Author: EEC Forest Stewardship

Another fantastic mushroom haul from our local forests in the nearby Cascades. This time, the focus was Hericium, a toothed fungi. Yes, this is the kitchen sink full of bear’s tooth Hericium americanum.

For the beginner mushroom hunter, this is always a safe bet in The Cascades. I stress that this information about mushrooms is only applicable to foragers hunting in The Central Cascades- though study of your local mycology might lead to the discovery of many local  fungi species you too can enjoy. Bear’s head is easy to identify and has no dangerous look alike in our region. It is a mushroom less likely to have bugs and usually grows up off the ground on dead trunks of older. Toothed fungi are very unique in the mushroom world. Here in The Pacific Northwest, we have two strong representatives, one is the bear’s tooth, and the other- Hydnum repandum commonly known as the hedgehog mushroom. I also found a few of those while foraging, so it was a toothed fungi extravaganza.

The bear’s tooth is prized for it’s beauty and taste. Really, this mushroom tastes like sweet crab meat. The flesh of this fungus is meaty, full of flavor, and so delicate in its form. To prep, I simply tear off any bark and browned edges and as I gently pull apart the white tangle into smaller pieces, I pick out needles, leaves, and bits of bark. I then put a table spoon of butter in my cast-iron skillet and saute on medium heat for about 10-15 minutes until most of the moisture is out of the mushroom and the flesh has turned brown. Add salt, pepper, onion, and garlic if you want the added taste, but just a little salt would be more than enough for this amazing taste.

Above is a great picture of some older bear’s tooth growing on a typical tree specimen. This grand fir Abies grandis is a standing dead trunk now, a perfect habitat for the Hericium. The trees I find them on are usually still hard wood, un-rotted by time, so I would put the death of these trees within a few years. Fallen “fresh” logs are also good hosts, though most of my best finds have been above head height, so remember to look up. In French, this mushroom is known as “Pom Pom Blanc” or white pom pom- and it can grow to be that big! Well worth the hunt in a forest, or in our case this week, a wonderful walk in our local forest looking for our delectable fungi friends.

We’re cultivating Oca Oxalis tuberosa and Yakon Smallanthus sonchifolius at Leafhopper Farm! The Oca is pictured here trellising in the kitchen garden. It has a leaf that looks a lot like that of the nasturtium; circular and bright green. This Peruvian root crop thrives as the days get shorter, and this year the original plantings are finally putting out new tubers as they establish. The leaves spread on thin vines, which clime along anything they can get their tendrils on. They are even outgrowing the hops now, a very interesting opportunity for companion planting in future. The colder temperatures will cut short this vibrant growth, causing the tubers to take much longer to form into edible sized tubers. We’ve been keeping our Yakon in the greenhouse, and will put some of the young tubers from this year into the protected covered space too.

In it’s second year of adaptation in our gardens, the oca is beginning to establish new rootlets, a great sign for future harvesting at the farm. It will, however, be a few more years before we’ll have any real starchy goodness from this investment. The hot summers will also hinder growth, but the plants should adapt as they continue to establish. We might end up keeping a stable crop in the green house, or harden our strain up in time to thrive in The Pacific Northwest.

The challenges of growing these Andean root vegetables has been catalogued by other Northwest growers on this page, which has a lot of great additional information on other South American root crops. To see how my seedlings are getting on, I dug into one of their established beds to glimps the new tubers. They are modest, but shaping up to be a stable foundation for future oca generations at Leafhopper Farm.

The Cascades are known for waterfalls, but they also “reign” supreme as mycological action, which also relies on the hydrological abundance of the coastal Pacific Northwest. The Bear’s Head mushroom Hericium abietis pictures above actually grows in a cascade off the side of its evergreen host. The Douglas fir was a standing dead trunk with no top. Another beautiful flush like this was growing up another twenty feet out of reach. One flush was enough for our next few dinners, and it’s one of the largest single fruits I’ve ever harvested. Hericium is a tooth fungus I’m very familiar with, having spent time as a commercial harvester at a grow operation, Snovalley Mushrooms. There we cultivated Hericium erinaceus, Lion’s Mane mushroom, but it never grew to this size!

