Mushroom Hunting Guide for Beginners

Frank Hyman: That’s true. But just do not think that Mother Nature is looking out for you. Mother Nature is , occupied with lots of things. And if you eat the wrong thing and die, all Mother Nature thinks is , “oh, that’s compost for the next generation of plants.” Mother Nature does not know our names. Mother Nature has no animosity towards us and is not out to protect us either. That’s not a thing.

Jessica: Welcome to the MOTHER EARTH NEWS and Friends podcast. At MOTHER EARTH NEWS for 50 years and counting, we’ve been dedicated to conserving the planet’s natural resources while helping you conserve your financial resources. In this podcast, we host conversations with experts in the fields of sustainability, homesteading, natural health, and more to share all about how you can live well wherever you are in a way that values both people and our Mother Earth.

[00:00:58] Frank Hyman and “How to Forage for Mushrooms Without Dying”

Kenny Coogan: [00:01:00] Good day, everyone. I am Kenny Coogan, and joining me is Frank Hyman, author of “How to Forage for Mushrooms Without Dying, An Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Identifying 29 Edible Wild Mushrooms”. Welcome to the podcast, Frank.

Frank Hyman: Yeah, thanks for having me, Kenny. Glad to be here.

Kenny Coogan: We’re excited to have you. We’re also excited not to die.

Frank Hyman: People seem to prefer that option, you know? I’m glad you feel the same way.

Kenny Coogan: Yeah, I was able to look through your book, and in the book you write, “There are old mushroom hunters, there are bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old and bold mushroom hunters.” So what are some key points on how to not get sick or die from eating wild mushrooms?

Frank Hyman: Yeah, well first let me say I didn’t come up with that little saying. That’s like an age- old, you know, who knows how long people have been saying that. But it sums things up pretty well, in that caution is the state of mind you want to bring to [00:02:00] this.

The mushrooms are not as dangerous as a lot of people grow up thinking they are. Let me start with that. That when I started, I was like, Oh my god, they’re all so scary, and even experts can’t tell them apart . And then my wife and I have spent a lot of time in Europe, and the grandchildren will take you out. You know, eight year olds will say, Oh yeah, we eat that one, we eat that one, we don’t eat that one.

So kids have no trouble learning them. That kind of confused me a little bit. And I thought about it and dug into it. As absurd as this sounds, that if you grew up being afraid of mushrooms, that they were so dangerous, that is an indication that you grew up in an English speaking country. I call it “Anglo- phonic- myco- phobia.” So maybe I need to put a little TR trademark sign next to it.

So apparently all over the planet, hunters and gatherers, they’re looking for food, they find the mushrooms that they can eat, and when somebody [00:03:00] dies, they take note. Okay. Yeah, we’re not gonna eat that one anymore.

Pretty much every culture had a mushroom eating attitude. Except somewhere along the line, the English got it locked into this idea that, oh, they’re so dangerous. And if you are willing to take that risk and eat mushrooms, you are a lesser human.

And so the English they were very focused on setting themselves apart. I mean, think about it. They are so focused on setting themselves apart that the English even drive on the wrong side of the road.

Kenny Coogan: Your English is impeccable. What kind of education or certification do you have regarding mushroom foraging?

Frank Hyman: I was one of the first people to take Trad Cotter’s mushroom hunter certification, because a lot of States had laws that you couldn’t buy or sell any kind of mushroom because they were afraid people were going to sell magic mushrooms.

So the states just outlawed them all, because the state troopers said, well, we don’t want to [00:04:00] bust people for magic mushrooms if we can’t tell them apart. So the legislatures of a lot of states said, Well, let’s make all mushrooms illegal to buy and sell. And Tradd Cotter kind of took that on. He started Mushroom Mountain dot com. He started the certification program. I was one of the first people to take it, to certify you to safely identify several dozen mushrooms, about 30 mushrooms, and this was valid in three states.

And I took the test and he scored it. And with a bunch of people around, he said, Frank, you were one of the first people to pass this test 100% taking it the first time. Because I’d already invested a lot of time in this. That certification now covers 8 states. All on the East Coast.

Kenny Coogan: Your book covers about 29 mushrooms. And where can you find all of those species?

