The two mushroom seasons these pines actually have

People talk about the mushroom season as though the forest had only one. Between the river and the railway line there are two, they behave nothing alike, and only the second one empties the village on a Saturday morning.

Collected: 9 June 2024
Written up: 27 August 2024
Locality: Varėna, Alytus County
Season: June 2024
Reading: 8 minutes
Parts: 4

Chanterelles keep their own calendar

The first voveraitės show up in the last week of June if the middle of the month has been wet, and in the second week of July if it has not. They come where they came last year: the mossy shoulder of the old forest road, the north side of the low ridge where the pines stand thin enough to let light through, a strip beside the drainage ditch that has produced something every summer since we started looking. A dry July slows them without stopping them. They wait, and then a single night of rain brings up a flush.

What makes them worth the walk is that they keep. A chanterelle picked on a warm Sunday is still a chanterelle on Wednesday, which is true of nothing else we carry home in June. They do not go soft in the basket, they rarely hold a single worm, and half a basket will clean in twenty minutes with a brush and no water at all. The cost is that they hide. That obvious colour disappears entirely under pine needles, and I have walked over a patch twice before kneeling down and finding thirty of them.

Boletus and the nights after the rain

Baravykai are the second season and the serious one. They want warm ground and a proper soaking, not a shower that darkens the needles and stops. The pattern here, across six years of notes, is that a day of real rain in the second half of August is followed by six to nine days of nothing at all, and then by mushrooms everywhere at once. If the nights in that gap stay above about twelve degrees the flush is heavy; if a cold front comes through on the third night, it thins to a handful under the spruce.

The whole district knows this, which is the other half of the arithmetic. The forest road past the sand pit carries more cars in those ten days than in the rest of the year put together, and by eight in the morning the near patches have all been walked. I stopped competing a while ago. The reliable places are now the ones that take forty minutes on foot from anywhere a car can stop, and I go on the second morning rather than the first, when everything too small for a hurrying basket has had a night to grow.

Field marks

A full day of rain, not an afternoon shower that stops
Six to nine days between the rain and the flush
Nights above roughly twelve degrees through that week
Ground still warm: the same rain in October does nothing

The same patches, year after year

Neither season wanders as much as people think. What comes up is the fruiting body of something that has lived under the moss for years, and it comes up in the same handful of square metres until the trees above it change. I keep a list of places in the notebook, described in words rather than coordinates: the third bend on the forest road past the culvert, sixty paces in on the left, where two pines have grown together at the base. A phone would do it faster and has done it worse, because writing the description forces me to look at the place properly.

The list holds about thirty entries and four of them are dead. One patch went when the stand was thinned and the sun got into it; another when a new ditch dried out the hollow above it; two simply stopped, and I have no explanation to offer for either. Dead patches stay on the list with a line through them and the year written alongside. A record that kept only the places still working would tell me this forest is generous, which is not the impression that six years of walking has left.

Filling a basket without emptying a patch

Whether you cut the stem or twist the whole mushroom out is the argument every family here has had, and the evidence that either one harms the mycelium is thin. What plainly does harm it is everything else: raking moss with a stick to see what might be underneath, kicking over the old caps, walking the same soft ground twenty times in an afternoon. A patch that gets raked stops producing in a way that a patch that gets picked does not. I twist, fill the hole back with needles, and try to put my boots on roots rather than on moss.

The basket matters more than the technique does. Anything with a wicker base lets spores fall through as you walk, which may or may not seed anything but certainly stops the bottom layer sweating itself into a grey paste before you reach the road. A plastic bag turns half a basket of boletus into soup within an hour on a warm day. I take the small flat basket when I mean to be out for two hours, and the tall one only in the second week of a flush, when optimism is justified.

Field marks

Wicker, never plastic: a bag cooks the basket on a warm day
Twist or cut, but fill the hole back in with needles
Leave the small ones; they double overnight after rain
No raking, and no kicking the old ones over to look underneath