I gently pulled the gem of a shroom off the bark of the tree, right where it attached; almost like a stem, the fruit emerged from a small space, about the diameter of a quarter, where I pulled the fungus free from the trunk by tugging away firmly. This delicate removal care keeps the mushroom whole. As you handle the grouping of toothed coral like structures, use two hands until you can get it to a bowel or bag. We had a left over Tupperware that had held our sandwiches. When we got home, Bernard took time to finish removing any bark still attached to the back of the bear’s head and then pulled it apart into the smaller groupings; each one about the size of a baseball. As I heated up the cast-iron skillet, I broke each ball down into peices about the size of hazelnuts to make cooking the water out of them easier. After a med-high heat cook on one side of about 8 minutes, I stir it around and then let sit again for another 8, or until most of the liquid is out of the mushrooms. Test this by pressing down on a pice in the pan and see how much liquid comes out. When you think enough has evaporated, throw in a little olive oil and salt to taste. The meat will have the flavor of mild, sweet seafood. It’s a very special mushroom treat!

On a hunch, Bernard took us down an old logging road on our way home from Tonga Ridge. There in some 60-80 year old Douglas fir stands next to a small creek we found some wonderful Aureoboletus mirabilis Admirable Boletes, and Boletus edulis porcini. The A. minabilis was older, but a few were still edible. I’ll try to dehydrate a few, but it is recommended you cook and eat them soon after harvesting. I have never found them without some fungus gnat activity, which adds to the need to cook immediately. eat on a cracker as an appetizer with a spicy sour cream topping.

The porcini has been a pleasure to get to know this summer, both in the Southwest and in the home rage of The Cascades. This mushroom has a well-earned reputation, surly a pleasure in any occasion where you are lucky enough to find them. These gems were sprouting up along the edge of the compacted road, tucked into the rootlets of a Douglas fir with thick needle duff blanketing the area. Just the tops of a few fungi were visible, but with a little needle clump flipping we found what you see pictured below. I took mine home to the dehydrator and in cutting them up, saw mostly great flesh with little to no insect spoilage. Some of the stipes were as thick as my palm, and just as meaty. I’ll look forward to enjoying the flavorful fungi.

Hunting for mushrooms is a treasure hunt, and the joyous hours spent wandering across the wild back country of The Cascades is always a special adventure. October is a great time to get out into your local woods to find fungi fortunes- a porcini to me is worth it’s weight in fancy fine dining at the cost of a pleasant stroll through nature’s larder. Please remember to only forage wild edibles if you have been out with an expert and have been taught clearly what is safe to consume. You can contact Leafhopper Farm for opportunities to learn more about wild plants in The Puget Sound region and inquire about planned foraging expeditions.

The mushrooms are out as foraging kicks into high gear at Leafhopper Farm! Though we are unable to find chanterelles on the farm property at this time, a stone’s throw away in nearby woodlands, the golden treasures of Fall abound. On a small “fisherman’s path” around a small pond, Bernard and I came upon some welcome wild edible mushrooms. Our local species of Chanterelles is C. formosus, a strain found in The Pacific Northwest, specifically 40-60 year old stands of Douglas fir and western hemlock. A lot of our tree farms around The Cascades fit these growing conditions perfectly, so you are likely to find chanterelles in the woods if you go looking at the right time of year. When?

Fall, when it cools down, after rains begin soaking in and you can squeeze water from moss. You can spot them from logging roads, but you’ll find more wandering in a serpentine pattern through the woods where things are mossy and/or deep in hemlock/fir needles. The picture above is a perfect example with a good flush of chanterelles along the forest floor. There’s also a slope, near water, and this flush ran towards the water on the lower part of the hill. We were walking in a 50-60 year old managed woodland on state land. It was a sunny day after a few days of rain and great morning mists that did not burn off till noon. This is the time to start mushroom hunting.

While looking for chanterelles, we also found many other wonderful mushroom friends, taking time to note species verity and abundance as we foraged. There were jelly fungi, a lot of boletes, russulas, and some earth stars pictured above. In taking note of other species, we could hone our awareness as to other areas where these companion varieties were growing which might be a place chanterelles might also fruit later in the season. I have not found a lot of research on mushroom companion fungi, and would like to pay closer attention to fungi neighborhoods.

When we brought our harvest home, I took a moment to clean them (brushing off any needles or dirt still attached, then pulled them apart gently into strips for the dehydrator. They are in the machine now being preserved for our enjoyment in the coming cold months. Chanterelles are great fresh or dried in soups, as additions to any stir-fry, paired with any savory dish you please, but most enjoyed by me with wild venison and some lightly steamed kale from the garden. Good luck hunting this season, and don’t hesitate to buy wild harvested chanterelles from your local grocer- make sure they were locally harvested. Enjoy your fungi feast!

