By Dave Layton
Readers Advisory: This overlong post is basically a travelogue to nowhere with pictures only of you-know-what. I realize too late that I created it to fulfill my desires to boast and pontificate. However that should give you readers opportunities to chuckle at or at least snort over my hubris.
2024 was a year with some mushroom extremes in my town. Dry weather created one of the few autumns when I found no honey mushrooms, knot-hole mushrooms, shrimp of the woods nor blewits and other usual treats in town. Even so, I found other favorites in such abundance that the earthliest of my earthly desires were fulfilled – right inside of Clinton Iowa – Wow! Sometimes amazing finds come from not so amazing locations. In short 2024 was a year filled with fungal abundance, great stories and first-time treats.
I chronicled travel stories of our trip to Michigan in my earlier post, Hens and Grandkids: https://faithfungi.com/?p=46, and NAMA camp in the Pacific NW in NAMA’s Mycophile:https://namyco.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Q4mycophile2024.pdf. So this post has no distant travel stories. The harvests I describe, all occurred within the Clinton city limits in 2024. I’m not writing this to brag about my mushrooming skills or about Clinton Iowa as some amazing mushroom mecca. No, anyone in the region who desires to find them and is willing to spend some time learning the basics before looking for them, can harvest these same mushrooms along with many other good ones anywhere there’s trees, grass and nearby rivers. Everywhere in Iowa has all of those. The key word is “desires.” I desire to find mushrooms and I savor the ones that are savory. So I spend a lot of my days (maybe too many) looking for them and a lot of my years getting to know where to find them.
In 2024, the first of my most earthly desires was met in April. We’d already had unseasonably warm weather going back to February. I went out looking unsuccessfully for morels in April when they were first reported in Iowa. I didn’t find any, but I was astounded to find shaggy manes (shaggies) already. Usually spring shaggies come out after the morels in late May. These arriving to early may have signaled unexpected competition from basidiomycetes affecting the morel harvest. I found very few morels in town. The April shaggies however, provided a tasty consolation prize. This strange find started a pattern of what I looked for and what I found not necessarily being the same throughout the season. The shaggies also gave me my first chance to experiment to my heart’s desire with mushrooms on our new stove’s griddle!
May brought oyster mushrooms, golden oysters and chicken of the woods (COW.) The COW were unexpected that early. May also brought a handful of rough looking local morels. I didn’t have enough morels to cook on their own, so I mixed them with the other mushrooms on pizza.
At a later date, I sauteed other leftover morels with other mushrooms in a pan. I juiced out the morels first in a pan then put the morels and their liquid in a cup to ensure that the morel flavor didn’t get lost. Then I cooked the other mushrooms in progression adding the morels and their juice back in before adding the golden oysters. The overall flavor had its own kind of symbiosis – yeah baby! My most earthly desires were fulfilled for that day.
Bonnet caps (Marasmius oreades) and a few fried chicken mushrooms (Lyophylum decastes) also emerged late in May. They went well with other mushrooms in spaghetti sauce. I found at least three large fruitings of bonnet caps in 2024 with the first batch between May and June and the last large harvest at the end of November. I’d never found them so late before. I’ve saved them both frozen and dried waiting for a summer treat on a winter day.
June 2nd saw me crawling around a park area that was being set up for camping for a big country western concert. I crawled around dozens of bonnet cap fairy rings plucking the caps from the stems and filling my bag. They’re little, so filling my bag was slow work. Volunteers laying out camp sites eyed me suspiciously, but fortunately their leader knew me and kept them from evicting me. She even tried one of the bonnet caps stating her approval. They’re good even raw but too rich to eat many that way.
At the beginning of June, the first mycorrhizal fungi were already emerging. They were Amanitas that were in the panther cap family growing with old planted fir trees and leather sheath boletes growing with white oaks. I studied the Amanitas knowing that panther caps contained psychoactive compounds along with dangerous toxins. I imagined finding the key to unlock their sorcery and hallucinogenic secrets but not for long. I soon learned on the internet that the only trips that species, A. velatipes, causes are to the bathroom to puke and have diarrhea. That’s just as well. Riding an Amanita rollercoaster isn’t nearly as interesting to me as it might have been at one time.
