forage bag

i'm a pothunter. i know foraging is all trendy these days, but i have been foraging since i knew you could EAT wild foods, which was about when i was seven. my mother couldn't get me to eat fruit or a salad, but if a thing got picked outside on the lawn or in a park, i was all over it.

i have some half-baked theories (and somewhere someone has done some research) that suggest a link between foraging behaviors and the reward systems in our brains.

in short, i am happiest when i have to navigate to something or am looking for things that i can eat.

and this year was a pretty good year for my mushroom patch. there is a landowner who lets me forage on his land, and it yields a couple of species of mushrooms and some fruits besides. i always pay the harvest tax, which is a share for the landowner and sometimes his employees.

but this is my forage bag on a good day. i have harvested several pounds of black trumpet chantrelles, and it was the most exuberant fruiting year i have yet seen from that colony.

which is heartening, because last year was droughty and they did not fruit much at all.

there's a bumper crop of apples this year, too, but i will probably tell you about that later.