Northeastern foragers, watch out - the mighty morel is marching your way at a staggering rate! Morels are already fruiting in West Virginia and Ohio, and I expect them to arrive in southern Pennsylvania within the next week. This means morels should be fruiting two to three full weeks ahead of schedule throughout most of the region.

My chaga eyes are on, and I am having trouble turning them off. Despite the disconcertingly warm winter, Northern Vermont still has powder stashes if you know where to look (if there’s one thing mushroom foragers and skiers have in common, it’s that we don’t disclose the locations of our coveted patches). 

The ground may be frozen, but a mushroom menagerie has popped up in Cornell’s Mann Library. “The Other Side of What? Adventures in Fungal Wonderland” features photographs taken by members of the Ithaca community during 2011’s bountiful wild mushroom season. Several of The Mushroom Forager’s photographs are displayed in the exhibit, which will be up until April 30. 

Of all the stately trees native to the Northeast, it is hard not to take a special liking to the paper birch (Betula papyrifera). Its peeling ivory bark, which happens to be an unparalleled fire starter, reveals a mini-sunset of yellow, salmon, and purplish hues on closer examination. Though it is native throughout the Northeast, the paper birch is most common in the Northern part of the region, where its cold hardiness gives it a competitive advantage. I recently moved to Burlington, VT, putting me in prime birch country.

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.

The streets are full of colorful costumes, but the woods are no longer full of colorful fungi. Things have changed since September 27’s ForageCast, when I was so spoiled by the wild bounty that I was leaving prodigious patches of honey mushrooms and aborted entolomas untouched. “I don’t have anything against these mushrooms, but it’s hard to get excited by ground beef when you have unlimited free filet mignon,” I remarked nonchalantly.

Stropharia rugosoannulata’s regal appearance and distinctive potato and red wine flavor have earned it a colorful assortment of common names, including king stropharia, wine cap mushroom, garden giant, Godzilla mushroom, and stroph. Wild strophs pop up throughout the summer and fall, almost always fruiting on woodchips in landscaped areas or forest clearings. Once you find a patch, they may fruit repeatedly throughout the season following rain.

From our motherload of gourmet wild mushrooms to the cornucopia of produce at the Ithaca Farmers’ Market, Ari and I have been eating very well this harvest season. However, one shortage that Ithaca does have is access to good quality fish. Since one of my last names is DiMare, meaning “of the sea,” it’s no surprise that my father grew up working on T-Wharf in Boston alongside my grandfather at DiMare Lobster Company. Coming from a lineage of fishermen and lobstermen, it is also no surprise that I grew up eating fish, and a lot of it. 

After one of the Northeast’s wettest falls of the century, my foraging eyes are on like never before. I am having an extremely difficult time prying my gaze from the ground, which has proven dizzying at times but more lucrative than expected. In the last two weeks my foraging eyes have inadvertently spotted bundles of cash on two separate occasions – first $20 and then $13. Money may not grow on trees, but it sure does seem to nestle up among the fungi from time to time!

Take a load off my fanny pack. Take a load for free.

That just about sums up how I felt as walked out of the woods yesterday, my back almost crumbling under the weight of innumerable mushroom-filled paper bags.

“So, do you think it is still too early to add blewits to the ForageCast?”

I asked Jenna this question early this morning as we neared the end of a fun but unfruitful jaunt to a proven wood blewit patch. As if being summoned, the blewits answered before Jenna even had the chance. Perhaps they just wanted to make their presence known before I stepped on them, popping their pretty purplish faces up out of the duff just in time to avoid a sad, squishy fate.  

When the bounty is more than plentiful, it’s time to share. This past weekend we hosted a local foods potluck with a wild mushroom tasting featuring hen of the woods, black trumpets, smooth chanterelles, yellow foot chanterelles and lion’s mane. Guests arrived to find a spread on our dining room table with the five mushrooms, labeled, in their uncooked state. And then, out came the cooked mushrooms, hot off the cast iron pan.

The flood of mushrooms continues to astound me. Yesterday after work I took Judah out for a hike and arrived home just before dark with a backpack bursting with king stropharias, lion’s mane, black trumpets, yellow foot chanterelles, cinnabar red chanterelles, and maitake. I was lucky enough to receive a dinner invitation from friends, and we enjoyed the mushrooms (minus the strophs and hen) alongside salmon and broccoli.  Delicious!

At this point, anyone who’s not a mushroom forager in Ithaca must by dying for some sun. It’s been raining almost around the clock – a steady pitter-patter on the tin roof of our home, soaking the earth and flooding the streets. In fact, when I woke up this morning all roads in Tompkins County were closed due to flooding, by order of the sheriff! Despite the pouring rain, Ari still ventured out yesterday on an early evening two-hour hour mushroom foray. He returned home soaked to the bone, but with a huge smile and a grocery bag filled with black trumpets to add to the four-pounds of black trumpets foraged earlier this week. Mushroom foraging is at its peak - it really doesn’t get any better than this! 

It was 8:35pm last night when the news rolled in. It came in the form of an email from a reader named Tom, who had attached a photo of a beautiful local fruiting of maitake (hen of the woods) and told me it was time to update the ForageCast.

Now is the time to be a mushroom forager. I thought this to myself yesterday as I followed an epic vein of porcinis down a moist wash at the forest’s edge. While Hurricane Irene wrought havoc upon many parts of the Eastern seaboard, in Ithaca all we got was rain. This rain, on top of plentiful August showers, has awakened the legions of fungi in the forest.