ATHABASCA – You can use them in soups, stews, stuffed, raw, cooked, on burgers and pizza, and as medicine, but only if you don’t pick the poisonous ones.
Long term fungi enthusiasts and those new to the mushroom picking world alike are meeting at the Perryvale St. Thomas Anglican Church at 10 a.m. Aug. 13 for a pre-exposition foray just one day ahead of the Wild Mushroom Expo which will be held at the University of Alberta (U of A) Botanic Garden.
“We're going to be going out to a local area of a farmer who has forested land where we're going to be going through five kinds of landscapes,” said Alberta Mycological Society (AMS) member and lay minister at the church, Bruno Wiskel.
The group will be going through five unique landscapes on the property – Black spruce swamp, Tamarack swamp, mixed forest, Aspen upland, and pine sand hills – with the goal of collecting as many mushrooms as possible to be displayed at the Expo the next day.
“That's five different micro ecosystems. There are different trees that are associated with each micro ecosystem and there are also different mushrooms associated,” Wiskel said. “You can find just about the whole gamut of mushrooms in northern Alberta at one place, rather than going from place to place. These are all adjacent to one another; within 100 metres.”
AMS member and foray leader Lisa Oishi said the Saturday foray would be different from ones people may have attended before.
“This one is, I call it a foray, but it's just a pre-Expo foray because we're just collecting mushrooms in order to display them at the Expo,” she said in an Aug. 4 phone call. “This one isn't a typical one where we go into identification or anything like that, we are doing a quick get-as-many-varieties-of-mushrooms-as-possible, including some substrate.”
Those taking part in the foray are hoping to gather as much as they can in order to have them identified and discussed at the Wild Mushroom Expo where anyone will have the opportunity to attend.
“We have several pre-Expo forays ... they're all over the province,” said AMS director at large and project director for the Wild Mushroom Expo, Melanie Fjoser, Aug. 4.
“All of our members are asked to pick mushrooms, whether they go on a formal foray, or whether they just go in their neck of the woods or whatever it is. They pick a diverse amount of mushrooms. It's not about edible mushrooms, it's not about anything in particular, it's about what kind of mushrooms are growing in Alberta on that day.”
The society is looking for everything from medicinal mushrooms to poisonous ones, no mushroom picked is a bad mushroom for the exposition.
“On the Sunday we have a huge display of fresh wild mushrooms that people have picked, there will be hundreds of varieties of mushrooms,” Fjoser said.
Individuals will have the opportunity to see and learn about these mushrooms from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the U of A Botanic Gardens.
“We have all these fresh wild mushrooms, and we have people there who are going to identify them. They're going to be putting names on a lot of these mushrooms,” continued Fjoser.
The exposition will be filled with mushroom-centric events, ranging from kids colouring to a wild mushroom café where all sorts of dishes containing edible mushrooms will be served.
“I'm excited about looking for mushrooms, I want to share that excitement,” Wiskel said. “I find a great deal of peace when I'm in the forest, looking for mushrooms. If you find mushrooms, that's a bonus. What we want to do is we want to introduce as many people as we can, not only to the mycological society, but also to the psychological and physiological benefits of looking for mushrooms.”
With over 800 members, it is no surprise that so many mushrooms are expected to be present at the expo.
“At first, often people are attracted to mushroom picking as an edible thing, they want to try to eat something,” Fjoser said. “What they do is they learn a couple of mushrooms that they can eat, and then they get the bug. What happens then is that they say, ‘well, in order to know if I can eat this, I need to know how to identify it,’ and so as you start getting into the nitty-gritty of how to identify mushrooms, it kind of takes over your life. There will always be people who pick just for the table and other people who just are interested in it being like Citizen Science.”
While anyone is welcome at the Wild Mushroom Expo, a membership is needed in order to attend the foray and any future forays. These memberships can be found at https://www.albertamushrooms.ca/membership/
