This year’s mushroom season turned out to be surprisingly long. November has come, but people are still bringing basketfuls of mushrooms from the woods, mostly bay boletes, slippery jacks and honey fungi. The ceps’ season has already ended, though some lucky “hunters” are still able to find a few of these. Some are even bringing home a few chanterelles which are, in fact, summer mushrooms. Experts explain such a bountiful harvest with this year’s fortunate combination of warm weather and abundant rain, the two most important preconditions of mushroom growth.
“Mushrooms like heat and moisture,” says Oksana, a mushroom hunter with decades-long experience. “Besides, they like quiet places.” She deftly examines baskets and buckets of beginning mushroom hunters, throwing out not only suspicious mushrooms, but edible ones, too, if they are too old or look second-rate. Oksana herself has been coming to the woods every fall for the past 30 years. She likes mushrooms and says that she not only dries, marinates and fries them, but also makes mushroom burgers and stuffs cabbage leaves with mushrooms. “Mushrooms will be good until the first frost hits, afterwards they will be of no use, because they will freeze and grow watery,” she explains.
“Mushroom hunting” at the end of the season has a number of advantages.
Although the harvest is likely to be poor, the hunter who came late gets a quiet environment and an opportunity to enjoy one’s very personal fall.
The woods at this time are not crowded and surprisingly quiet. Mushroom hunters are mostly absent, while in the high season, people with buckets and baskets could be found at every turn, and dozens of cars were parked along roads cutting through forests.
Mushrooms are less numerous, too, than they were in the early fall, and this circumstance calms mushroom hunters themselves, transforming their “quiet hunting” into a kind of meditative practice.
An old rule is activated then, stating that mushrooms are found exactly at the moment when a hunter has given up and decided to just enjoy walking through the woods.
Experienced mushroom hunters teach that most importantly, one should thank the forest for every mushroom one finds, without any further reasoning, just say one’s sincere thanks in a low voice, or whisper it, or even say it to oneself. The forest likes appreciative guests.