Frank Hyman: It covers 29 by their common names. But puffballs, for instance, so by that count, puffballs is one kind of mushroom, but the book, I describe seven species that vary a little bit. [00:05:00] So it’s actually covers like over 80 species of mushrooms.

It has a little more reach than people might think. It also has a little more reach in the sense that it isn’t just North Carolina mushrooms or East Coast mushrooms. This book is applicable in the entire temperate region of the Northern hemisphere. So the U.S., Southern Canada, uh, most of Europe and most of Asia, all the way through to Japan.

Frank Hyman: The temperate region , not the tropics, not the Arctic, but the temperate region of the Northern Hemisphere. If you get into the tropics or you get into the Southern Hemisphere, it’s a whole ‘nother ball of wax. So this has, this book has wide application because the spores of mushrooms are lightweight and they float on the air currents from one continent to another.

And other mushrooms were brought from continent to continent during the colonial period, where ships would have, you know, animals and hay with all kinds of spores and come to another continent, and the spores would take. [00:06:00] The book has broad applicability and it’s been getting great reviews in England and Ireland.

[00:06:05] Mushroom Identification

Kenny Coogan: Now, many other mushroom guides require the reader to use spore identification. What is a spore print?

Frank Hyman: It’s a great fun thing. I definitely advocate that people explore this, but I chose the mushrooms in this book to be mushrooms that can be identified in the field easily without taking a spore print. You gather a mushroom, you know, it might be an old man of the woods (Strombilomyces floccosus) or a blewit (Clitocybe nuda) or something like that, and you, break the cap off of the stock, and you lay the cap gill side down on a piece of paper. Can be anything: newspaper or magazine or typing paper, anything, cardboard is fine. The color really doesn’t matter. Although some colors give you a better result if you’re into the art of it .

Leave the cap of the mushroom on the paper for a couple hours or overnight, and then you lift it up and you will see that the [00:07:00] cap has been dropping spores. And for each species, it’s going to be a particular color. It’ll look like an x ray image of the gill side of the cap. So it’s very beautiful. The colors are terrific.

There are some edible mushrooms or poisonous mushrooms that it’s helpful to have the spore print to get the ID correct, but that is not the case with the mushrooms in my book. If you’re out in the field, you don’t have time to do a spore print and wait around, you don’t want to gather a bunch of mushrooms and necessarily want to gather a bunch of mushrooms and bring them home, do a spore print and find out, oh, I can’t eat that one. So I wanted it to be focused on mushrooms you can identify in the field easily.

Kenny Coogan: Do all mushrooms have gills?

Frank Hyman: No, they don’t. And that’s one of the factors I use to organize the book. My book is set up very differently than most mushroom books. Most mushroom books, ID books, are, the mushrooms are arranged alphabetically. But if you’re a beginner, you don’t know where to look.

You don’t [00:08:00] know that this mushroom, your strange mushroom you’re looking at, begins with the letter B or L or R. You can look at it and go, okay. Did I find this on the ground or in a tree? And so my book is broke up into those two groups. The book is then sorted, does it have gills or does it not have gills? Because some mushrooms have little pores or other things. The book is broken up into four different types of mushrooms, either on the ground or on a tree, with gills, without gills.

So, pretty quickly, you can look up the strange mushroom and you can go to the right part of the book and flip through 5 or 6 or 7 different species, and you pretty quickly, you’re going to find what you’re looking for. Or you’re going to find it’s not in that book and, and just keep going.

Kenny Coogan: And don’t eat it.

Frank Hyman: Don’t eat it. Don’t eat it. Unless you’re 110% sure what you’ve got. So one of the things I do is I have some little rhymes. And there’s some of these I borrowed from other people and some I came up with on my own to help people learn. And one of the rhymes I came up with [00:09:00] if it’s a poisonous mushroom, if it can make you sick or it can kill you, then the eating is not worth the repeating. Especially the ones that like, will make you throw up, which is many of the poisonous ones. So the eating might be good, but the repeating is not so good.

I’ve met people who have poisoned themselves with a type of mushroom that I call “sickeners.” The ones that will sicken you, but not kill you. The ones that will kill you, I call “killers.” And so I’ve met people who have mistakenly misidentified a mushroom. It’s a sickener. They eat it. They spend like 3, 6, 12, 24 hours. You know, it’s, it’s coming out both ways. Let’s say that. And not a one of them has said, man, Frank, that was, but it was so good. I would eat that again.

