Firsts

I was taking a stroll around a botanical garden here in Sarasota the other day and came upon some really beautiful mushrooms unlike anything I'd ever seen before either in person or in photographs.  I took some photos of them and then came home and contacted as many mycologists I could think of, to see if I could get an ID on these specimens. 

My friend Taylor Lockwood saw my photos and said he thought they looked a lot like a mushroom he'd photographed in Australia, called Agaricus rotalis.  I then contacted the US expert on Agaricus mushrooms, Richard Kerrigan who agreed, they were Agaricus rotalis which had only been recorded in Australia and Hawaii and the Caribbean.  He said he and his colleagues preferred using the name Agaricus endoxanthus which is an older name and more correct.  He also said this is the first collection from nature of this species in North America, and I found it!!

Seeing Blue Again

If you've been following my blog, you will already know my passion for wild mushrooms and to be even more specific, my affinity for blue mushrooms.  I posted a while back about my quest for the blue Entoloma of New Zealand but there was still one blue mushroom I still had not yet found.  I'd only seen it in photos and having lived for so many years west of the Mississippi, I had no chance to ever find it unless I spent some time mushrooming in the east.  Now that I am living in the east once again, I have opportunities to learn a whole new host of mushrooms I know little about and have never seen before.

Here in SW Florida, on the Gulf Coast, the Lactarius indigo mushroom is known to grow fairly regularly, but I am still learning habitat here and having a difficult time finding much of a mix in trees other than oak, oak, oak.  Yes, there are some pines here and there, but they never seem to be together around where I am.

I have a favorite spot that seems to produce the most mushrooms after good soaking rains, but the one spot I'd been told does produce this blue mushroom has never produced much of anything and I'm getting tired of driving all the way there just to find nothing!  So, I'd been walking around my usual haunt and finding some new and unusual species of mushrooms which I was having difficulty identifying.

Florida fungi is quite unusual for the most part because the genus and species of many of the mushrooms here are that of tropical mushrooms seen in places like Mexico and South America etc.  I'd been there on a Friday photographing and hiking but decided to go back the following Tuesday to get more info on a few specimens I had seen but didn't collect.  I was quite surprised to see that some of the mushrooms I'd found only a few days earlier had completely dried up and others that I wanted to collect, were just gone!  I walked around in the exact same spots I'd been before and found nothing, until all of a sudden I walked into an area where I thought I had seen some baby reishi mushooms and low and behold, what did I see, but three of the most gorgeous blue mushrooms.  There they were, just as plain as day, Lactarius indigo!  Finally, I found them.  They are just the most beautiful color although I have seen specimens in books that are very vivid colors, these were a bit more subdued.  I am hoping with the good soaking rains we have had the last few days, that more will emerge and perhaps the damper, fresher specimens will be a bit darker and more vivid in color.

Lactarius is a genus of mushrooms commonly knows as milk caps (lactose = milk) and when the gills of these mushrooms are cut, they exude a milky substance or latex hence the name.  This particular one exudes an indigo blue latex so that is how it got its name.  These specimens were a little on the dry side so not so much latex.

Mushrooms in Old Growth Forest

It's not every day I get to take a long hike through an old growth forest. It's such a magical feeling to be amongst such grandeur and beauty. My purpose of this walk was mushroom photos, of course. I was and still am (unfortunately) in search of a photo of Polyozellus multiplex, aka Blue Chanterelle. It's not actually a chanterelle at all, but that's another story I will leave until the day I have such a photo with which to share. Until then, here are some of my favorites from the hike.

Montana Boletes 2009

This has been one of the oddest summers here in SW Montana that I can remember in the 11+ years I've lived here and the boletes seem to be going along with it. Last year I was picking 20+ pounds each time I went and this year was more like 20 mushrooms per visit which just doesn't make sense to me but what can I say?

Usually my patch starts producing around July 8th but last year didn't start until the third week in July and then went well into the middle of August. That was pretty much the same this year also but I'm still finding some here and there.

This spot is primarily all Douglas fir trees and the elevation is over 6,800 feet asl. We've had cold snaps, lots of rain, then a little heat, then cold, rain and then heat. Yo yo weather for sure and now we are back to HOT!

I don't think I've ever seen so many slugs in the field. The slugs were eating everything like pirhana.

Look how many slugs are in this photo and the damage they did:

Reconnecting with our Montana Souls

So, we gave Oregon a shot and it just didn't work out. Between my horrible joints that hated the climate and the lack of open spaces, I decided I needed to return to southwest Montana where I've lived the last 11 years quite comfortably with the exception of the long winters. I'm going to work on that though and figure out a place to go for winter.

Upon departing Roseburg, Maggie the wonder dog and her feline pal (and sister) Madison and I took to the road and pulling our new (well, new to us) 1970 Aristocrat camp trailer decided to take a few days and camp out in Sisters, OR in search of morels and boletes and whatever else we could muster up.

Maggie had a great time playing with her doggie pals Mazey and Ruby and Madison sat in the window most of the time or hid and slept all day so she could pester the crap out of me all night long while I was trying to sleep! Have you ever tried camping with a cat in tow? It's not a particularly fun thing to do, traveling with a litter box in cramped quarters.

We met up with friends out at the Jack Creek campground about 18 miles from Sisters, which was quite a peaceful place to camp once the weekend warriers departed Sunday afternoon and Monday morning. The mushrooming was not as good as we'd hoped it would be. There were no boletes popping yet and the burn that had been producing had been so pounded by commercial pickers there were no morels to pick including babies. There were scads of pickers and buyers and virtually no mushrooms to go around so it seemed like a bad dream. We did manage to get out and find some natural morels though which is a treat for me, not having any natural morel spots in which to forage in Montana.

