Rare July Find

Through the tough hay season, those daily dribbles of moisture kept adding up by minute increments. It’s a good thing that I was monitoring and recording the rain gauge for the citizen science CoCoRaHs project because over one week span I saw that we had an inch of rain.

One inch does not seem like a huge amount, and over the course of a week only led to puddles once during that span of time. But one inch is the magic number, or so I have been told by those fellow foragers, mushroom fanatics and park rangers. One inch is enough moisture to signal the below ground fungi that fruiting season can begin, less than an inch and the moisture isn’t enough to get through the tree canopy and onto the earth below.

Ten days after an inch of rain, I head into the forest to see if the normal fall crop of delicious Chanterelle mushrooms are popping up. I have seen them in abundance in September during those years when the end of August gives us a good storm and even found them in the month of August a couple of times. The season lasts until frosty air freezes into the ground, or dries back up in a rare dry fall which can be as early as October or be a mild season and they last through into early December.

Even though our inch of rain didn’t come all on one stormy day, I wondered if I could find the elusive mushrooms since that was practically all I could think about while waiting for the drier weather so we could finish hay season.

One particular slope in our woods seems to be the one that is the dampest during the summer months. It is west facing so the hillside is shrouded in shadows during the afternoons, it has a thick stand of Douglas fir trees about 70 to 90 years old, and the canopy is open enough to let salal, Oregon Grape, and other low level brush to grow around the bases of the trees. It’s a good spot to find Chanterelles in the fall.

On my walk I did spy several patches of coral mushrooms and a few other non-descriptive species before seeing a single clump of Chanterelles. They were really dry compared to the fall mushrooms but I was certain they were the valued species.

I harvested them and hauled them down the hill to prepare for dinner. The small handful of Chanterelles were cleaned, sliced and sauteed in butter with slivered garlic. We served them over freshly picked green beans from the garden and they were delicious. No we have to wait for more rain before the rest of the harvest arrives.

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