So the eating is not worth the repeating if it’s a sickener. You do not want to go there. So it’s not worth the risk. If you’re 90% sure, leave it or gather them up and bring them home and do more research. Do not mess around when you’re not 100 percent [00:10:00] sure. So that’s what that’s about.

Kenny Coogan: What is the function of a mushroom gill?

Frank Hyman: So the function is that that’s one of the ways that they put their spores out in the world, and I think a good way to think about mushrooms is that out in the field, they act somewhat like plants. They are not plants, they are not animals, but in the field, they kind of act like plants in that they will put out the equivalent of pollen or seeds to create the next generation.

And that’s what the spores are, and they come out in between the gills on mushrooms that have gills. If they don’t have gills, they have tiny little pores that you might see easily. You might have to look really close, and the spores come out of those pores the way pollen or seeds would come out of a plant.

In the kitchen, though, I think it’s better to think of mushrooms as being similar to meat. So if you bring some plants home, like carrots or cauliflower, and you leave them on the counter, [00:11:00] overnight, you forget to put them away. That’s kind of okay. But if you leave meat out on the counter overnight, it’s at room temperature for a long time. Bacteria will grow on it. And if you eat it, you will probably get sick. And mushrooms are like that. When you get them home, put them in a paper bag, put them in the fridge. Don’t leave them out overnight. Don’t leave them in the backseat of a hot car all afternoon because they think of them as like, what would you do with meat once you harvest it? What would you do if this was some meat? You would want to cool it off as soon as you get home, or have a cooler in your vehicle if you’re going to be out and about for a long time. So out in the field, they function like plants. In the kitchen, they function like meat, so hope that’s helpful.

[00:11:41] Mushroom Hunting Guide: Lion’s Mane

Kenny Coogan: That’s a great analogy. Alright, so you mentioned that your book is divided into four sections of how to classify them and name them, so that’s what we’re going to spend the rest of the podcast doing. Some mushrooms are born on trees that come out of the trees. So we’re talking about mushrooms on trees without [00:12:00] gills. Can you give me like one or two super easily found mushrooms?

Frank Hyman: Yes. So one example, one of my favorites, a favorite for many mushroom hunters, is the lion’s mane mushroom. You’ll find it usually in the cool part of the year, fall, winter and spring. I’ve heard of people catching them as late as April and as early as even August. There are some odd ones that will come up in warmer parts of the year, but they’re growing on a tree, and you will know it’s a lion’s mane because it’s going to be the kind of the shape of a big softball or sort of the shape of a watermelon and the size of a watermelon .

The shape is going to be rounded like some kind of ball, round ball or oblong ball. And then it’s going to be covered with what people call hairs. I mean, not literally hair like fur. It’s more like whiskers or bristles, but they’re very soft. It’s just a coating covering the top and sides and bottom of the [00:13:00] lion’s mane. These whiskers kind of white, creamy white, mostly they’ll get a hint of tawny brown if they’ve been hit with some cold weather, but that doesn’t indicate that they’ve gone bad or they’re too old, but so easy to identify.

I harvested 10 pound lion’s mane growing at the base of a tree, which was nice and convenient. Mostly they’re growing up high. I harvested a 33 pound lion’s mane. I had to drag my 8 foot step ladder into the woods and stand on the top part of the step ladder where it’s flat, but it says, “do not stand here”, which to me is a mixed message. If you don’t want us to stay in there, why did you make it flat? But so I had to stand on top of that and then still just reach up to cut the mushroom out.

There are some mushrooms that might have some whiskers like on the bottom part, but it’s a hard mushroom. The surface is not covered with whiskers like lion’s mane. So there aren’t really lookalikes. It’s a wonderful, delicious mushroom.

And, and here’s the interesting thing about the mushrooms growing on trees is that that [00:14:00] is normally an indication that that mushroom is living on the dead heartwood of a mature tree. You’ll find them on mature trees, big trees. It may be a live tree, might be a dead tree, but it’s eating the dead part of the tree. And I call that type of a mushroom, I call those “eaters of the dead”. Just because I like the sound of that. The Latin for it is saprobe or saprobic mushrooms that they’re eating the dead.

