Good evening, friends, Yesterday, the Cape Cod Mycological Society met in the Shawme-Crowell State Forest for quite a successful mushroom walk. We found black trumpets, which was quite a surprise for this time of the year because they’re typically a summer mushroom. Our hypothesis was that it was such a dry summer they weren’t able to grow until now (after we’ve finally had an abundance of rain), and it was better to fruit late in the fall than to miss a year of spore dispers

Late this summer, I found myself seated in a doctor’s office. Nothing was wrong with me per se (at least nothing above baseline); I was there to talk with Dr. Lindsay Chimileski about her naturopathic medicine practice, Hawthorn Holistic Health, in Hamden, CT. Lindsay is a doctor who prescribes mushrooms (not those kinds) to help patients treat lifestyle and health ailments. Lindsay first popped up on my radar when we would run into each other on the mushroom festival circuit

Good morning, friends, Last week we looked at the choice edible and highly coveted Matsutake , a mushroom that draws many foragers to the outer arm of Cape Cod every October. This week we turn our attention to the foragers’ second choice, Leccinum vulpinum . Brick Cap, Foxy Bolete, and Scaber Stalk are just a few of the common names tossed around for these robust, charismatic boletes (I chose the middle for the title because it’s provocative). A handful of folks were collecti

This week we’re opting for a treat of a mushroom, however finding them was a bit of a trick. A couple Sundays ago, the Cape Cod Mycological Society ventured out to the Cape Cod National Seashore in Wellfleet, MA to try and hunt down the coveted Matsutake (Tricholoma magnivelare).

Good morning, friends, This week’s mushroom comes to us from the sandy grasslands of Breivogel Ponds Conservation Area in Falmouth, MA. A sandy plain devoid of trees might not be an area where you’d expect to find tons of mushrooms, but the place was teeming with them after a nor’easter dropped over four inches of rain on us last week. The title of this article lists a few of the common names for these rather unsightly lumps, and Pisolithus arenarius doesn’t exactly roll off

Good morning, friends, This past Thursday, a group of amateur mycologists joined Dr. Erik Kiviat of Hudsonia Ltd. to look for mushrooms in a landscape where you might expect to find bodies instead. The New Jersey Meadowlands is an urban wetland ecosystem just a few miles west of Manhattan that serves not only as a home for roughly 300 species of birds, 50 species of fish, and an untold number of mushrooms, but also as a dump for the excesses of all the industrial (and organi