For most of the year, the oyster mushroom fungus lives inside dead deciduous trees, happily digesting the cellulose of the trunk. Then, once a year, usually in May, it reproduces by growing gilled fan-shaped growths through the bark of the tree, which send out millions of tiny spores which in turn create new fungal colonies on other dead deciduous trees.

These gilled fan-shaped growths are the oyster mushrooms themselves, and they happen to be delicious. I have eaten them a few times before, but this past weekend I gathered them for the first time from the wild.

Oyster mushrooms often grow rather high off the ground, making them somewhat difficult to gather. the search involved wandering through the forrest, looking high above our heads for small white growths on rotting trees, and then reaching up with discarded branches to knock them off. After about 3 hours, we had two standard plastic grocery bags full.

A good portion of our catch, laid out before being put into the oven for drying.

Oyster mushrooms can apparently be artificially cultivated much like the plain old button mushrooms available in grocery stores. The point for me, however, was the experience of gathering my own food from nature. It was about finding out when that short ten-or-so day window to gather the mushrooms was, then learning what they look like and whether there were any poisonous look-alikes whose seasons overlapped with the Oyster Mushrooms (thankfully, there were none). It was about learning that this year was an abysmal year for these types of mushrooms, relative to past years, and that the season almost never comes as late as early June, as it did this year. It was about preparing and storing food that I myself gathered.

Tags: Agriculture, food