The cats are cuddled in as the weather starts getting wet and cold here at Leafhopper Farm. The yellow golden eyes of these feline friends echos the spooky Fall time as we step into October. Bright orange pumpkins abound in the garden and we’re starting to harvest them for pies and soups. The cats mind our veggie garden beds, making sure voles, shrews, mice, and rabbits keep away from the tasty nibbles.

Our two young kittens, Nikki and Nora are still very close to their mother, Lucia, and spend a lot of time shadowing her as she hunts and dawn and dusk. Muir makes sure both young cats are on their toes, pouncing and grappling them in play meant to teach defense, and sometimes encourage offensive strategies. Overall, the kittens are both gentle and loving, but Nora is a little more standoffish, she really prefers to watch from a distance and not be petted. As I continue interacting with all the cats, I know now that kittens who stay with mom are less connected to people. Where as Lucia and Muir are extremely affectionate and social, the kittens are far less interested in human connection. Nikki is very friendly, and easy to handle, but she, like her sister, maintains enough aloofness to feel much more distant than her mom or dad.

The cat’s are also enjoying the Fall harvest, having feasted many a night on pig liver, goat kidney, and other sweet meat treats. Making fresh food for all the animals at Leafhopper Farm is a challenge, but for the carnivores, fall butchering time is a gluttony of eating before the really cold weather sets in. Everyone is looking healthy and happy as they lounge through the afternoons here on the porch.

Something else to mention about cats- if you have more than one, your vet bills can add up fast, so talk with your vet about cost saving ways to make barn cats more affordable. Our biggest expense will be spaying the three ladies later this fall. At the local vet clinic, this would be too expensive, but at a spay and neuter vet nearby, where all they do is this surgery to keep population numbers down, the cost is much more affordable. I’ve already got an appointment to take all three ladies in. This will ensure our cat family stays manageable and healthy for a long time to come.

A pile of cardboard awaits placement around established under-story shrubs and young trees through the coming wet season. The bramble below is deceiving, for many other verities of native plants are hidden in the vegetation. Using the scythe, hand shears, and a pair of gloves, I took time clearing back the overgrowth of about a month and a half of good summer sun. That’s how quickly you can loose young transplants in a temperate rain forest.

Old goat manure and bedding have been piled up around the base of each plant after a good layer of cardboard is put down to keep back weeds. Allowing young transplants space to slowly spread roots is important to the long term success of the planting. If there is no room for the new roots in an established soil, it will have to put a lot of effort into establishing and thriving, energy most young plants don’t have. They will end up stunted if they survive at all.

For each of these shrubs and trees, we added mulch for keeping down weeds, as well as insulating the young trees through the winter. I enjoy layering materials to serve one another; not only the nutrients from the manure and hay going into the soil for the young plant, but also holding down the cardboard mulch to keep it from blowing away in the wind. Note that green manure is not used, this bedding is from the lower layers of a deep bedding stall which has not had a goat in it for months. Green manure will burn the plant with too much nitrogen.

Because I’m planting by hand, and doing this with a wheelbarrow and pitch fork, there is always material available and plants that need transplanting. To keep from feeling overwhelmed by the projects, I work in sections at a time, slowly establishing a planted area within a tended edge space. It’s important to not get ahead of newly established plantings, forgetting to clear them of bramble or mulching enough for summer drought. In the past two years, Leafhopper Farm has been cultivating nursery stock with real intention. At last, there is enough root stalk and young seedlings being self-generated at the farm to keep up with replanting, at least in the zone one area of the farm.

The downside of using the bedding mulch is the enthusiasm of the chickens getting into the mulch to scratch out bugs. I can’t fault the birds, and appreciate their support in spreading fertility across the landscape, but fresh mulch placement is purposeful, and the birds are unwelcome around the young transplants. Chickens love fresh greens, especially delicate young growth of a baby plant. The young crabapple above got no love from the hens, and lost half of his leaves last Spring.

The reward of establishing new spaces around the farm to improve diversity in the flora of the land continues. As Fall sets in, I look around the fresh plantings and dream of a new under-story of lush shrubs and small trees offering a verity of food, medicine, and materials for use on the farmstead and in the greater community. The change will be slow, but long term vision feeds and encourages. I am so grateful for the continued opportunity to steward land, planting new life for the future health and fertility of the earth.

We’re cooking up more great fun here at Leafhopper Farm! The apples are piling up and some sauce must be made to keep our fruit through the winter. Applesauce is a simple way to can fruit in a water-bath canning method. Apples have a high acid rating so they are safe for water canning. Not all food can be canned in this way so check before you water-bath can. The next step up for safety in canning would be a pressure cooker.