The leather sheath boletes are totally interesting to me, however. I’ve found them nearly every year for two decades. I learned early on that they’re very tasty and come out before other boletes, often in abundance. A 2011 scientific article noted their genetic similarity to a dangerous mushroom Paxillus involutus and questioned the safety of eating the leather sheaths. Since then I’ve researched these mushrooms, learning anything I could about chemical similarities and possible toxic reactions. Each year I’d not learn of any toxic reactions and I’d try a little of the tasty mushroom but not much, because the Paxillus poison is thought to be accumulative. I focused on the chemical involutin which I thought likely to be in leather sheath because of its brown staining reaction. However, that species isn’t listed as one containing it in a 2015 study of the chemical: https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/aem.02312-15. Likewise that article stated that the mushroom Gyrodon lividus is one of three species that contain involutin. It is considered edible but limited quantities are recommended because it has high oxidative stress levels, which may be related to involutin’s oxidative reaction in substrate decomposition. Processed meats like bacon and sausage also have high oxidative stress levels. So that mushroom might be as bad for you as bacon. That did it for me. I’m not afraid of bacon! So my desire for a tasty mushroom overruled my wariness partly because of the study and partly because I’d been looking for something bad about leather sheath for well over a decade without finding anything. Plus these were the only really good mushrooms available at that time. Maybe it shouldn’t be on my menu, but leather sheath is back – though mainly when it’s the only earthly delight waiting for me. My mind says don’t be concerned, but fears of serious poisoning are more visceral.
By the end of June a dryness was starting to really set in and mushrooms were sparce. Still, I was starting to see chanterelles, boletes (Lanmaoa) and Amanitas, mainly blushers. When I was young, I really liked blushers. More recently I still eat them once in a while, but they no longer have most earthly desire status. I was intrigued when a mushroom expert in PSMC: https://www.iowamushroom.org, our local mushroom club, said he only eats blushers that are parasitized by Hypomyces hyalinus.
He just makes sure that they stain red like blushers since they might parasitize more dangerous amanitas too. Wow I never seriously considered eating these and here in 2024 they were one of the most abundant mushrooms in a local mixed woods. It was easy to find specimens that were certainly parasitizing blushers. I soon found out that they were excellent! So in early 2024 I already found one new most earthly desire and I’d soon find another.
It was now July and Iowa sweetcorn was coming in – yay! However, one ear of sweetcorn, was “ruined” with a large fruiting of smut. Hmm, I’d never tried it, but smut is considered a delicacy in Mexico (huitlacoche.) Wow! It’s now considered a delicacy by David Layton too – two new most earthly desires in less than a month. Life was good. Then I lost my brother Charlie. Mushrooms were not on my mind, but a great abundance of chanterelles, COW, oyster mushrooms, bonnet caps and boletes would soon be out there waiting to make inroads on my saddened heart.
Dry weather is a mixed blessing for fungi. Many species don’t emerge at all, but other species do. Plus, larva which often infest mushrooms in the summer can’t survive the dryness leaving some mushrooms that do come out much less infested especially those mushrooms I just mentioned. So nearly every day I found desirable mushrooms including a large expanded bluegreen russula that would have been totally ruined by larvae any other year. I love those mushrooms even raw in a salad. They’re a mushroom that you really can’t hope for or desire until you finally taste them.
On August 1 an unexpected treat came from a friend’s text wondering what the mushrooms growing in his mulch around an old oak were. I was delighted to see several stately “princesses” (Agaricus Nanaugustus.) They’re a treat that is almost always found in town but is most often not found at all.
These mushrooms were mature, but the dry weather made them almost worm free. Sally calls them the most mushroomy mushrooms of all. Indeed they took multiple meals to whole new levels of yummy. What could be more desirable than that?
I found them again in a different part of town two days after my September birthday. Interestingly, I had found them on my birthday two years ago also. They were in a yard on the same city street as this year’s patch only six blocks away – weird. I like to imagine that they were a deliberate birthday gift.