Kenny Coogan: So you mentioned that you found a 10 and a 33 pound lion’s mane. The tree next to where you harvested, are there a bunch of babies, or do you have to go an acre away to find the next one?

Frank Hyman: It’s the latter. The next one might be 50 feet away. Probably more likely it’s 500 or 1000 feet away.

Yeah, they are few and far between, because the spores pop out. So every year when that lion’s mane comes out and those little whiskers are hanging out, the whiskers are like tubes, and spores [00:15:00] drop out of those tubes on the lion’s mane. And then the wind catches them and they are so lightweight. The wind can carry them up, high above the tree canopy, and those spores might land on some of the tree.

A useful thing to know about all of nature is that if a plant or a mushroom or an animal, if they generate hundreds and thousands of progeny, so like the spores can be in the millions, that’s an indication that the likelihood of success of any one of them is very low.

So a mushroom might put out. I’m just going to make up, you know, like, you know, 1000 or 10, 000 spores on a given day. And the likelihood is that one of those or 10 might find the right tree at the right stage of growth with the right amount of moisture that it can then germinate. That’s probably not the right word. I can’t think of it right now, but it can germinate, because it’s kind of like a plant, and work its way into that tree and find the deadwood of the [00:16:00] heartwood, which you have to be a big mature tree to have that, and then get started growing.

Any particular spore being successful, the odds are very low. It’s rare that you find a big mushroom growing on a tree and there’s another big mushroom nearby. I’m sure it has happened, but I’ve never heard anybody talking about, Oh, I found this big lion’s mane and two or three trees away, there’s another big lion. I’ve never heard of this. I’m not saying that never happens, but the likelihood is low.

What I tell folks who take my classes is that if you want to find wild mushrooms, the best thing you can do is decide, make a conscious decision. You will spend more time outdoors than you do now. However much time you spend outdoors, spend 50% more, spend a 100% more time. Find time after work, on the weekends, or on your vacation. When you’re on vacation somewhere else, find a mushroom hunter to take you out. That’s one of the best things my wife and I do.

And we meet a really nice person. And we find [00:17:00] food that’s edible and delicious. And we get great stories and have a good time. And so, spend more time outdoors and you will find mushrooms.

[00:17:07] Musroom Hunting Guide: Tree-Borne with Gills

Kenny Coogan: Alright, so a lion’s mane is a mushroom without gills that grows on trees. What is a species or two or a group of mushrooms that’s tree borne with gills?

Frank Hyman: Oh, tree borne with gills. Oh! Here’s a good one. It’s called “funeral bells”. Can you guess why? I think you were asking for edible, but let’s talk about one that’s a killer.

It grows on trees, so it’s a eater of the dead. So it’s living on a mature tree that might be alive. And so it’s eating the heartwood or it might be a dead tree. It might be a dead tree that’s standing. It might be a dead tree that has fallen over, and funeral bells will be growing on that.

So it looks like a classic mushroom. It’s got a little stalk and then it’s got a little cap on it. Little umbrella. And they’re not real big. They’re about that tall, maybe a couple inches, three inches tall and growing in clusters. Yeah, it’s very beautiful looking. [00:18:00] Funeral Bells also smells wonderful and delicious. Which, this is an interesting phenomenon in that the mushrooms that we know will make you sick or kill you, they all smell great.

Like you smell it. And if you’re like, Oh, I hope this is edible. It smells really tasty, but that smell and that, they do taste good. So I hear. And that smell and that taste is why we know that species will make you sick or kill you. So that’s a useful thing to know that do not let your appetite draw you into eating a sickener or a killer.

Kenny Coogan: Just like going to the grocery store on an empty stomach. You shouldn’t go mushroom foraging on an empty stomach.

Frank Hyman: That’s true. But just do not think that Mother Nature is looking out for you. Mother Nature is , occupied with lots of things. And if you eat the wrong thing and die, all Mother Nature thinks is , “oh, that’s [00:19:00] compost for the next generation of plants.” Mother Nature does not know our names. And is not trying to protect us. Although some surprising number of people seem to have this belief.

Mother Nature has no animosity towards us and is not out to protect us either. That’s not a thing.

Kenny Coogan: Do you have a edible tree borne mushroom with gills that comes to mind?

