Mushrooms

What’s happening on Mist Mountain ?  A Walk-Around in April, a very unpredictable month.

The Pacific Northwest has an abundance of mushrooms.  Spring and Fall are the best time to find them.  We have just had some great sunny warm weather and now it is misting and getting ready to rain for a few days.  Perfect weather to grow mushrooms.

The best we have close by are the morels and the chanterelles.  You can not grow the the morels commercially.  They must be harvested wild, which makes them even more sought after.  Here on Mist Mountain the canyons are pretty steep, so the older we get the less we hunt for them.  Sometimes we get lucky and find them closer in on flatter ground.  One year I found two beautiful morels growing outside my garden perimeter.

The morel, I think looks like a tree.  They camouflage themselves really well.  You just have to be in the right place at the right time and stumble across them.

The chanterelles, on the other hand, are a bright orangey-yellow, so if you are in the right place you will have no problem seeing them.  Here they tend to be in the bottom of the canyons.  When you find a patch, you usually find a lot. One patch usually supplies us all year, and I dry them in the dehydrator to store.

And then there is Mist Mountain.  This is a view from the end of the driveway, where they logged. It seems you can see forever, well at least across the river to the next state.   The few trees left up here are on our property which begins on the left of the pic.  It is quite sad what they have done all around us cutting down all the trees, but that is for another blog as well.