Were they local to you ?
Yep. Two fields away from the parents’ house.
Was out at home this evening to watch a Junior game. Knew last few days as echt mushroom weather, humid and heavy following wet – but late June/early July generally considered too early. But had a walk around – and lo…
Found as much again black and maggoty. They have been coming up in ones and twos over the last week. Ground remains hard, despite quite a bit of rain. Wanting to flush but not able to flush.
Just had a look at Kilkenny weather forecast for next few weeks. Probably a good chance of a mushroom flush around July 18/19.
1 Like
Just had them on toast with a glass of amontillado. Nothing better – and few combinations so delicious.
We won the Junior match as well.
1 Like
The whole field is the same – a field in which the father, now 77, tells me a mushroom was never seen before.
6 Likes
Not long grazed you see
Exactly.
For the last 12 years, the mushrooms have all been in fields on the other side of the road. But I just had a gut feeling this morning and went and had a look in two fields on the other side – for the first time.in about 30 years.
1 Like
Fantastic work. That’s what it takes to be a top, top mycophile.
2 Likes
Thanks!
For the last 12 years, we have been getting loads of mushrooms in eight fields – two banks, each four fields deep – on one side of the road. They usually appear in only two of the eight fields in a given year – bar blank years such as 2012 and 2014. I noticed in the summer of 2018 that mushrooms were found in the fourth deep fields for the first time. The following three years, the mushrooms have been mainly in fields back out towards the roadside.
So a sort of pattern was there. The next ‘logical’ move was for them to be found across the road. Hence my gut feeling this morning. There were a nice few mushrooms in the immediate roadside field on the other side, which is where we usually got them back in the 1970s into the 1980s. But I discovered that an inside field, a lovely bit of old pasture, is covered with mushrooms. As you will know, you cannot beat the feeling of walking into such a field. I have never seen a bigger flush of mushrooms in a field. Equaled only by a couple of fields in 2010, 2011, 2013 and 2018.
The father was flummoxed. Said that he had never before seen, in his 77 years, so much as a single mushroom in this field.
Mycophilia indeed…
5 Likes
Could you have taken some mushrooms from the field across the road to the barren field, and, from mushrooms where the gills are starting to show/cap has torn away, scrape the gills so the spores spread?
Something as simple as casting the spores under right conditions not help innoculate a mycelium?
Now @Malarkey I’ve a question. Do you pull your mushrooms or slice them off with a knife in the ground? There’s an aul boy around these parts would fall out with you if he heard that you were “pulling” mushrooms. Not that it’ll make any difference to him anymore, his days of mushroom hunting are in the distant past, but he’s adamant
That slug needs stomping while you’re at it. Rotten things
Your man is spot on, for my money. I use a small knife and snick them. Much tidier.
There is also the point that leaving ‘debris’ in the field means it is easier to know whether new mushrooms have come up. Because debris marked spots I had been over on Sunday, I was able to see yesterday that fresh mushrooms had appeared.
3 Likes
No knowledge, really, on that subject. My understanding is that people tried to domesticate wild mushrooms for centuries and were unable to do so, because wild mushrooms are so mysterious.
I do not think – round my way, at least – there is any such thing as a barren field for mushrooms. Just a dormant one. I would be fairly sure the field in which I was picking the last two days has not had mushrooms in it for a hundred years. The father says his father never mentioned it as a place to go for them. My grandfather was born in 1916.
There is a field above this one. There were cows and sucklers in it on Sunday. Gone now. Found out yesterday that field is also alive with mushrooms. Remarkable sight.
We have often thrown excess wild mushrooms out the back on a big stretch of lawn. Never brought mushrooms around there. So…
Was unusual summer weather??
Yes. Because of drought. The ground in fields was like rock.
Once serious rainfall arrived, softening the ground, the mushrooms were rightly in business, because nighttime temperatures had stayed high.
But it is a funny game. The mushrooms picked yesterday tasted far better, overall, than the ones picked on Sunday. Why? Because the ones picked Sunday – or quite a few of them, any rate – had been rained on a lot, diluting their flavour. Yesterday, I picked the ones I definitely knew had come up overnight into a separate bucket.
2 Likes
I spent a fruitless 2 hours this morning in what would have been in my youth a gauranteed bonanza area for mushrooms. Tried several old grazing grounds that I’m pretty sure wouldn’t have been subjuct to slurry not fertilizer in many a year. Not some much as a mushroom to be seen. The hunt continues