Frank Hyman: So oyster mushrooms are much more common than a lot of other mushrooms. It’s often one of the first mushrooms that a beginner learns. And for several good reasons.

Oyster mushrooms can grow on a tree in any season. I’ve found them in the winter, spring, summer, and fall. Winter is the best season for a couple of reasons. One, with the tree leaves gone, you can see them more easily on the trees. Winter is a good season for finding oyster mushrooms because the weather is cool and they grow more slowly, so they are in their prime for harvesting for a longer period. Where oysters in the summertime are growing really fast, zoom, and so if you catch them, they might be past their prime.

[00:20:00] Also in the wintertime, the oysters are not going to have bugs in them. And some people, for some reason, seem concerned about having bugs in their mushroom. But I don’t worry about it too much. I think bugs are the next wave of foraging. And so you get oyster mushrooms or some other mushroom and there’s tiny little bugs in there. Some people fuss about getting them out of there. And I’m like, nah, I just don’t even worry. Just fry them up, man. That’s just more protein, it’s all good.

Kenny Coogan: And for listeners who want to learn more about eating insects, they can head over to MOTHER EARTH NEWS, where I interviewed a chef about edible insects.

[00:20:35] Mushroom Hunting Guide: Chicken of the Woods

Frank Hyman: Amen.

I can give you an edible one, another edible one that does not have gills, that is like a favorite.

It’s called Chicken of the Woods, and it so it’s often, so it’s growing on a tree. It looks like a big pizza has been shoved into the side of the tree and it’s sticking out horizontally, you know, like a pizza sticking out horizontally from the tree. The edges of it even look like the [00:21:00] crust of a pizza.

They’re a little wider and it’s pale colored, like the crust. And the toppings area of this pizza can be bright orange, almost like a tomato sauce topping. Sometimes it’s more of like a salmon pink color, but a very distinct mushroom and no gills underneath, but thousands of little pores, a little bit bigger than the pores on your nose, and all the spores drop out of that.

It tastes like mushroom, average mushroom, but it has the texture. Once you cook it, it has the texture of white meat chicken. When I sauté them up, I tear them up, hand shred them into bite sized pieces so it looks like the chicken you’d use in like a chicken salad recipe. I saute it up for 15 or 20 minutes because you want to cook it long enough because maybe 3% of people might be sensitive, get a little indigestion from chicken of the woods. And some of that I think is it’s not cooked long enough.

So you cook the chicken in [00:22:00] the woods for 15 minutes and sauté it in butter, and then I add some chicken stock and it absorbs that flavor. And then you make your dish. Or I often make chicken salad . I let it cool. Use those things you’d use in a chicken salad recipe: Mayonnaise, onions, peppers, whatever, salt and pepper, and then put it in a little container so that I can put it in the fridge and then give it away to people. Like, oh, here, here’s some chicken salad and people like, oh my God, Frank, that is just like chicken.

So that’s another great one off on a tree. Finding ’em on trees is sometimes easier than finding ’em on the ground, ’cause the colors are so bright, the mushroom is so much bigger, generally if it’s growing on a tree, and so it’s much more visible. A lot of mushrooms that grow on the ground, they might be covered up by the leaves or they might be a dull color that doesn’t grab you. So learning the ones that grow on trees is definitely a good way to begin.

Kenny Coogan: All right. Well, speaking of the groundlings, we’re gonna be talking about groundlings without gills. Because they have a very distinctive ID [00:23:00] features, including pores, spines, ridges, honeycombs, or smooth surfaces under their caps. And those mushrooms, with and without gills, are what we’re going to be talking about right after we take a quick break to learn how listeners can get Frank’s book, How to Forage for Mushrooms Without Dying.

[00:23:19] How to Order “How to Forage for Mushrooms Without Dying”

Jessica: With the surging interest in foraging for mushrooms, those new to the art need a reliable guide to distinguishing the safe fungi from the toxic. Frank Hyman to the rescue.

How to Forage for Mushrooms Without Dying is the book for anyone who walks in the woods and would like to learn how to identify just the 29 edible mushrooms they’re likely to come across.

In it, Hyman offers his expert mushroom foraging advice, distilling down the most important information for the reader in colorful, folksy language that’s easy to remember when in the field.

