It
is ‘mushroom’ week here in my area of the Ozarks. I found the first ones on the second day of April, which is
unusual because the average time of eruption over the years has been about 10
to14 days into the month. I have
what I call an ‘indicator tree’.
It is a big ash tree on my place where the very first mushrooms appear
each spring, and over a two-week period in past years it has produced from 20
to 35 mushrooms.
I
found three there a few days back and I know that it will have more. Then about a week later there will be
mushrooms sprouting up on Truman Lake, about 30 miles north of me as the crow
flies. A week or so later there
will be mushrooms to find in north Missouri.
Folks
get excited about finding extremely large morels. I have found one about 12 inches tall with a diameter of
nearly 4 inches. BUT… I am
usually in southern Canada on some lake that first week of June, and there,
when you find morels, they AVERAGE 10 or 12 inches. I have found morels there that were 15 inches tall. I never look for them in Canada; you
just find them along the lakeshore here and there. Some years though you never see one. But when they are there, they are very
big.
I recommend that if you have never found
morel mushrooms, you begin looking for them around very large ash trees. Ash trees send out long large roots
which may curve around as far as 15-feet from the trunk. The tops of those
roots stick up out of the ground.
Mushrooms grow up all around those roots. But over the years I have found morels in cedar groves where
larger cedars grow, around big sycamores along waterways, around open areas
where May apples bloom, under dogwoods, and… well heck, I have found them in
what we jokingly refer to as a ‘lawn’ around my house up here on Lightnin’
Ridge.
They
grow where nature puts them. Along
small streams I have found them on gravel bars and on a sand bar beneath maple
trees. Those sandbar morels are
worthless because there are tiny grains of sand all throughout the indentions
and actually inside the meaty part of the mushroom, and you cannot get them out. When you fry them and bite into one,
you are chewing on grains of sand.
The
funny thing about finding morels a little early this spring is that everything
that blooms is blooming a little later than usual. But I am not just going to look for and eat mushrooms around
my wooded ridgetop in April. I
will fry up some pokeweed leaves, (only the young small ones) and some cow
pasley (parsley to educated folks) lamb’s quarter and crows foot, and make some
sweetened sassafras tea out of the roots of small sassafras saplings. If you
want to try those plants, look them up on a computer or in a book so you can
identify them and learn how to eat them.
If you get ahold of hemlock, which is similar, it can kill you!
Later
in the summer there will be raspberries, and blackberries and mulberries up
here within a hundred yards of my home and office, and then in the fall,
persimmons, pawpaws, walnuts, and more mushrooms of one type or another. I built a pond twenty-five years ago to
water ridge-top wildlife and it is full of fish and bullfrogs. All around me there are squirrels,
rabbits, quail, turkey and deer.
If the time comes that city supermarkets don’t open or they don’t have
food, the natural market allowing survival is right outside the door. Many country people can say the same
thing.
This
week I will eat fried mushrooms until I get sick of them. And I will give away a bunch as well. If you want to come and hunt them with
me you can, as long as you wear a mask and raincoat and stay 10 feet from me!
I
might mention that in May and June, when those orange day-lillies are blooming
everywhere, that if you collect a bunch of the buds before they bloom, you can
roll them in egg and flour and fry them like mushrooms. Great eating! They are known by country folks as ‘poor man’s asparagus’.
Which means, I guess, that you can fix them like you fix asparagus. I ain’t never done that… but I may try
it this summer.
I
want to caution prospective mushroom hunters that there is a large rusty-red
mushroom known as beef-steak mushrooms that are often found even earlier than
morels, and many people slice them and fry them too. They may be found as big as a basketball and even
bigger. But while some folks eat
them with no problem, others get very sick from them. I don’t know why.
But heck, there are some folks who get sick from eating too many morels,
so if you are a first time
mushroom hunter, do this… eat only a small amount of either at first. Find out if you have a mushroom
tolerant system.
Beefsteak mushroom
Beefsteak mushroom
at a distance
Some
folks is different than us normal folks, I’ve heered. I once knew an old boy at the pool hall that got sick ever’time
he ate baked ‘possums and another feller who was allergic to peekans and
walnuts!!
No comments:
Post a Comment