A variety of fungi gathered by seminar participates are divided into groups by their characteristics Saturday morning at Rainbow Falls State Park. A new mycological society aims to inform curious mushroom eaters about what is safe — and deadly — in the autumn woods.
When George Jensen of Pe Ell was a kid, he didn’t like the taste of mushrooms and had very little interest in learning about them.
“My dad was a logger and he was really into mushroom picking. He knew all the mushrooms,” said Jensen. “Now I wish I had paid more attention when I was little.”
Today, Jensen enjoys eating mushrooms; his taste buds have grown up. Saturday morning he attended the first fungi foray of the new nonprofit mycological society in Lewis County, hoping to gain some of that knowledge and understanding about mushrooms he missed learning from his father years ago.
Sarah Roebas of Tenino also attended the mushroom hunting and identification workshop with her dog Count Caron. She enjoyed the outing.
“No use leaving him at home on a beautiful day like this,” she said. “This (workshop) has just opened my eyes. Mushrooms are something that I would just normally walk right on by.”
Anyone interested in gathering wild mushrooms to eat, needs to learn from an expert, says Gene Butler, Lewis County’s local mycological expert, who led the hands-on mushroom hunting and identification workshop held in Rainbow Falls State Park.
“You can get into a lot of trouble if you just make assumptions (about mushrooms),” Butler, of Chehalis, said. “You first need to learn the different characteristics so you can gain an appreciation for what those characteristics look like.”
The workshop was a gathering of 25 mushroom enthusiasts, from experts to “rank amateurs,” as attendee Sarah Roebas of Tenino described herself.
In this workshop — as in upcoming workshops — Butler hopes to pass on his knowledge and expertise to help educate the local Lewis County fungi foraging public.
Butler is leading the way and the WSU Lewis County Extension Office is backing the effort. Butler and Debbie Burris of the extension office hope to train a number of new mycologists. Currently, Butler is the only expert available in the area.
“People bring mushrooms in to the extension office for us to identify all the time,” said Burris. “If Gene’s not available, we don’t have the expertise to help them.”
The extension office has received a Sustainable Agriculture Research Grant that has enabled them to fund mushroom workshops, field trips and to start a new mycological society in Lewis County.
“It’s a ‘train the trainer’ program,” Burris said. “The idea is that once someone is trained in mushroom identification, they can go out and train others. In this county, it’s really important for us to have people we can rely on for mushroom identification. There are a lot of people interested in learning.”
Belonging to a mycological society can also a lot of fun, said Burris.
“I talked to a group in Raymond last week that went out mushroom hunting together and then came back and cooked up the mushrooms to eat,” she said.
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Kimberly Mason is a freelance writer based in Cinebar. She can be contacted at kz@tds.net.