Want an easy way to determine if a mushroom is a [00:24:00] delicious morel or a toxic false morel? Slice it in half. If it’s hollow, you can swallow, Hyman says.

With Hyman’s expert advice and easy to follow guidelines, readers will be confident in identifying which mushrooms they can safely eat, and which ones they should definitely avoid.

Order How to Forage for Mushrooms Without Dying from our Mother Earth News store at Store.MotherEarthNews.com. You can even get a sneak preview of the book there. Item number 11313.

[00:24:30] Mushroom Foraging for Puffballs

Kenny Coogan: Welcome back, Frank.

We’re going to be talking about, mushrooms on the ground. And let’s start with mushrooms on the ground without gills. What’s the top, one to find?

Frank Hyman: So here’s probably the first one, really, that people learn, and they probably grew up with this mushroom, not even thinking about it as edible, but the puffball mushroom.

So everybody probably grew up picking puffball [00:25:00] mushrooms so that the dust comes out, for the fun of it. One of my theories is that human children and puffball mushrooms co- evolved. The puffball mushrooms were depending on human children to help get their spores spread widely. Yes, that’s my theory. You know, if somebody wants to prove me wrong, I challenge them to do that.

Kenny Coogan: But they’re edible.

Frank Hyman: Yes, this is an edible mushroom but not at the stage where you’ve got all the dust. Usually you’re getting an edible mushroom when it’s mature, but that’s not the case with puffballs. When you can kick it and there’s all this dust, that’s mature and you don’t want it.

You want to eat a puffball mushroom when it is immature. So it is just come out of the ground. It might be the size of a golf ball. It might be the size of a watermelon. It might weigh like a couple of ounces. It might weigh 30 pounds. So the size can vary a lot, but the exterior is rounded. And you’ll know that it’s ready to eat if you cut it in [00:26:00] half. And on the inside, this is all the ID information you need, on the inside. If it looks entirely like tofu, just white tofu from stem to stern, you know, or it looks like kind of like a marshmallow, just white, white, white, smooth and clean like that, then it’s edible.

You can slice it up, sauté it in butter, olive oil, whatever you want. I like bacon fat, that’s me, you know. It’s delicious and the texture is great. You cook it long enough and the exterior gets a little crispy. And the interior is kind of gooey. So the texture can be really delightful.

The flavor is very mild. So you can spice it up any way you want to: Hot sauce or cook it with some garlic, cheese, and people love that. So that’s like probably the first mushroom that a lot of novices learn because they recognize it from childhood. They just didn’t know you could eat it.

If it’s colors in there, it means it’s too old and mushy. And if you see that cartoon outline of a mushroom in there, that means it’s in the [00:27:00] Amanita family, which those are often killers. And the exterior vaguely looks like a puffball, but not really. But some people, you know, get a little too excited and need to be aware that they can make a mistake like that.

So, if it’s pure white, like tofu or marshmallow, it’s an immature puffball, you can eat it. That’s all you need to know, literally. There’s no confusion beyond that.

[00:27:25] Mushroom Foraging for Chanterelles

Kenny Coogan: All right, so the last group of edible mushrooms we’re going to talk about are the ones with gills that grow on the ground. And what do you think, maybe the top one that somebody would be able to find is?

Frank Hyman: So the one people are probably most excited about on the ground would be a chanterelle. You look under the cap, and there are these lines that kind of look like gills, but they’re technically not gills .

It’s going to be somewhat yellow. It might be like yellow beige. It might be a little bit yellow towards the orange, or it may just be straight up yellow. [00:28:00] Which isn’t enough information to tell you you’ve got a chanterelle, but that’s how you start. And then you slice it in half. And if the yellow is just a coating on the outside and the interior is all white, that’s indication that you probably have a chanterelle.

Other indication that’s important is that you look underneath the cap and it looks like gills, but these gills are not parallel. Most gilled mushrooms, the gills are parallel like railroad tracks. They never meet. Chanterelles are distinct in that the quote unquote gills will cross and make Xs and Vs and Ys, and it’ll be very obvious.

If it’s some version of yellow on the outside, it’s solid white on the inside, and it has gills that cross over, you have a chanterelle. That’s all the information you need to know about it.

