String Notes

I just got back from the Central Pennsylvania Mushroom Club’s annual weekend-long foray. This might be the nerdiest thing I’ve ever done outside a work context, and I say this as someone whose main hobbies involve medieval recreation and science fiction conventions. I am delighted!

After a too-hot and too-wet week, it was a lovely weekend to be outside. I had great conversations with interesting people, and listened to talks on chestnut blight, bolete identification, and on medicinal mushrooms. And of course, we collected and identified a whole lot of mushrooms.

I learned a bunch of new mushrooms, and got to try a new-to-me mushroom as well, the lilac bolete Boletus separans. There was a huge flush, and the expert who gave the bolete talk, Greg Marley, collected a pile and cooked them up for breakfast. Delicious!

But that’s not all! I made several sheets of mushroom paper, to varying success. The birch polypore paper turned out very brittle, but the darker mixed violet tooth polypore and Berkeley polypore paper is great. I have a whole basket of dried birch polypores from last year, so I may give it another try on my own. I printed myself a copy of this year’s foray art, although on regular watercolor paper.

And! I won a huge batch of mushroom-dyed yarn in the silent auction. It was dyed at a previous foray, and the person who had it hadn’t done anything with it, so into the auction it went. I also came home with a lovely dyer’s polypore to do some dyeing experiments of my own. I still haven’t found any on my own, but Greg gave me the one he found.

The timing is pretty horrible for me most years, so this is the first foray I’ve attended despite being a club member for four or five years, but I had a grand time and will definitely try to attend again.