The small punpkin on the table is slated for pie- we had a great harvest of sugar pumpkins this year and that means lots of sweet treats through the Fall and into the dark lean times of Winter. Squash of all kinds are wonderful to store for a few months in a cool, dry place out of the sun. We’ll store out squash in a back bedroom and monitor it through the next few months. Some of the larger squashes will be kept to feed the goats too.

Yesturday a good friend came to visit and I had a special treat to share- crackly cap boletes from the farm! I was out hunting and found a lot of great young mushrooms for the pan. Foraging on the farm is always fun, and the mushrooms are eager to be discovered across the pasture and woodlands if you know where to look. I snagged a few and was especially taken by these two very small shrooms- also crackle caps, who were too cute to cook. I’m still fawning over them in the kitchen and will cook them up with some farm fresh eggs tonight.

The crackle caps are wonderful in a pan with a little cooking oil- I use pig lard right now, there’s a lot of it available from a Kunekune we recently butchered. Cook on medium heat, stirring continuously until soft and slightly shriveled. You want to get the water weight out of them for optimal taste, and also cook them well enough to receive the nutrients. Many mushrooms will not unlock their nutrients until heat breaks the fungus down. Add a pinch of salt to taste and there you have it, a delicious simple meal of mushrooms!

Fall is such a  busy time in the kitchen- with all the food prepping and larder filling, things are hopping! The apples will simmer overnight until the fruit is liquid and spices are added to heighten flavor. I use cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. The apples have enough sugar that I don’t add extra, but if you want yours to taste store bought- put in sugar, and a lot of it. I usually pair my applesauce with meat dishes, so it can be a little more savory. That’s also a bonus to making your own food, you get to hone in on the particular taste and method that you like. It seems so obvious, but I’ve learned so much about my own taste in cultivating my own food. Still a lot to learn, and that’s the fun happening now at Leafhopper Farm.

A wonderful neighbor friend gifted me a Muscovy duck and Kunekune pig for butchering and I got around to it this weekend here at Leafhopper Farm. The pig was culled last week, then scalded and hung for a few days for ageing. The Kunekune is a breed of pig from New Zeland and the name means “fat and round” in Maori. This pig certainly is fat and round, which means lots of fat for the freezer! Anyone need some lard? Grazing is another trait of this species -they can survive on grass alone! 1 acre of grass can sustain 5 Kunekune, which is a very good return on your investment of veggie to fat

Butchering is one of my favorite jobs on the farm. I appreciate looking at the meat, seeing the amazing result of human evolution with this animal as a food source and how domestication and forethought has magically turned grass into meat. As you can see below, there’s a lot of fat too!

The cut above is a rib rack with bacon and thick back fat. I’ll say my main cut to separate is not as smooth as I’d like. Every place a crease shows is a place more surface area invites bacteria to make a home. In the commercial meat world, because the cuts will be shipped around the country and sometimes internationally, there is high risk of contamination over time. At the farm, we process the pig and have it in the freezer much faster, sealing in freshness and avoiding defrosting situations in between handling. There’s nothing better than home grown!

It took me a few hours of good cutting to take apart half the pig. Another hour went into wrapping- a not to be rushed process involving an initial plastic layer to prevent freezer burn, followed by a layer of butcher paper for added protection and easy handling. All this meat will go into the chest freezer and the lard will wait in the cooler for friends and neighbors who are looking for nitrate free pork lard to cook with. We’ll never have to buy cooking oil again. The only parts not shown above were the grids- small bits which go into sausage. Those went into the freezer first thing.

Leafhopper Farm has been processing it’s own home grown meats for seven years now and continues to raise quality animals on certified organic grain and no-spray-non GMO pasture. We’ve raised goats, sheep, chickens, ducks, and pigs- all of which were processed on site at the farm by me, Liz Crain. I hope to continue offering one-on-one classes in butchering, along with opportunities for local residence to acquire safe, natural meat from small, local farms. Please inquire at- info@leafhopperfarm.com for more information on how you too can have clean local meat and support local farms!

Scale is something I always love thinking about around Leafhopper Farm; the size of my flock, how many square feet of garden I can irrigate off the well without going dry in late summer, or scoops of grain left before a trip to the grange should happen to re-supply. When I look at projects- especially earth works- scale determines so much when we’re dealing with big machines. In past writing, I have talked some about my ethical dilemma around using gas power on the farm, and it is still on my mind with every decision. The logic of scale demands my attestation one more, and the answer is still clear; machines save more time, wear and tear on the self, and ultimately allows longer recovery and restoration of space once transformed.