It’s a favorite mushroom that has a long season in the East coast from May to September. So warm and rainy is what it likes. It grows [00:29:00] around or under trees. Chanterelles are not Eaters of the Dead. The Latin is Mycorrhiza. What I call them is they are the “marrying kind”. The chanterelle mushroom underground is going to collaborate with the tree roots. The roots get a benefit for the mushroom. The mushroom gets a benefit from the tree. It’s a favorite mushroom, long season, very distinctive look. So it’s bright. It’s in the yellow. So you can see it easily from a distance, even in the woods.

Restaurants buy tons and tons of chanterelles.

[00:29:31] Mushroom Foraging and Harvesting Etiquette

Kenny Coogan: So the last question for today is: In your book, you mentioned harvesting in a sustainable manner.

Frank Hyman: Yes.

Kenny Coogan: Can you talk a little bit about etiquette when you’re out in the field foraging?

Frank Hyman: Yes. You’re out in the field, you find some mushrooms. So let’s say chanterelles. And you will notice that likely they are in three stages of growth. Some will be like [says “tiny” in a Southern accent]. And that’s a Southern word for very tiny. And then [00:30:00] some are good size for harvesting and they’re mature and they’re solid and they’re not eat up with bugs.

And in the third stage, they will be, you know, pretty big and they’re kind of spreading out more and they’re crumbly. You pick one up and pieces of it break off because there’s insects in it and it’s just old and kind of crumbly. So I have been with mushroom hunters who hoover up everything. So the tiny ones, the good mature ones, and then the over mature, they just take everything. I’m kind of like, you know, how about if we leave some of the tiny ones for whoever comes tomorrow or the next day or the next day after that, and also allow them more opportunities to put out spores for the next generation. And the crumbly ones, you’re going to get them home and try to clean them and it’s going to be a mess and you end up not eating them. Let’s just let the bugs have them and let them keep putting out spores because they may not be done putting out spores. So let’s just harvest the ones that are at a good stage of growth and [00:31:00] edibility , who’ve already put out a bunch of spores. You’re not going to curtail the population that way.

So just being a little bit judicious and aware of the foragers coming behind you, the next day or the coming week. Let the tiny ones grow up to be harvest size for them. I think is one of the best things a forager can do in terms of being aware of sustainability, but also just the etiquette of thinking about other foragers and thinking about those insects. They have to eat too, you know.

Kenny Coogan: That’s right. All right. Thank you so much, Frank, for joining our podcast today. We learned a lot. And we encourage everyone to think about mushrooms and maybe befriend a forager of mushrooms and start your own journey.

Frank Hyman: Thank you so much, Kenny.

[00:31:41] Podcast Credits

Jessica: Thanks for joining us for this episode of MOTHER EARTH NEWS and Friends. To listen to more podcasts and get connected on our social media, visit MotherEarthNews. com forward slash podcast. You can also email us at podcast@ogdenpubs.Com with any questions [00:32:00] or suggestions. Our podcast production team includes Jessica Anderson, Kenny Coogan, John Moore, Carla Tilghman, and Alyssa Warner.

Music for this episode is Hustle by Kevin MacLeod. The MOTHER EARTH NEWS and Friends podcast is a production of Ogden Publications.

Until next time, don’t forget to love your mother.

About Frank Hyman

Frank Hyman is a mushroom forager and teacher who writing has appeared in national publications, including MOTHER EARTH NEWS. He’s also the author of the popular mushroom ID book How to Forage for Mushrooms Without Dying: An Absolute Beginner’s Guide. Follow his mushroom adventures on Instagram @MushroomsWithoutDying.

Get Frank Hyman’s Mushroom Hunting Guide

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Learn More About Mushroom Foraging & Cultivation

• What are Cordyceps Mushrooms?
• How to Grow Mushrooms: Liquid Culture Recipe
• Where to Find Truffles – And Why Are They So Expensive?

 Our Podcast Team

Jessica Anderson, Kenny Coogan, John Moore, Carla Tilghman, and Alyssa Warner
Music: “Hustle” by Kevin MacLeod

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The Mother Earth News and Friends Podcasts are a production of Ogden Publications.

Ogden Publications strives to inspire “can-do communities,” which may have different locations, backgrounds, beliefs, and ideals. The viewpoints and lifestyles expressed within Ogden Publications articles are not necessarily shared by the editorial staff or policies but represent the authors’ unique experiences.