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.

Last week we had rain.  This week we have mushrooms! Seemingly overnight, the woods have exploded with a colorful and diverse cast of fungi. I am overjoyed but, quite frankly, a bit overwhelmed. After weeks of waiting, interrupted by the occasional flush of mediocre mushrooms, the past few days I have felt like a kid in a candy store as I wander through the woods. Porcini! Bicolor boletes! Smooth chanterelles! Parasols! Black trumpets!

As much as I have been enjoying this summer’s catch of shrimp russulas and lobster mushrooms, there’s nothing like a freshly picked Maine lobster. Ithaca’s gorges sure are gorgeous, but when we got time off work, Jenna and I decided to leave our landlocked town and head for the salty coast. So, we apologize for not updating the ForageCast the past couple weeks, but we are back just in time.

Do you like the idea of having gourmet mushrooms springing up among your crops in the garden? Come to a “Mushrooms in the Garden” workshop at the Ithaca Community Gardens on Sunday, August 28, as part of the Garden Education Program’s summer workshop series. The workshop is free and open to the public.

Over 35 high school students gathered outside Cornell University’s Plant Science building on a sunny late June morning for “Mushroom Cultivation for Fun and Profit,” a workshop I co-led at the 2011 Youth Grow Summit with Steve Gabriel – a Cornell Garden-Based Learning co-worker and Program Director for the Finger Lakes Permaculture Institute.