After four nights at Jack Creek, Maggie, Madison and I continued our trek back to SW Montana overnighting in Connell, WA and then finally making it back here late afternoon through rain, high winds, snow and crazy weather. Now we are getting settled in Montana and enjoying life staying with a friend in the Highland Mountain foothills and especially enjoying the beautiful sunny, warm weather. It's good to be HOME!

The Elusive Morel

When morel season is in full swing it is hard to think about anything else. My mind is constantly grinding away trying to think of areas I could scour for just a few more for the pot. Needless to say I have no trouble finding Morchella conica which favor fruiting in previously burned areas out west, but the one that constantly has me stumped is the elusive Morchella esculenta. This is the big yellow colored morel that most people think of when you speak of morels.


This mushroom is not so elusive in the midwest and even eastern U.S. but out here, it is much harder to locate. I used to find a few (maybe 10 or so) under the cottonwood trees on my property in Montana but to find them in the riparian areas along the western rivers is much harder because now you're dealing with private property and either getting permission to scout someone's property, or else you need a drift boat and good oarsman to navigate the river and cruise the banks stopping to pick along the way and always staying below the high water mark in order to remain legal. The problem with the second scenario is the fact that when Morchella esculenta are fruiting in the late spring in Montana, the snowmelt and runoff are in full swing and the river is usually too high and far too dangerous to attempt floating.


I have found scads of them on my family's property in Pennsylvania where they prefer old apple orchards and woods with dead or dying elm trees. They are also widely associated with maple, ash, poplar, cherry and an assortment of other trees but they will fruit prolifically around dying trees, their last attempt to prolificate or become extinct. They love disturbed areas and will grow in places unimaginable to those picking them with what seems like no rhyme or reason to the where and why.

There are certain wild flowers that can be used as indicators for timing morel fruiting. In the Rocky Mountain west, the calypso orchid and glacier lily are often in bloom at the same time or close to the same as Morchella elata (black morel). In Oregon, a good indicator is flowering Oregon grape.


I guess part of the attraction to these honeycombed fungi is the difficulty factor in finding them and the sheer size of them which can be downright huge. These are the perfect receptacle for stuffing so hopefully some recipes will follow in the coming posts.

Winter Mushrooms

It's nice to know that spring is starting to spring up all around me and there are still winter mushrooms to be found if you know where to look. It won't be long before the morels start to poke their heads out from under the leaves so in the meantime, I had to go take a look and see if I could find some hedgehogs Hydnum repandum and yellowfoot chanterelles Cantharellus tubaeformis. Sure enough, I found enough to make the trip worth while.

The Most Elusive Mushroom in Oregon

Craterellus cornucopioides

Man these are the doggone hardest mushrooms to find in this state. I've searched high and low and with absolutely NO success. I've had some pointers from people who are pickers who have found them around here in the past but with or without pointers I've had the same amount of success...NONE! So I had a proposition I just could not refuse. A commercial picker friend of a friend from my area contacted me and told me he had a spot he would essentially "give" me as it had no commercial value to him in terms of amounts of mushrooms to harvest, but if I was only looking to find some for my own enjoyment and use he would take me right to them and show me what habitat to look for.

It was a great learning experience since I'm still having trouble with some of my Oregon trees and he showed me some tricks to learn some of my different firs and one tree I'd heard of but never seen (that I knew of) a golden chinkapin, which seems to be key to finding black trumpets. We were in white fir, madrone and the occasional chinkapin and they were always near the chinkapin.

Anyway, we hiked like a couple of llamas (or pack mules..take your pick) up and down ridges and into bowl like areas and finally we got to his spot (which in a million years I would NOT have found) unless I had a very good GPS unit and even then... and there they were. Just as I remembered them in CA...almost invisible with their background but growing like black petunias. It was a tough hike but well worth it with the bounty we picked. At the same time we found some yellowfoot chants and a scant few belly button hedgehogs. Yippeee...
I'm so excited to have fresh black trumpets. This winter I've been consumed by and preoccupied with black fungi. I've had black truffles on the brain for months as well as black trumpets so now it's time to celebrate. I feel a pizza coming in my near future. My two favorite mushrooms to put on pizza, yellowfoot and black trumpets. See my pizza blog right here. I think a risotto is in order real soon also! Hmm hedgehog and black trumpet risotto with truffles. I'm so spoiled!

Hello Oregon

I've just recently relocated to Oregon hence the long silence and lack of activity here on my blog. Things are getting a little more settled now so perhaps I'll have more time to spend here posting new and interesting things.

I'm now fortunate enough to be in the most diverse fungal playground in the land. Not only is Oregon loaded with a plethora of wild gourmet edible mushrooms, but there are so many other wonderful foods available for foraging such as razor clams, dungeness crabs, oysters, fiddlehead ferns, sorrel and a host of other delicious things.

Since my arrival here I've been concentrating on fungal delicacies such as porcini, chanterelles, shrimp Russulas and whatever else I can find that is food worthy for the table. I've been having fun photographing a variety of mushrooms as well.

This winter I'm hoping to scope out the best spots for fly fishing for shad on the Umpqua River for this spring when the run begins but I may also get some time in with some winter steelhead fishing. My other winter "business at hand" will be truffle hunting for the elusive Tuber oregonense (Oregon winter white truffle) and Leucangium carthusianum (Oregon black truffle).

You may recall my earlier posts when I was in Oregon digging Oregon spring truffles, Tuber gibbosum. Those will come along in May and June but for now it's winter truffle season and I'd be interested in training my companion Maggie to help me find these delicacies in the woods.