When I stand with the teeth on one of the buckets, my spirit sings at the thought of not having to lift and move these masses of material using my wheelbarrow and a shovel. The two days it will take to do this schedule of work with a machine and truck, would take me months, and with all the other projects and responsibilities on my plate- years! When the work is done, I will have a lot of reseeding in the pastures to get done- great, I didn’t have to bring in a tractor to till before I seeded. I’ll rake the driveway to get out the track grooves in my road, and hope everything is well drained as the rainy season sets in.

The eco blocks are placed to hold an embankment leveled out for our 20,000 gallon pillow tank. The rain catchment will come from two roofs of a combined square footage to collect more than enough water for the cistern. We opted to put in the large heavy blocks as additional structural integrity for both the water tank, and the as of yet built potting shed. In the picture above, the machine is working on the space where the shed will be constructed.

A drain pipe with plenty of drain rock went in against the eco-block wall to allow for any runoff rainwater a place to divert from, to avoid pooling and the softening of the foundations. As the larger scooping bucket began pulling the last of an old pile of drain rock from my materials yard, my heart soared again at recognizing the last of a large truck load of gravel that I had spent years moving with my truck bed and a shovel was gone. When materials move into place and I know that’s their final resting location and the use is full-filled, there is so much success in completion. Earthworks is a sort of instant gratification, and for a person who works her day to day in small increments of human scale, the machines make moving gravel and soil feel like magic.

The pay off for using large scale planning is large return, but it also comes with a price, in ecological disruption- from the mining of materials to make the machine, it’s fuel consumption, and hydrophilic fluid nightmare should anything go wrong, to the impact on my land and budget, machines are not ideal, but they do get the job done fast and when you are working on a scale so large, it does fit the picture. I would love to see more horse power going to work in place of machines as they once did, but there are a lot of pros and cons surrounding that argument too. Let’s just say, for the sake of the here and now, that machines make the most sense where scale demands.

The rains are returning to The Cascades, and we’re eager to get foraging in the forests for our mushroom friends. My partner Bernard took me to a very special mycological place where we’ve found some of our best mushrooms and most diverse specimens. This area is special for many reasons; from the second growth established forest, to the sheer inaccessibility, make this area our special foraging spot and it has not disappointed yet!

We drove my truck over some very rough terrain and then hiked through soaking wet forest which left us feeling very sponge like in our hike to the wonderful mushroom paradise. This feeling of being utterly soaked was exactly what fungus thrives on, and we knew our timing was right to see some splendid things. Many are still mysteries we’re trying to unfold.

Our forest is a protected place, so the trees are growing large as the forest floor continued to rejuvenate its self after the clear cut over one hundred years ago. Here there are established duff layers and uninterrupted mycelium highways which encourage a healthy and diverse fungal family by providing mature woody food, an active biological landscape with vernal pools and seasonal streams carrying moisture and nutrients throughout the woods. These active wetlands in a maturing forest are what I dream my food forest will one day look like. You can see from the picture below that larger old trees are spaced out well and actually allow light through the canopy. Natural windblown trees create open pockets to the sky throughout this forest, letting a more diverse under-story thrive. The mushrooms love it here, and so do we.

Hiking around this woodland space was challenging at times, and we often found ourselves having to scale over huge fallen trucks or cross slick rock streams. The pay off is worth the effort. And let me be clear, through we are searching for edible species, we are also looking at all the diversity in our fungi, hoping to see one or two we’ve never seen. Usually, it happens.

Many of the species we saw, like the coral mushroom above, are saprotrophic, meaning they feed on dead and decaying matter, like leaf litter or mulch piles. This ability to help compost the forest is an important part of mushroom magic. These little fungi are breaking down huge amounts of material into nutrients for the whole forest. They really are keeping everything in the woods healthy and balanced.

Animals love to eat mushrooms too, and you’ll often find sign of this predation on the mushrooms of the forest. Remember, just because the slug is munching on fungi, does not make it safe for you! I’ve said this many times, and I’ll keep at it- don’t eat anything unless you are sure- you’re only sure if a trained mycologist has shown it to you in the field and called it a safe mushroom to identify and eat. Even then, if you are unsure, don’t eat it! Assumptions about mushrooms can and will get you killed. I’m not trying to scare people away from mycology, but I will say that thinking a book will tell you what is safe and not safe to eat in the mushroom world is a crock of ****.

