Exciting podcast news! The podcast is now monthly. And because of that news, I’ll be publishing it in addition to weekly newsletter posts. So you’ll receive this podcast in your inbox the first Friday of each month in addition to weekly newsletter stories on Tuesdays. What’s even better—all of this is offered to all subscribers for free. Hooray for more content!
I’m so excited to share this month’s podcast about foraging, specifically mushroom foraging with Leah Carlson. Leah is the marketing and communications director at Wilderness Awareness School in Duvall, WA and more importantly, she’s an avid mushroom forager. I met her at a Wild Women’s Retreat with WAS in 2022. She was there as a staff-participant and I was there for this project. She and I hit it off immediately and had a lot of fun getting to know each other during those two days. Right off the bat, I learned that Leah was an avid mushroom forager. As we walked around WAS’s forested land, she’d stop every once in awhile and point out the mushrooms. None of these were edible mushrooms and so I saw that there was an interest far beyond what kind of mushrooms served us humans. And that’s why I really wanted to bring Leah onto the podcast.
You can follow Leah and her mushroom hunting adventures on Instagram @northwestwildcrafting.
In the episode we spoke about the mushroom that Leah discovered and named, the Protubera Cerebrum. She discovered this unique and frankly, creepy, mushroom in the forest behind her house and it turns out she discovered a completely new and undiscovered species of mushroom. You’ll have to listen to the episode to learn about how that went down, but here are some photos of that super cool new mushroom.
Resources from our discussion:
The Mushroom Identification Kit that Leah created for Wilderness Awareness School
All That the Rain Promises and More by David Arora — This is a Pacific Northwest foraging guide that Leah and I talked about with the guy wearing a tuxedo holding a trumpet and a giant chanterelle. PNWers will see this guide everywhere for local mushrooms.
If you’re not in the Pacific Northwest, look up guides that are specific to your region as mushroom varieties vary from region to region. And when you get deeper still into mushrooms, seek out the local mushroom Facebook groups.
Leah mentioned “dichotomous mushroom guides” that are a choose-your-own-adventure kind of guide which is much easier than just paging through an entire book to find a matching photo. Here’s an example from the Mycological Society of Toronto.
iNaturalist is also an excellent app for mushroom identification and one way to get some confirmation that your mushroom won’t poison you.
DISCLAIMER: These resources do not serve as an end-all-be-all mushroom foraging guide. I am not an expert. There are a lot of lookalike mushrooms that seem like they’re the delicious edible kind, but I am not an expert and it takes a lot of time and observation to become adept at foraging for the right mushrooms. So if you’re new to mushroom foraging, when are going out to eat those mushrooms you found, you should get confirmation from at least 3 sources (e.g., iNaturalist, a Facebook group, and a knowledgeable mushroom foraging friend) before you eat that mushroom.
Credits:
Cramming for the Apocalypse artwork by Amanda Burnham
Music by DayFox
Mushrooms and Foraging with Leah Carlson