Meadow Mushrooms Day

I’m holding down the fort at Farmstead Creamery on Saturday when Kara calls in urgently. She’s out in the pasture moving chicken tractors, and she needs instant advice.

“There are mushrooms everywhere out here!” she explains breathlessly over the phone. “And the chickens are stuffing their faces with them. Are they poisonous?”

Images of all the chickens being dead momentarily flashed through my mind, and Mom and I hit the internet to learn more about this instant appearance of fungi in the field.

Edible and poisonous mushrooms abound in the barnyard, fields, and forests on our farm. There’s a particular spot where red or yellow amanita with their white spots love to grow. These are the classic fairytale “toadstool” mushrooms. While they are very pretty, they are insanely poisonous, and we always give them lots of personal space when they appear.

There are much friendlier varieties too, like the giant puffballs that adorn the hillside by the garden or the trail out to pasture. Overnight they can puff right up like enormous marshmallows. If you can catch them early when the insides are solid and pure white, they are very edible and delicious when skinned and sauteed in butter like slabs of fresh mozzarella. Do be careful, as there is a look-alike that is poisonous that has gills. Puffballs have no gills at all. Instead, to spread their spores as the fruit ripens, the spores collect inside and the skin becomes brittle before bursting like a little balloon, thus spreading the start of the next generation. At this stage, the mushroom is shriveled and blackened and historically are called “the Devil’s bladder.”

Friends of ours love harvesting chicken of the woods and many other tasty varieties that grow locally, but you do have to know what you are doing. Look-alikes can be deadly, hence Kara’s concern as to whether the sudden appearance of loads of fairy rings of white mushrooms in the pasture were friends or foes to the chickens who were gobbling them up like candy.

Fortunately, the birds seemed to instinctively know what took us about a half hour to fully research—that these were meadow mushrooms, which are delicious and edible. Members of the cremini and portabella family, they are considered a delicacy and are very flavorful. Lately, the conditions must have been just right for these fungi, as mushroom-hunting friends were also eagerly posting their meadow mushroom finds of the day on social media.

Meadow mushrooms love full sun and soils rich in manure, which explains why they were growing out in the pasture. Their look-alikes that are poisonous like to be in the woods or near the edge of the woods. Meadow mushrooms have pink gills when they are fresh and good for eating, while the poisonous ones have white gills (don’t eat those!).

Armed with the knowledge of what was a true meadow mushroom and which ones were still in their prime for eating, Kara began harvesting out in the pasture for us. She came back to the kitchen with a tray full of meadow mushroom caps, with their bright white tops and pink gills below. They smelled like portabella only even more intense.

Last night she sauteed them all up and we enjoyed them on homemade zucchini fritters with stewed roma tomatoes—yum! For many mushrooms, the season for harvest can be quite fleeting, and a fruit that was perfect yesterday will be too far gone today. It is the fruit that we harvest to eat, while the actual fungal organism is in the ground. It produces the fruits in order to make spores to create new mushrooms in the future. Picking the fruit does not kill the fungus—it’s more like picking the apple off the apple tree.

As the cool, wet weather continues, I won’t be surprised if I continue to meet additional interesting mushrooms on the farm. We’re still very conservative about which ones we eat, but it is fun to add a new and delicious one to our list. Being a happy home for fungi is yet another way that the farm is an edible landscape. The meadow mushrooms love the nutrient-rich manure from the sheep and chickens, just as much as the grasses and clovers do, and they are able to share that sunny habitat for mutual benefit.

I’ll bet Kara will be keeping an eye out for new mushrooms in the pasture this morning as well. See you down on the farm sometime.