not have been more loving or supportive, and I can't imagine how I could have made it through those dark days without her;  I will never forget it, or lose the profound gratitude I feel.

The surgery was completely successful, albeit with a few not-uncommon complications.  My doctors tell me that I have a long and happy life ahead of me.  And that life, shared with my beloved wife, has new meaning; after this experience, I'll appreciate it even more, and the time and adventures we'll continue to share will never again be taken for granted, as they may occasionally have been in the past.  Our lives are precious, and we must live them accordingly.

    Not everyone was happy in 2013!

As soon as I was up to it after the surgery, we ventured back into the woods.  By then, however, the season was well past its peak; dry weather, followed by a cold snap, took care of that.  We had a good outing on Mt. Hood at our "secret spot" for Matsutakes.  On our own property near Port Orford, we found some more white and golden Chanterelles, although not in any real quantity, and on two occasions, Mary happened upon cauliflowers, unfortunately one of which was well beyond its prime.  We did find a massive fruiting of Oysters on an alder tree down the hill, and a couple of weeks ago, had an outstanding day gathering Hedgehogs, but that has been the extent of it.  We'll await next fall's season with great anticipation, and will be ready to really devote ourselves to it.

Good luck and good health to you, dear readers, in 2014 and the years that follow.  No one is more appreciative of the value of your time than we are, and we will do our best to reward the time you spend with us with good and interesting information about mushrooming, and occasionally, life in general.  If you think of a way we can improve our efforts, please let us hear from you!

And, who could resist including
this charming Vietnamese baby in their post?