Mushrooms. Mount Tam. Rain.

We went mushroom hunting. I dare to post this now, because I am now and official member of the FFSC who describe themselves as “an informal, friendly, fun-loving group of fungophiles dedicated to the knowledge, pursuit and appreciation of wild mushrooms.” They eat them too, as well as we do (just the edible ones, after we very carefully ID them)… anyway, that might be something you did not really know about us. We have repeatedly told Leilani not to tell people here about the mushroom eating – in Austria it is normal, but here people often think we are totally out of our mind… We could probably still get in troubles because I now know we’d need a permit to pick the mushrooms…

The stars of the adventure, photographed by Leilani.
Andy – not yet wet.

Sonja soaked, but too far away to see.

Leilani – dry for unknown reasons – probably shortly after we changed her clothes (we had 3 sets of clothes for her)

Ainalaa, who got scratched a few days earlier

The real stars. We found so many mushrooms, it was incredible. We photographed a few to ID at home (but still have no positive ID on any)

This is a russella which is called Speitaeubling in German. It is not tasty unlike most russellas.

Leilani forgot to zoom. I am showing off some really nice mushrooms here.

She also forgot to have mushrooms in the picture. Actually that day it must have been hard to find a bit of forest ground that big without any mushrooms.

Later in the day the weather got better.

Doe, a deer, a female deer… oh wait, the does don’t have antlers… must have been a striped-legged Mount-Tam Leilanidear

Well, I think everything above I would have posted anyway… but not that. We ate mushrooms for 2 days. We deep-fried boletes (the first home-deep fry in about 3 years, done with ghee and butter because we had no cooking oil that could get hot enough.) We froze about 6 mushroom dishes, and I worked 4 hours cleaning. We tossed about 20 pounds of wormy and too soggy mushrooms in the compost.

Author: Sonja

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *