I found this chanterelle on June 29. Earliest ever for me, other than a few that were barely visible at this time in previous years. I thought this would be a great year. Since then they’ve been scarce. Bill Russell in State College, PA tells me it’s the same story up there and they don’t have any black trumpets yet either.
Eatmore T
I had planned to post goldenseal photos here, but the latest version of Wordpress is not working with the system to allow uploads from my computer. So I published two photos of my small urban plot on my first plants page: http://eatmoretoadstools.com/index.php?pr=Plant_Notes. Goldenseal is a hardy plant. Plus it doesn’t taste very good (”medicinal” in the old-fashioned sense of the word), which keeps the rodents away from it.
Now for a quote from Hugh Heclo, who was kind enough to send me his new book, On Thinking Institutionally. “Lies, short-term thinking, self-promotion, denigration of duty, disregard for larger purposes - all of these amount to one common syndrome serving to undermine social trust and institutional values.” Of course, we all must live in the present, we need to promote ourselves in order to make a living, and deception is a survival tool provided by Nature itself. But the important thing is to stay focused on the larger purpose of life, and not, as the book of Genesis in the Christian Bible says, trade our birthrights for a mess of pottage. Or a patch of morels.
Eatmore T.
I live in a small 1950’s house on 4400 sq ft of land in an urban area. The area was farmed intensively for a few centuries then turned into housing for young couples who mostly worked for the government, either civilian or military. There is a very thin layer of topsoil left. I have been trying to improve it for years, but there is only so much county mulch hauling and composting I can do. In fact, it may be almost as bad as it ever was. The first year I was here, in 2002, there were a few blewits in the yard. But the only fungi that’s grown here in recent years is “dog vomit” mold atop some of my mulch.
This soil is a primary reason I have lots of crop failures when I sow directly. In recent planting seasons we’ve been getting tremendously variable weather. Clay doesn’t drain well. It holds water too long sometimes, causing the seeds to rot. Other times it dries out too quickly and the seeds dry out before I realize it. I don’t have a greenhouse and this old house is subject to pretty much the same problems - too wet or too dry. When I plant in pots outside to get seedlings for transplanting, I often run into the same problems. I think maybe I am over-extended and I might get better results doing a few plants well. But I do learn quite a bit about which plants can put up with such conditions. Besides, failure has never been a huge concern of mine, even though it does extract its share of pain when it happens.
Eatmore T
There are quite a few useful mushrooms that should be out right now. By the end of the week I should be able to gather some reishi and maybe even some black chanterelles. But meanwhile, I will fill in with an interesting story from my hippie days. The reason I wrote this story is that Mark Dixon (Captain Zen) is in the hospital in a coma and the docs say he needs to wake up soon. They also say that talking to him and reminding him of where he has been, what he has done and friends that love him can possibly awaken him. His woman partner is there at his bedside to do the talking, but we must provide the material. Thus we are wrestling with the Spirits to reclaim him for the Earth, at least temporarily.
Mark, Chip and I were roommates one year while we were going to Valdosta State College. Chip and I were also working construction. Mark had worked construction for awhile, but he had a bad back so he had to quit. Mark was doing Zen (thus the nickname Captain Zen), and Chip was doing it to a lesser extent. Chip had roomed with Clarence Thomas in Catholic seminary in Savannah and was a very meditative person as those who attend seminaries often are. Of course, at the time none of us had a clue what Thomas’ future would be. Occasionally I would sit, but I wasn’t so much into it. I prefer to meditate while walking or even driving long distances.
All 3 of us were into what was called “health food” at the time. It was not so sophisticated as todays organic foods, and quite frankly, not always very tasty. We shared food expenses and cooking duties. Mark wanted to go totally vegetarian, but Chip and I said we had to eat meat because we were working construction.
One day Mark and I were grocery shopping and we spotted a 5 lb bag of birdseed. We looked at the label and saw that it had the same grains as those we had been buying at a much lower cost. So we bought it, took it home and cooked up a pot of it.
Birdseed might be health food for birds, but it doesn’t work for humans. We had forgotten the small matter of shells and husks on the seeds.
Eatmore T.
Sometimes I think that if I could just promise people everything for nothing and get them to believe it, I could become a multi-bazillionaire. Easy, risk free mushroom identification in 10 minutes showing how you too can gather all the choice edible mushrooms you wish with no chance of sickness or death. Workshops that show you exactly how to grow plants with no chance of “crop” failure once you learn the magic ways I have developed over a lifetime of planting.
As Ringo Starr was singing in my hardhat days, “if you wanna sing the blues you gotta pay your dues and you know it don’t come easy.” You can stick to store-bought mushrooms, which most people will because they simply aren’t interested in picking their own. But the lessons here can be applied to any endeavor. You can spend hours and hours learning about wild mushrooms, because you must invest the time to learn them to pick safely (although you can learn a few with much less investment in time). But you can’t control the weather. You can’t control the mushrooms and they can be as cantankerous as I am. You can’t control the competition from other pickers, including insects and animals. So you can take all your invested knowledge to the mushroom patch and come up empty-handed. This has happened to me many a time when I’ve taught workshops. People feel they didn’t get their money’s worth when it was too dry to find anything. Oh, but you did get your money’s worth. You discovered that there are things beyond the control of the instructor and student. That nobody can promise you a good outcome even when you invest time and money.
You know it don’t come easy.
Eatmore T.
Below is something I started writing a few years ago. Thought I would clean it up and toss it into the blog.
I’ve been interested in wild berries and plants since childhood, but I don’t recall having an interest in mushrooms until I was an adult fishing in the Shenandoah National Park. I don’t think anybody in South Georgia where I grew up knew a thing about wild fungi at the time. But many of my friends knew plants and I learned from them. Also, there was an Air Force base close by and many of my Boy Scout leaders were Air Force officers and enlisted men. They had access to experts in survival, such skills being rather useful if your plane was shot down, so occasionally we would get presentations from them. Early on I learned the value of the saw palmetto heart, but it was many years before I learned of the medicinal uses of the berry. In fact, the first time I heard about it was from Andy Weil at the Telluride Mushroom Festival one year. I asked him which part of the plant was used, since he didn’t make that clear in his lecture. He said he thought it was the leaf. I knew that wasn’t true, because you could boil a saw palmetto leaf for a month and it would still be too tough to eat. Even the experts cannot know everything.
I believe it was George, a good friend in my youth, who taught me about deer tongue, which is a plant that grows in swampy areas in South Georgia and North Florida. In fact, I was down in South Georgia last fall and George and I went out to search for it along with mushrooms and other plants. We had no luck finding deer tongue, but there were lots of other plants to reconnect me to the foraging days of my youth. George took me to a cow pasture filled with mushrooms. It did not cross my mind until later that he might have figured these were Psilocybes and wanted to check with me to confirm it. Everybody knows about cow pastures and mushrooms, right? But they were Chlorphyllium molybdites, which by all accounts won’t kill you, but might make you wish you were dead for a few days. I should have gotten a photo, but I had already taken enough photos of that mushroom elsewhere on the trip. Anyhow, it’s another reason to remove the notion of the potential for easy identification of mushrooms by reference to stories about their habitat from your mind. No free lunches in this world.
Back to the main story. Deer tongue was harvested by some wildcrafters and sold to tobacco companies back in those days. I couldn’t tell you if this is true today, although I know it is sold by a few herb shops. Mixed with tobacco at a ratio of 100:1 or 100:2 or so, it makes an interesting pipe blend and was available commercially. I mixed it myself a few times, having taken up pipe smoking at the age of 17 (I quit almost 20 years ago). I think deer tongue would probably make an interesting incense blend. But the stuff is quite strong by itself.
I was a student at Valdosta State in those days. I worked construction, labored in a sawmill, and did other jobs to put myself through. I ran with the gang of “freaks” at the school, which included some notable characters. One of these was Fielding from Massachusetts. Fielding lived in a small “apartment” with Scott, who left this earth a number of years ago, behind an old rotting house rented by “Electric Dave,” a genuine free spirit who can make anything with a little scrap wood or other parts he scavenges.
One day when I was at Electric Dave’s with 5-6 other hippies, Fielding burst into the house with some plants. He was all excited about his find. He declared his discovery to be “diatong” and claimed we could smoke it and get high. I examined it and said, “Fielding, I believe this is deer tongue. It’s used in pipe tobacco.” Fielding said no, he was told by some black guys that it was diatong and it had the same properties as a certain illicit plant that was readily available during those times. I was skeptical, but I went along with the plan. Maybe there was something I didn’t know about small plants growing in swamps.
Fielding baked the plant in the oven, rolled a smoke and we all passed it around. Lots of coughing, no feelings of being spaced out or a sense of well being. As I said, that stuff has to be mixed 100:1 or so to smoke with tobacco, so you can imagine a bunch of college kids coughing up a storm, with watery eyes in a haze of smoke. As I said, I think it would make good incense.
Massachusetts accent, South Georgia black accents and a desire to discover something you can smoke for fun without getting busted. Interesting combination.
As Coach Joe Wilson told me when I was a lad, “son, don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.” Coach Wilson wasn’t the brightest candle in the window, but perhaps he gave me the most sage advice I’ve ever received from a teacher.
As for Fielding, he went on to become a magician and he has a regular show in Las Vegas as well as performing all over the country and perhaps abroad. Still creating illusions.
Eatmore T.
I should be in a morel patch right now. The reason I am not is intensely personal, but it seems to reflect the kind of spring I have been having. Wet, unpredictable, full of disappointments, but always a rainbow in the sky. I’ve picked maybe a pound of morels, neglected to gather spring redbud blossoms and enough ramps to get myself a few more meals, don’t have the photos I wished to have taken. I haven’t caught a single trout, although I did climb my way up the trail on Piney Branch with a rod in hand, only to spend the entire time looking for morels. My urban ginseng patch is not gonna be anything to write home about. But my goldenseal loves my yard. Seedlings have drowned, dried out during the spells of dry we’ve had, and it’s been another frustrating spring with plants. Some didn’t survive the house over the winter. Too wet, too dry, too buggy, too much fungus. My house is a rough place for survival. But still, there are survivors and some thrivers.
I should say I am happy I am not in the middle of a Burmese typhoon or a Chinese earthquake. Blessings should be counted. My basement may be wet, but my house didn’t collapse on me. I’m not afraid to venture into my yard or into the city. I might be if I lived in Baghdad. I am able to hike the Shenandoah National Park and don’t feel any worse the next day than I ever did, although I guess I’m hiking more like 8-9 miles instead of 12.
Finally I have been thinking about an old James Bryant Conant quote with respect to a number of things I have been doing. “Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.” I think I have made some progress this spring, but sticking your neck out may get you a bloody head. I have that also. Bloody but unbowed I guess.
And that’s the moral of the story. I’ll be back soon with more mushroom philosophy as well as pure information intersperced with opinion. Meanwhile, celebrate with some good wine, absinthe, cheese, coffee or even a good book, all of which you may even order from the ads on this site should you feel so inclined.
Eatmore T.
I just installed Wordpress to replace my old “semi-blog” listed under “News” on my website. Eventually I’ll move those posts and photos to an archive. This offers me real interactive blogging and you can take part!
Eatmore T.