This immersive wilderness learning experience will bring you into the forest with a single delicious goal in mind: how to find, identify, and harvest wild edible mushrooms!
There are thousands of species of mushrooms in eastern North America, many of which you can find right here in the Haliburton Highlands, and all across Ontario! Many have strange alien-looking shapes that don’t resemble the mushrooms you find in the grocery store at all. Some look like heads of cauliflower, some like beautiful corals you’d find under the sea, others like soccer balls, bird’s feathers, or dangling icicles that hang from tree trunks, dead stumps and logs, or that burst up from the forest floor through leaves and dirt.
Wild mushrooms have curious folk names like “Dead Man’s Fingers”, “Shaggy Mane”, “Witch’s Butter”, and “Bear’s Head Tooth”; but their scientific names are far more accurate and important. Some turn colours when they’re cut or bruised, others smell like common fruits, taste acrid or bitter, or even glow in the dark at night. Many wild mushrooms are delicious; others are toxic. Most are unpalatable, flavourless, or too tough to eat. A few are even deadly. But how do you know which is which?
As the wise saying goes: “There are old mushroom hunters, and there are bold mushroom hunters… but there are NO old, bold mushroom hunters!”. With a few simple steps and rules, avid outdoorsman and forager Stephan Lukacic will start you down the rewarding path towards being able to safely recognize and locate wild edible mushrooms in the forest, and in many cases, right in your own backyard or local park when you get back home!