🗁Added 47 photos to album Foraging 2021.
On a late night wander through Ravenscraig Park, we found chicken of the woods! I spotted it! I knew it was important even though I'd never seen it before. A lower down bigger one was a bit old, but we harvested it. A higher up smaller one that was young so we left it to grow.
We proceeded to a small woodland in the middle of Kirkcaldy, and found some oyster mushrooms! We filled up a box, and well pleased with ourselves, thought that although it was getting late, we should probably do a quick scout of the rest of the surrounding area to see what else was about.
Then we had a mushroom emergency.
Multiple logs, absolutely bursting with beautiful oyster mushrooms, in perfect condition for harvesting.
But we were at capacity! It was getting dark! What to do?!
I phoned for backup.
K gracefully interrupted here evening to come and rescue us with a car and several large boxes. What a night! We picked as many as we could, and were up late cleaning them.
Two days later we returned to pick what we'd left because it was too young, or we just couldn't fit it. And got another massive load.
Processing oysters is a lot of work, and they really really need to be sorted quickly or they fill up with worms like the dryad's saddle. But worse. So we bottled litres and litres of three kinds of mushroom soup, stock, and cooked batches more to turn into pie filling and freeze. Plus, we ate loads of them too.
