Mushrooms

I'm talking tasty field mushrooms........

We have recently had a rain event here of over 100mm. It’s heading towards the end of winter and there are many signs of spring - my jasmine is flowering, the peach and nectarines have flowers on them, the mulberry trees are coming into life, including my cuttings from a couple of months ago, the grass is greener and growing, etc.

With this bit of warmth and good rain, surely it’s mushroom time!? Kim and I went for a drive around the whole farm yesterday. Now this is a lovely thing to do any time, but with two baskets I was hopeful to find some mushrooms. Unfortunately, the result was not so positive! I didn’t take a photo of my meagre haul, however what I did get was extremely tasty in a creamy mushroom sauce for our steak.

After cooking the steak, I added the mushrooms, some spring onions, garlic, parsley and cream, to top off home grown/harvested steak. The veg were all home grown too. A complete meal from home grown ingredients! (except the salt I added!)

Driving around, it was lovely to see the land blossoming and the fresh pasture growth. Winter here is not a good time for grass growth. We have some grasses and a little bit of clover that will continue to grow, but mostly everything is fairly slow. We’re just about to finish our 3rd year here and we’re still getting the hang of managing our grazing through the seasons. We get amazing growth over summer, which we struggle to manage with our small herd of cattle and then it gets so tall that the cattle trample more than they eat. Then it gets dry and cold and it’s a struggle to have enough grass. The trampling isn’t a bad thing in itself, as it’s mulch on the ground, but it means that it reduces the amount of pasture that can be eaten by the cows.

There’s also a lot of weeds! I think the previous owner must have sprayed a lot of glyphosate out, because there was barely a weed on the place when we looked at it. The weeds don’t worry me though as they are just part of the plant succession. We need to wait out the weeds, continue to manage the cattle in a good rotation and the pastures will come back again. One good thing about weeds is that weeds are better than bare ground. We don’t have much bare ground at all and come summer, we won’t see the ground, nor the gullies as we drive around in the buggy. Safely driving across the gullies is one of the good things about winter - being able to see them!

I believe that the previous chemical use is the reason for the lack of mushrooms.

Thinking about mushrooms reminds me of previous years on our last farm in Central Queensland where we got some massive mushroom harvests. Not every year, but if you got good rain in winter through to early spring, you could be guaranteed of getting a good feed, and in good years, you’d get a bucket full!

I like drying them best and then you’ve got them to add to cooking throughout the year. One year I made a mushroom sauce, which was a great little flavour bomb in cooking. I’ve frozen them, but they go very soggy - okay for throwing in a stew, but dried is better for crumbling into things like scrambled eggs. I haven’t pickled any successfully as the field mushrooms we get are usually fairly fragile and I don’t think they would hold up well.

Some people are scared of harvesting wild mushrooms, so I should caution that unless you know which ones are edible, then don’t eat them without doing some research. The common field mushroom is of the Agaricus genus and there are many in this, and not all of them edible. Last year we had some that looked slightly different to the ones I usually see, but they were okay, so there can be a little variation in them I believe. I am not a mushroom expert at all and there are various ways to check edibility, including spore prints and cutting them to see if they stain a strange colour (don’t eat them!)

The photo below are Edmund’s (son) mushrooms and that’s what they need to look like underneath. They’ll be smooth on top (like the ones in my link below). Edmund collected these from his farm yesterday.

We’ve been eating them for many years, and here’s an old blog post of mine Healthy Farming Healthy Food Blog on Mushrooms. These mushrooms are identical to the ones we collected yesterday and I know are safe.

Are you lucky enough to live in an area of abundant mushroom harvests? Or are you unsure what’s edible or not?