Spending so much time in the 3 gardens I look after – The Edible Garden; The World and Demonstration Gardens at Væres Venner Community Garden and the Allium Garden Chicago at the Ringve Botanical Gardens in Trondheim – I don’t get into the surrounding forest so often. Yesterday, we had a fantastic day foraging fungi in the forest nearby in Malvik and the forest shared with us and these will mostly be dried. The following edibles were picked: Winter chanterelle / traktkantarell (grows in damp mossy locations in the forest) Gul trompetsopp / yellow foot (on the edge of bogs) Chantarelle / Kantarell – a bit late for this, but we nevertheless found a few patches Rødgul piggsopp / terracotta hedgehog Piggsopp / hedgehog fungus (Hydnum rufescens)
At last, after the warm summer the porcinis (ceps / steinsopp; Boletus edulis) are coming up in large numbers in the woods, the best year since 2005! I’d read the reports on Facebook, so now is the time to harvest and dry these amazing fungi in as large amounts as possible to last until the next time, hopefully not another 16 years! Almost all were in good condition. They are often infected with a parasitic fungi that makes them inedible! In addition, we found a large patch of yellow foot / gul trompetsopp or gul trompetkantarell (Craterellus lutescens), at a place I’d picked many some years ago. Not a fungi I find every year. There were also some chantarelles (kantarell) and a few puffballs (røyksopp). The walk home with a very heavy load was thankfully mostly downhill! Now for the biggest job of cleaning them before drying!
A new species of fungi discovered growing on an old wild hazel nut in the garden this week, nut disco (Hymenoscyphus fructigenus), not found earlier in Malvik kommune. Thanks to Edel Humstad for the ID.
I’ve already shown that all the windows are full of drying seeds at the moment, now it’s standing room only as the tables and chairs are now full of drying fungi :)
The forest has unlimited supplies of winter chanaterelles (traktkantarell) at the moment, so making the most of it and drying as many as we can! They’re now much larger than last time!
It was a busy weekend picking our winter supplies of winter chantarelles (traktkantarell) in the forest. This abundant species is mycorrhizal, associated in Norway with spruce, usually in mossy woods.
As I wrote earlier, it looks like we may have a glut of runner beans (Phaseolus coccineus) this year, the first time for many years. Runner beans are borderline here and last year we only managed to get a few beans before the first frosts. This year, we could have made a first harvest a week ago, but I wanted to keep the first beans for seed for the next couple of years. Yesterday we had bread dough ready and therefore made a pizza with runner beans and a mix of fungi picked in the woods (separate post). The dough was 100% coarse whole grain rye, spelt and emmer (sourdough)! Delicious as always!
Slicing the beans with a runner bean slicer, commonly found in kitchens in the UK where this could well qualify as the national vegetable!
The forest is now full of edible fungi, witness today’s haul of mostly chantarelles, winter chantarelle, hedgehog fungi (two species) and puffballs (Norw: kantarell, traktkantarell, lys- og rødgule-piggsopp og røyksopp)
Tonight’s veggie pizza (with part of the bread dough as I’m also baking bread this evening) had some unusual for me ingredients: perennial kales, a mix of oriental brassicas (pak choy, mizuna, mustard greens etc.), various spring onions (all hacked out of the frozen soil) with garlic, chili, oregano, dried fungi – Albatrellus ovinus (fåresopp in Norwegian) and topped with dried seed of highly invasive himalayan balsam (kjempespringfrø), the seeds of which are quite attractive (see the picture)
Earlier in October, we found a place with a large amount of chantarelles (kantarell); see http://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=23655). We noticed that there were also a lot of winter chantarelles (traktkantarell; Cantherellus tubaeformis) growing in the same place, but we decided to wait a couple of weeks as many were still small and return before the first hard frosts (forecasted in the next few days). Here is the haul:
Perennial vegetables, Edimentals (plants that are edible and ornamental) and other goings on in The Edible Garden
(Hydnum rufescens)
