Where Have All the Fungi Gone?

With winter looming, milkweed sends its seeds into the wind.

As I walked through the sun-soaked woods in shorts and a t-shirt this morning, for a fleeting moment it felt like summer. The fungi, however, have not been fooled by the unseasonably warm weather. Unless you are looking for chaga or artist’s conk for a medicinal tincture, your November forays are unlikely to be fruitful.

This means we will be putting the ForageCast to bed until morel season sends us back into a frenzy next spring. The ForageCast was a new addition to The Mushroom Forager this year, but it will definitely be back due to the overwhelmingly positive response. Part of our vision for The Mushroom Forager was to make foraging accessible to neophytes by creating an active community of mushroom hunters who share advice, inspiration, and field notes. We are very grateful to all the northeastern foragers who reported their finds and helped make the ForageCast as useful, up to date, and dynamic as possible.

An article in the Dining section of today’s New York Times raves about the culinary merits of wild mushrooms, but goes on to suggest that only the most intrepid souls should dare search for these untamed treasures in situ: “While a lucky hunter does sometimes happen upon a bonanza cluster of easy-access beauties, far more likely is the very unglamorous experience of crawling on your belly through the moss and mud, dodging thorny branches, and generally getting rather cold and soggy.” Sounds like fun to me!