Mushroom pickers leaving the woods
Email
Print
Letter to Editor
Share
Updated: November 10, 2009 1:11 PM
With the arrival of the first snowfall on Mt. Arrowsmith and the cooler, wetter temperatures of winter setting in, the mushroom pickers are coming out of the Oceanside woods.
Parksville picker Flynn Sheedy said this year’s crop of wild mushrooms is beginning to deteriorate, although some mycological treasures can still be found.
“There are still pockets out there, but they’re harder to find, with more mush,” he said. It doesn’t really pay the gas to go out there so you really have to just love doing it.”
Sheedy, whose Old Growth Edibles supplies chanterelles to the private market, said this wasn’t a stellar year for deep woods production.
“It’s hasn’t been a great year for Chanterelles,” he said. “It starrted out with really promising indicators, with lots of babies, but they never really came to fruition. The second growth wasn’t really good in most places and even a lot of the babies didn’t mature. The weather played a little bit of havoc with them. It was better than two years ago though. That was really bad.”
Any year, no matter how bad, has its bright spots, adn this summer was no exception.
“There was one roadside spot that Allan (Savage) and I found a couple of months ago, where we started picking 10 feet from the truck,” he said. “We picked 20 pounds of chanterelles and from every mushroom we could still see the truck. It was just one of those little pocket areas that people have walked past or around.”
Although yellow chanterelles are the main breadwinner for mushroom pickers in the Oceanside area, Sheedy said there are several other edible species to be found, although most of those end up on the dinner plate, rather than the market.
“There are three species of chanterelles, including the yellow, but there are also white chanterelles and winter chanterelles, also known as yellowfoot,” Sheedy said. “Then there are hedgehogs, which are my favourite. At home, they don’t even make it to the dinner table. The kids and I eat them right out of the pan. There are also cauliflower mushrooms, which can grow huge and which cook up like broad egg noodles, and pines.”
Although pine mushrooms are renowned for being the most valuable to pickers — as much as $20 a pound or even more, they aren’t a big money maker for Sheedy.
“I did pines for the first time once this year,” he said. “It was gruelling, straight up Arrowsmith. There were three of us and in total we made $65 for the day. It’s not nearly as pretty a mushroom as the chanterelle, either.”
The woods also hold edible boletes, as well as lobster mushrooms.
“A lobster, can be any number of host mushroom species,” he said. “A bacteria attacks the host mushroom and changes the nature of it, changing the flesh and turning them bright red.”
Other, less benign species also thrive in the local temperate rainforest, some of them deadly poisonous. Sheedy said novice pickers should make a point of picking only those mushrooms about which they are absolutely certain.
“As I learned more about mushrooms and how deadly they can be, I realized it’s not something you want to be experimenting with,” he said.
news@pqbnews.com