September came in warm and dry in 24. Grifola (hen of the woods or maitake) was emerging and some was already ruined from the heat, but that didn’t keep me from finding young fresh ones too. I also began seeing a new phenomenon in three different locations. Ash stumps that had been cut close to the ground were covered with bright orange/yellow chicken of the woods (COW). These stumps were among hundreds all over town that were killed by the emerald ash-borer and were cut down several years ago. We’ll be seeing much more of those mushrooms all over the Midwest in coming years. I guess it mutes the sadness a little of losing so many ash trees.
I found some reishi in front of my doctor’s office after a routine examination in late September. I took one large mushroom leaving a sizable hole in the mulch, so I hightailed out of there hoping no one saw me damaging the landscaping. I got a call later from the receptionist saying Dr. Woods wanted to know what kind of mushroom that was. I was busted. I admitted that it’s used in Chinese herbal medicine and wondered what my American doctor would think of that. Fortunately he’s been my friend even longer than my doctor, and knows what to expect of me
September was crowned by a solitary pristine silky sheath. It was quite delicious to look at, but even a rampant microphage like myself has limits – dang it anyway. Interestingly I always found these in July or August in other years.
October 2nd was the day I hit the motherload of hens and chickens – Polyporarama! Suddenly I had thirty plus pounds of delicious polypores to deal with along with plenty of other fungi still in the fridge. I had explicit instructions that all this crazy mushroom business had to be done with before we went to Michigan in a couple weeks. I started to feel like Midas suffering under the weight of my good fortune. I imagined being smothered by fungi. In truth I was a victim of my own mindless craving to have all the great mushrooms I saw. Earthly desires, no matter how humble their origin, can take over if they have no limits. Fortunately, this time friends came to the rescue. At least twelve people enjoyed mushrooms that I harvested in October.
After a mild frost, warm moist weather returned for an extended period in November. I found only a little more Grifola which was strange, but Oysters and shaggies were abundant and pristine. Wild enoki also showed up with the oysters.
Bonnet caps and Lyophylum made a comeback as well. I might have been overwhelmed with abundance and desire again, but a friend, Jon Kuiper, showed up and took over half of the oyster harvest. A new wonder also arrived in abundance, meadow mushrooms!
In the 1970s Meadow mushrooms fruited around here in abundance but in the 80s they disappeared entirely. In recent years I began finding them again – in the summer. I saw a couple in July, but I was too occupied. One warm November in the 70s I actually saw a few emerge, but nothing like November 2024. Meadow mushrooms aren’t quite as mushroomy as the princess, but they’re right up there. They go great with all the other mushrooms which I was already up to my eyeballs in, so of course I had to harvest a couple bags full. Most went into mushroom soup and spaghetti sauce, and some made it to the freezer. We had a few of those in fish stew the other night. They were fine but not as perfect for fish stew as the missing honey mushrooms would have been.
Sally had another great find in town, whole dried shiitake in one ounce packages for $2.20 at HyVee (regular price) – delicious. All of a sudden a big meal can become a gourmet treat for anyone with a couple of extra bucks. I can’t really call those dried shiitake “most earthly” desires though, since there are several middle men between the dirt and me. That little truth belies the arrogance of my thinking that my “most earthly desires” are better than other people’s earthly desires because they don’t require human construction or intervention. They come straight out of the dirt (or wood). So what! Mushrooms are the most ephemeral of desires, literally here today and gone tomorrow. Plus, they are capable of taking over a person’s life just as badly as a boat or a swimming pool.
Finally, on this cold day, I’m able to sit in my warm house wearing my warm slippers eating fresh warm cinnamon bread that my sweet wife just baked while typing on my nice computer. I wouldn’t be thinking about desiring stupid mushrooms at all without those comforts. So I should always be filled with thanks not desire. In truth, my biggest desire is to enjoy nature, even in the middle of Clinton, where a little patch of woods that others don’t know about is a fine place to give thanks when unexpected desires get fulfilled.
