Carson Barnes

You might want to call the state parks after eyeballing the regulations. Some states specifically protect plants and animals, which mushrooms are not. Also you might have some good wild fruit, persimmons, grapes, pawpaws come to mind. I'm on the piedmont in Georgia, it's been a rainy summer, and the mushrooms have gone nuts. Not a lot of calories in them if you're trying to survive, but incredibly tasty and many species simply are not available for sale anywhere, the ones that are I couldn't possibly afford. My wife and I haven't bought mushrooms since 2007.

That's them all right. Clean them out well, make sure to cut off the gritty base, and they dehydrate well. This concentrates their flavor. Think risotto.

2013, 2018 and this year. Here on the piedmont in Georgia we usually stop getting rain in mid to late July for six weeks, which ends the season; in those and this year, the rain kept going, seven inches yesterday. I checked the black trumpet patches last week, nothing, and on Monday picked about four pounds, another patch will be ready later today or tomorrow. Red chanterelles also need a lot of water to come up. The boletes have gone nuts, I'm harvesting at least five different ones, and seeing some I've never seen before (a huge, nearly black capped one yesterday that keyed out not really edible, touched to the tongue it was slowly bitter); we dehydrate the boletes and the trumpets. We got some good Swedish pickling recipes for chanterelles, both smooth and cibarius (and it seems like some are intergrades), and put up fifteen quarts; rinse and they're good in salads or pasta sauces, just don't use lemon or vinegar, they'll tart it up from pickling. It makes them keep color, size, and form much better than when cooked and canned.

Lactarius indigo, I've seen them twice here in Georgia in wet years. Edible but not so great in my experience, crispy almost, not too tasty.

I spent some decades in coastal California, saw satanas many times, always sort of startling. So here's one of the subject boletes, reddish reticulate stem, red cap, brick red pores that are yellow when I cut into them, the whole thing stains blue as fast as does B. bicolor when cut. The ones from out in the forest are clean but occur here and there, the ones from under the oaks in the parking lot islands at the county park are much rougher in surface, but that's where they come up in large groups. I'm used to touching boletes to my tongue to assess bitterness; these are citrusy, lemony. The other thing shown is in the Falcon guide, which I still have, as Austroboletus. I found ONE of them a couple years ago when it was nearly as wet in summer as this year; now I have a dozen or so, they're pretty tasty but never more than one here and one there, not patches as with chanterelles or black trumpets. Oh, and there are several yellow pored species here that have a lemony taste as well; one is bitter, I think there might be five or six closely related species. It was easy in California, with zelleri, edulis, and satanas, and a half dozen other reliably identifiable (for me) species out in the hills.

And don't forget, tasty.

I just cleaned and put in the dehydrator about eight pounds of what might be these. Distinctive lemon flavor on the tongue, very firm flesh, bruise blue when cut, growing under oaks mulched with pine needles (common here in Georgia), dark red to brilliant red caps, pores rust red but when cut the interior of pores yellow. I've been eating them for some years now, the lemon flavor survives dehydration and rehydration, great with shellfish in cream sauce with pasta. We've been getting plenty rain here, usually we're dry from late July through August, and there are even still small numbers of chanterelles (smooth and cibarius, and some that look like intergrades)!