Mushroom Obsession RSS
Don't look now, but there's a humongous fungus among us
On October 9 we headed out for a 3,444-mile foray across the northern U.S., from west to east, to visit national forests and see the mushroom sites. (Along the way my son-in-law Mike and I also stopped at 8 coffee roasters and a half dozen brew pubs. Mike is a true coffee connoisseur, and the daily caffeine overdose was a small price to pay for his extremely helpful participation in my schemes.) First stop on our seven-day itinerary was the Malheur National Forest in northeast Oregon, home of the world's largest single living organism, an Armillaria ostoyae (Honey Mushroom) infestation in...
Fall season still going strong: A cornucopia of shrooms!
Every week I'm out there (on the slopes of Mt. Rainier) hunting this fall, there seems to be a different variety of exotic mushrooms predominating. At first (about a month or so ago) it was Lobsters, loads of Lobsters. Then shortly after that the Chanterelles started, but didn't come in as strong as usual; but after the rains what did come in strong were the Boletes: Fat Jacks, Zeller's Boletes (pictured at right), even Admirables.We've had a few weeks with almost no rain, now, and the Boletes are drying out and thinning out a bit. But what is coming on...
Fall Mushroom Heaven!
Fall is our favorite time of the year here in the Pacific Northwest ... because the weather is nice, the colors great, but mostly because of the mushrooms! They are springing up everywhere. Recent forays have yielded lots of Boletes (Slippery Jacks and Admirables), Golden Chanterelles, Lobsters, Puffballs, and others. This blog shares more about upcoming forays in the Puget Sound, and also a status report on cultured Shaggy Parasols now springing up.
First Fall Foray of 2018: Smoked Lobsters
It's August 21. It's warm and dry and the skies are filled with smoke from British Colombia (and some Washington) wildfires, but we had a decent rain at the beginning of last week, and I've been reading reports of lobster mushrooms appearing in Oregon. So I decided to take a few hours off today and do some look-see down in the Gifford Pinchot. And I did find lobsters -- all of them near streams at the 2,500-foot level southeast of Ashford, WA. I collected about a dozen in a two-hour foray. None were much larger than my fist, all were...
Fire Morels abundant in first forays of the 2018 season
It's become tradition for my son Nathan and I to head to Eastern Washington in the Mother's Day timeframe. This is about the time the Morel Mushrooms begin showing their lovely little heads, typically in areas that have been ravaged by forest fires the prior summer. This year we started early in May in some minor burn areas north of Leavenworth. We've had good luck in the past in the general vicinity. But we found nary a mushroom, so we did what we should have done earlier and paid the local (Wenatchee) Ranger Station a call. (The rangers are always...
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- Chicken of the Woods
- children
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- Club Mushroom
- Coltricia Perennis
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- cultivation
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- forest safety
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- Gifford Pinchot National Forest
- golden chanterelles
- Gyromitra esculenta
- H-Mart
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- Honey Mushroom
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- hunting
- King Boletes
- King Trumpet
- lion's mane
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- Malheur National Forest
- maple logs
- matsutake
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- mushroom worker's lung
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- spring mushrooms
- state parks
- straw logs
- Tiger Mountain
- White Button Mushrooms
- White Chanterelles
- White Shimeji
- yellow morels
- Zeller's Boletes
