Mushroom Picking

It’s nearing the end of September and the start of mushroom season, more wet weather is forecast and in this part of the country, with our rainy prevailing winds, we have some of the best fields and woods for picking funghi you could hope to find anywhere.

Mushroom picking is traditionally a social activity, it’s a good way of getting a group of friends together outdoors and focused on something other than work or home life, you’ll probably see something interesting and will definitely all come home with stories and memories, be warned though it will bring out the competitive nature in some!

Before you set out make sure you brush up on the basics and from different sources, take guide books out with you too. I always take Collins ‘food for free’ and an identification book by the author Josephine Bacon, but there are many other good ones to choose from, there are also some very reliable apps available now and many websites to look at, wildfood uk have one of the simplest and concise guides.

If you’ve identified a good place to go don’t rush out immediately, make sure you’ve got permission, ask the landowner or farmer and check which fields and woods you can go in, if you ask where the best fields are they might just tell you, if they don’t want them for themselves that is!

Also make sure you have something suitable to put your funghi in, a basket or similar, I’ve learnt the hard way that if you stuff them in your pockets or an old carrier bag out of the car boot they’ll just end up squished.

Here are a few tips I’ve learnt over the years:

1. Pull them out by the stem, then you get the whole mushroom and if you’re unsure about what they are you can use the stem to ID them later.
2. Check for worm holes, if you’ve got a knife cut them in half to check in the middle.
3. If there’s quite a big crop leave some, pick alternate ones so somebody, (or something), else can have some for dinner.
4. If you’re at all unsure about what it is, leave it be.
5. Let’s hope it’s a good season for mushrooms, if you get out yourself why not post some pictures of what you’ve found, you don’t have to tell us where though!

Mushroom Picking, by C Richard Miles

We all picked mushrooms galore
On that mid-September stroll
From Hebden back to Grassington
Past the old sanatorium
Itself as mouldy as the fungal fare
We children gathered there.

Summer’s last sun glimmered
In the remaindered rotten windows
Frames streaked russet red with rust
Hung aslant and grimed with dust
Flapping silent watchers of our 
Youthful quest for more.

We had harvested a few on the outward leg
But plastic carrier bag-less
We could only hold a handful
As we boldly gambolled
Like incongruous autumn lambs
In yellowing meadowgrass.

But, through some canny enterprise, 
The single village shop supplied
Brown-paper bags blagged by mother
On some pretence or other
From the quizzical shopkeeper-fellow
For ice-creams, I seem to remember.

Then, like miniature marauders, 
We invaded the sward as
If to steal the moon-round treasure
Which the moist mellow weather
Had hidden: silver-white moidores
In the green below brown-brackened moors.

Laden with the grey-gilled offerings, back
We trekked to the daytripper-crammed car park
Weighted down with our gains: sheer greed
Excited by our rapacious raid
On nature’s boundless bounty
That the hay meadows had granted.

The cottage-hospital is demolished, in its place
A swanky new red-brick estate
Homes rich off-comed-uns
Some from as far as London
But Wharfedale’s fertile fields will
Yield autumn mushrooms still.

A B-H

(Sep 2024)