That said, here in The Pacific Northwest, I find that the genus Boletus is a great gateway of relatively safe mushrooms to start paying more attention to in your foraging quests. Again, go out with a mycologist before you start picking for your kitchen. I love this picture above of a young bolete with some rhizome of mycelium coming off the bottom of this specimen. Though it was probably a safe mushroom, we did not keep it because it was too young to tell which species it was, and some are not that appetizing.

None of our edible species identified were found in mass quantity, but unique shapes abound, and this Boletus edulis above was a great find with a funny shape. I did harvest and cook up this wild edible verity. There were others far too mature to collect for eating, as maggots had already taken hold of the flesh and putrefied the flavor. It is never a good idea to eat older mushroom that are starting to decompose. Often, bacteria has begun to eat the mushroom and might damage you if you ingest, just like eating any spoiled food.

A first for me on this forage was the scaly chanterelle! I found them all over the place and wondered at the fact that this seemingly abundant mushroom was not one I had ever seen before. That’s part of the magic of mushrooms; they can happen any time, any kind, and you can’t really know where. Sure, you can go back to the same spot year after year and assume you’ll see some consistency, but timing in the fungi world is everything, and moisture content also plays a huge role in when a “bloom” might occur.

Note what kind of substrate the mushrooms in each of these pictures is growing out of. Some are hanging off logs, others pop right up out of the soil. Also know that the mushrooms you see “blooming” are like the fruit of a tree. The main living part of the fungus is within the substrate and continues to grow and expand unseen.

Some kinds of fungus are so strange, it’s hard to identify them correctly. The orange jelly fungus above is my guess on the genus based on a general understanding of physical characteristics, but mushrooms often look alike, and narrowing down to a specific species is sometimes impossible without sport print analysis -usually involving a microscope and some real know how I have yet to possess, but the knowledge is there, and I will be taking more classes soon to better hone my I.D. skills.

The bolete above is easy to identify from the unique velvet textured cap. Combine that with the spore shape of the “gill” and brown striping on the stipe (stem) leads to a confidant label and another edible mushroom into the basket. This mushroom is safe to eat, and ripe for harvest, being young and untouched by bugs. I know that in my area, this genus has no dangerous lookalikes unless the spores and flesh are red or purple. That’s such a strong marked difference, which is another reason for people in The Pacific Northwest to keep a sharp eye out for boletes. Note I keep saying my region, The Pacific Northwest, etc. Please be aware that if you are living in a different part of the country or world, your local mushrooms could be completely different than mine and therefore, each bio-region should be treated like a totally new mushrooming experience. DO NOT ASSUME!

The genus Russula is very different from Boletus, being are more likely to be unpalatable and even toxic to most people. There are a few choice species which are coveted, like Russula xerampelina, known as the shrimp russula. You cannot confidently identify this mushroom by looks alone. That’s where the complications start. In the picture above, you see a very young russula emerging from the ground, coated in a slimy film. This mushroom could look very different from its current form by the time it matures. Mushrooms can change everything about themselves from birth to death, and if you catch a fungus at the wrong time and assume, you might pick a tricky mystery that could make you sick. Stick to what you have been taught by the professionals and keep away from things with dangerous lookalikes.

There’s a type of mushroom I shy away from to this day. “LBM’s” or Little Brown Mushrooms have always challenged me. My limited knowledge on smaller verities of mushroom is already limited, stack on that the color brown and you have a huge diversity of species which are mostly toxic or completely unpalatable. Because of this I neglect these shrooms, but they are still great to photograph. My hope is that as I document them, I might begin to see subtle differences between certain genus and widen my awareness of fungi. Does this mean I might start eating some? No! But learning who is who in mushrooms is a fast track to finding more yummy things to eat.

Mycology is a vast discipline of such alien beings, yet compelling to the senses, and a study of unique fauna on this earth who deserve more attention. Next time you encounter a fungus, take a picture if you can, study the shape, color, placement, substrate, and size without even touching the specimen. Avoid taking samples from the field until you are more familiar with different species and how to properly take them from the wild. Mushrooms are endless fun. and some of the most amazing flavors to experience, but again, with good instruction and awareness, this hobby is not for the impulsive. To take steps towards becoming an informed mycologist, join a mushrooming club in your area or take a class at your local college or university. In the Seattle area check out Puget Sound Mycological Society. It’s a whole world waiting to be discovered!