Mushrooms And More............

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Yooper

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We are big time foragers and this fall has a pretty good year for mushrooms. I normally get puffballs and oyster mushrooms, but this year we also hit the mother lode in comb-tooth mushrooms!

We pick fruit for wine, harvest wild rice, find rosehips, and so on. What else do you forage for?
 
When I was young we used to go out into the woods and pick bucket after bucket of choke-cherries. There were dozens and dozens of large choke-cherry bushes out in this big clearing. We still do from time to time, but since we are keto-eaters we usually just make up some jam and then give most of it away.
 
I enjoy foraging. When I lived in the more desert area of Arizona I was very surprised at all the plants I could find to eat. Now since we moved to this much higher elevation (7500 ft) I have to learn all the different edible plants in this area. I did find some loaded current bushes earlier and we have many pinon pines here. I have purchased several books on edible plants for this area. I'll hopefully get into more next spring.
 
I have Foraged for most of my Life, and for several Years it's how I supplemented the Family Dinner Table. My Favorite Green is Stinging Nettles, but I also like Day Lilly Flower Buds, Milk Weed Shoots, Cat Tail Shoots, and Lambs Quarters. When we have a good Crop of Acorns, I like to gather some, and Leach the Tannin out to make Ash Cakes. Of course there are also the Raspberries, Strawberries, and Dew Berries. I have Pounded Cat Tail Root in a little Water to collect the Flour like Starch, but it is Labor intensive with little return. I also like to collect Medicinal Plants, and Plants to make Tea.
 
Where I used to live we had a lot of banana yucca in the area. The flowers are big and juicy, very close to iceberg lettuce. The yucca flowers make a great salad. The fruits look just like small bananas but I never had the opportunity to get any that were ripe.
 
For years we would go down the slews at the river to collect Mayhaw berries to make jellies. Also have acorns, cattails, blackberries, dewberries, pears, pecans and prickly pear cactus. I wish I was more familiar with mushrooms in our area, but we have so many look alikes that I feel like I would need to learn with someone with first hand knowledge.
 
Been getting into a bit more foraging here too. We tried and liked pear tree fruits and also get field mushrooms growing in our paddocks which I am convincing DH to try as I used to pick and eat these as a child. Also did some reading up and we have plantain and stinging nettles so will have to investigate those further too and more plants. Being in Australia we have a lot of bush tucker that the aborigines have eaten for centuries so will have to investigate and learn more there too.
 
Black berries,black choke cherries, muscadines,Indian/sand plums,crab apples,blueberry.
Hickey nuts,black walnuts, a few pine nuts, but they were small.
Poke weed was every where, but we grew our own greens.
Had a peach,pear,muscadine vine & fig tree.
A big garden so we did very little foraging.
 
don’t have to go far for rooms as the old stumps around the place grow huge bunches of hen of the woods and what I don’t use I give to a friend down the road. around here in the spring its morel hunting and I start the year off foraging wild garlic and ramps to dry to make seasoning’s then dandelion greens and thistle havt lots of books n foraging plus what my mom taught me growing up.if everything breaks down I and my family wont go hungry
 
When I was a kid...we picked wild raspberries in the woods. Persimmons too.
NH would go out with his family and they'd gather paper grocery bags full of morels in north central Michigan.
Pecans are the thing to forage for here, before the squirrels get them. Mustang grapes too.
 
For mushrooms we get chaga, oyster, puff balls, and chicken of the woods. We also get wild ginger, acorns to make flour, berries but thats a given, wild hopps, the list goes on. New England is a treasure chest of wild edible plants. One of my favorite things to eat is the lilly flower, so good!
 
Redbeard said:
For mushrooms we get chaga, oyster, puff balls, and chicken of the woods. We also get wild ginger, acorns to make flour, berries but thats a given, wild hopps, the list goes on. New England is a treasure chest of wild edible plants. One of my favorite things to eat is the lilly flower, so good!
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Meat King, I mean Red Beard, can you tell us how how you prepare Puff balls.
 
