If, in fact, April showers do bring May mushrooms, we should be up to our eyeballs in fungi any day now!
It has been a pretty wet spring all over the Northwest, and especially here on the southern Oregon coast. We've had an occasionalnice day or two, but there has been a lot of rain around these parts (including a particularly nasty storm May 4th with a peak gust of 83 m.p.h. and 2-1/2" of rain), and we're more than ready for some consistent sunshine.
It's often useful to make note of
the plants that grow near
your favorite mushrooms.
Of course, the southern Oregon coast is never a mecca for spring mushrooms; you'll probably find some oysters, and perhaps some of the delectable Agaricus campestris(The Prince) if you are lucky and know where to look, but morels are very rare - pretty much limited to old, overgrown apple orchards - and if spring boletes grow here, we have yet to find them.
Head east over the coast range, and it's a different story. Good areas for morels exist all over the Grants Pass/Medford/Ashland corridor, and we've heard good reports from there this spring, but our own schedules have precluded our seeing for ourselves. Maybe next year.
We've also heard and read some very good reports from northern California. Our friends in the Bay Area Mycological Society have been reporting outstanding fruitings of morels, in some cases from areas where they haven't been seen in years. The consensus is that credit goes to those April showers we were bemoaning earlier.
Business took us to our cabin on Mt. Hood in northern Oregon on both the third and fourth weekends in April, and we squeezed in a couple of brief forays. Last year on the third weekend in April, we'd found decent quantities of one of our favorite mushrooms, the succulent Montana helvella, adjacent to receding snowbanks; this year we looked hard for them on both forays and found exactly none.
Not everyone appreciates puffballs like we do.
We recently encountered these puffballs
that had been kicked about by someone.
On the fourth April weekend, we did manage to find a few warted puffballs in one of our semi-secret spots, but the operative word here is "few." (Of course, the mini-snowstorm that we encountered wasn't encouraging the puffballs to pop up!) Last year, the puffballs were abundant and quite large on this same weekend.
The puzzling thing about all this is that between the two weekends we forayed, the area had a little hot spell of 2-3 days earlier in the week, followed by cooler weather. To us, that seemed ideal. We guess no one bothered to tell the mushrooms, or perhaps they just read different books than we did. Either than, or they do this just to drive us crazy!
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