Are you team 🎃 or team 🍎? Me? I'm team 🍄

Published: Sun, 10/16/22

Greetings, Rural Sprout Readers,

Another week has come and gone, and Sunday is here. We had a good soaking rain on Thursday, so I’ll be heading out into the woods this afternoon in search of hen-of-the-woods.

One decent-sized mushroom or a couple of smaller ones are all I need to keep me in Just-Add-Cream-of-Mushroom soup until next fall.

Most foragers proclaim morels to be the king of mushrooms, but I’ve always preferred the offerings found in late summer through fall.

Chanterelles, honey mushrooms, black trumpets, yellow foot chanterelles, hedgehogs and hen-of-the-woods – these are my favorites.

There is something about foraging in the fall that is different from any other time of year. The colors are more intense, and so are the flavors. There is a quiet urgency in the crunch of the leaves underfoot and the chatter of the red squirrels in the branches above me. The air is cool and damp.

Sitting here writing about it makes me want to close my laptop, throw on my boots and head into the woods.

Even when I return with an empty basket, it’s still time well spent. And with the garden finished for the season, I have more time to be in the woods.

How about you, my friend?

What autumn activities do you look forward to each year? What do you do now that the gardening chores have dried up? Plenty of folks are happy to turn the oven on again after a long, hot summer. Baking season always kicks off with a trip to the apple orchard or the pumpkin patch.

It seems that your fall fruit of choice can be as divisive as your political leanings, although much easier to be bipartisan. In our house, we’re pretty evenly split between Team Apple and Team Pumpkin, and the only real polarizing topics that come up are whether to serve pie with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.