It's the season for mushrooms and their hunters!
In our part of Oregon, mushrooms are plentiful in September,
October, and November. Some of them can
be worth quite a bit of money, especially to restaurants and suppliers. It's an equal-opportunity fungus (unlike
those growing in our nation's capitol), not caring who picks 'em. Whether you plan on selling them to the
buyers who suddenly appear along our roadways, or are just picking them for your own
enjoyment, mushrooms are a fantastic find.
In this coastal area, you can collect lobsters (pictured above), morels,
shaggy mane, chicken of the woods, boletus, pine mushroom, chanterelles, among
others. These wild mushrooms can fetch a
tidy sum, depending on their quality and the market. It’s possible to make $400-plus after a day of
picking mushrooms. It's not glamorous - walking
in the woods can bring ticks, spiders, injury, mud, etc. And mushroom hunting tends to bring out the
criminal in many of us. Even the most
honest souls, caught up in the hunt, can forget that searching on someone
else's property is trespassing. They are
not worth a ticket from the sheriff or, worse, the threats of an angry property
owner!
You can grow your own if you have land with the right soil and trees. Take lobster mushroom for example. Lobster mushroom is a parasitized white mushroom (Russula) that grows under older Douglas fir trees. You can pick up spores from any mushroom buyer’s place of business - they are all over the floor. You then scatter the spores (waste) on the soil around the tree bases. Two to three years later, you could be picking lobsters.
Chanterelles can be found in the moist soil under older Douglas
first trees (approximately 30 years or older).
I’ve also read that OSU has developed a media that chanterelles can grow
on.
Plenty of information on harvest and culture of various
mushrooms can easily be found on the internet.
Years ago, my wife and I had classes with Paul Stamets in Washington
State. It is not that hard to grow your
own mushrooms and Mr. Stamets had it together, showing us how to grow various
mushrooms on bags of media and adding spores of our choice. Mixing
spores in soil, media, hard wood logs and compost allow you to grow your
own. It also saves the walks in the
woods, and the various threats that go with it!
Here is a link to info on Paul - you'll learn a lot from him. Happy hunting!
No comments:
Post a Comment