Redbeard said:
For mushrooms we get chaga, oyster, puff balls, and chicken of the woods. We also get wild ginger, acorns to make flour, berries but thats a given, wild hopps, the list goes on. New England is a treasure chest of wild edible plants. One of my favorite things to eat is the lilly flower, so good!
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Redbeard you're Lucky to have Chaga. If I could have only one Herbal Medicinal it would be Chaga Fungus, it is Antimicrobial, Antibacterial, Antiviral, and Antifungal. It is possibly one of the best all round Medicinal Herbs used.
 
camo2460 said:
Redbeard you're Lucky to have Chaga. If I could have only one Herbal Medicinal it would be Chaga Fungus, it is Antimicrobial, Antibacterial, Antiviral, and Antifungal. It is possibly one of the best all round Medicinal Herbs used.
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Aka the tinder fungus. I have piles of it. Chaga is everywhere here and yes i do feel lucky. I use it alot. I also sell it for 15 a pound to the people here who don't want to get off their butts and get it them selves. If you ever have any interest pm me and i will give you a better price than that. I can get more than anyone will ever need.
 
Redbeard said:
Aka the tinder fungus. I have piles of it. Chaga is everywhere here and yes i do feel lucky. I use it alot. I also sell it for 15 a pound to the people here who don't want to get off their butts and get it them selves. If you ever have any interest pm me and i will give you a better price than that. I can get more than anyone will ever need.
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You must have plenty of birch trees. There are tinder fungi that are not chaga.

How do you prepare yours for use. Up here most make a tea but I am not keen on the flavour
 
Are there books published for specific geo areas for what is safe to forage? I love mushrooms of all kinds. I can't quite convince myself it's safe to go looking in the woods because if I'm wrong it wouldn't be pleasant.
 
BugoutBob said:
You must have plenty of birch trees. There are tinder fungi that are not chaga.

How do you prepare yours for use. Up here most make a tea but I am not keen on the flavour
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Triple extraction method. Each method releases good things the other ways don't. Alcohol based tincture, boil method, and 120 degree max steep. Also a 4th were i add ground chaga to foods. People argue over the best way to do it but the scientific facts prove each way releases a different goodness so i do them all. Chaga shouldn't taste like much, usually when there is an off taste it is because the chaga was harvested from a dead tree and that produces and off taste. But that's not always the law..
 
Out here on the Pacific coastal area there is a lot of great forage foods, as a young boy I learned a great deal about what was good and what to avoid, blue huckleberries, red huckleberries, thimble berries, ground creeper blackberries, salal berries, salmon berries and blue elderberries, I knew a few edible mushrooms but for the most part avoided eating them as there are a few that can fool a person into thinking they are edible, the death angel can be tricky and has poisoned a number of people every year, so generally I leave mushrooms alone, if I got the urge to pick some then I would go to mushroom picking class, ran by an expert.
 
backlash said:
Yea, that's why there is a new mushroom farm being built here.
30 acres under cover just for mushrooms.
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I didn't think they figured out a way to replicate morel growth.

We love to go morel hunting in the spring. DH and I found a new spot by chance a few years ago that is awesome! Typically morel season can be hit or miss, but since we found this new spot we've always gotten plenty. We've even been known to play hooky from work to go fungus hunting.:D One year I had to sell about 40 pounds b/c I didn't have the time to process them and it was much more fun finding them than processing them. I let them go too long one year and lost almost a full 5 gallon bucket full. I was so bummed.....so I figured it was much better to sell than to let them go to waste......and this was after we gave a bunch to friends and family. We have dehydrated them and frozen them for longevity but neither works very well. Fresh morels are just impeccable.
 
Patchouli said:
Good mushrooming spots are like good fishing spots...
Keep it secret, keep it safe!
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You got that right! We have the really good patches marked in our GPS. We won't be sharing that with anyone! DH wanted to bring his dad with us one year. Don't get me wrong.....I love FIL.....but he can have loose lips after a few beers.:mugbump: I told him if FIL was going, we'd go to one of our old spots.

We try to find a virgin spot every year. Usually they don't pan out.....but we never would have found our honey hole had we not tried something new.
 
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