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A report on local fruitings, findings and the state of the woods

 4/20/02

On the Sunday after the Organization meeting (4/14) I went out to see how the mushrooms were coming. There's a patch of ground off Cable Rd. south of Custer that produces beefsteak (Gyromitra esculenta) mushrooms early in the season each year, and I use their size and moistness as a barometer of how soon the morels will be out. They were there - about 4 of them the size of walnuts, so I figured it would be about 2 weeks before the morels were big enough to be worth gathering. On the way there, however, I got a nasty shock: our "friends" in the Forest Service must have decided we had too much forest. The two major stands of poplar trees on Cable Rd. that produced many large harvests of oyster mushrooms as well as morels, chanterelles and hedgehogs have been strip mined into desert. The woods we went to last year for the Oyster foray are gone, stumps and all. It's beyond me how this could be good forest management - popple's not worth much except for cardboard. I'm real curious what they're planning to plant there that will be more "valuable" than the 80+ acres of mature ecosystem they destroyed. Probably tobacco. Thursday the 18th I went to a different place and found around 10 morels about half the size of my baby finger in about 1/2 hour's time. And now it's snowing. The season will be late this year and it remains to be seen how plentiful they'll be.

4/29/02

So far I've gathered around 4 dozen mushrooms - mostly black morels plus a dozen small Verpa bohemicas and a few Gyromitra gigas. The continued cold weather has kept the size of everything down. It has been wet enough here that as soon as it warms up for any amount of time there should be a goodly crop popping up. A co-worker today said he had several fair-sized M. esculenta in his yard! Looks like the blacks and whites are going to overlap more than usual this year.