Fern & Fungi

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Beautiful bloodroot is blooming! Sanguinaria canadensis is a native woodland plant growing in shady mixed forest. It is a traditional First Nations medicine. The leaves and roots are poisonous and cause vomiting if ingested and a contact rash if touched. Do not touch bloodroot and touch your eyes! Use gloves when wild harvesting and only take from substantially large patches. Bloodroot can be commercially grown using forest farming techniques. The dried roots can be made into medicinal salves to treat sore and inflamed joints and muscles, rheumatism, and poor blood circulation near the surface of the skin. It is used in modern dental preparations to treat plaque build up and gum inflammation.

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False Morels: Gyromitra, Carcinogens, and Controversy

Spring means morel mushroom foraging season! How well do you know your look-a-likes? Alex teaches how to tell the difference between false morels (Gyromitra esculenta) and true morels (Morchella sp.).

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Licorice fern (Polypodium glycyrrhiza) dried rhizomes and fresh leaf. This edible and medicinal fern is native to the Pacific Northwest and can be found growing on mossy trees and rocks. Notice the leaves of this species are pointed and more delicate than the rounded leaves of the eastern species Polypodium virginianum. The rhizomes of licorice fern can be used fresh or dried and taste just like licorice root. The flavour is improved and intensified after drying. It can be used to make teas, decoctions, tinctures, herbal liqueurs, lozenges, and cough syrups for cough, cold, and flu. Traditionally it has also been used to help with indigestion and diarrhea. Harvest a small portion of the rhizomes in the fall to forage without disturbing this lovely fairy fern.

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Three identification photos of Polypody fern (Polypodium virginianum) growing between boulders on a forested lakeshore. Polypodys are my favourite fern species! Yes I am a fern nerd if you couldn’t tell from our business name! Polypody virginianum, Polypody glycyrrhiza, and Polypodium vulgare are edible and medicinal ferns, but you don’t eat the tiny fiddleheads, you eat the rhizomes (roots, sort of). The rhizomes are sweet and throat-soothing, tasting of licorice. All over the world this little fern family has been used by Europeans and First Nations as medicine to treat colds, flus, lung congestion, sore throats, and diarrhea. It was also an alternative to candy where there wasn’t any.

The species that has angel’s singing around it is Polypodium glycyrrhiza or “licorice fern” from the Pacific Northwest. It is the sweetest of them all and tastes the most strongly like actual licorice root. The rhizome can be chewed fresh, picked out of the moss of big leaf maple trees. Drying truly enhances it though and then it is an amazing flavour for liqueurs, mead, candy, desserts, and herbal medicines. Add it to cough syrups, immune system boosting tinctures, medicinal mushroom extracts, and herbal tea blends.

The rhizomes are sweetest in the spring, but to harvest polypody ferns sustainably we should forage for the rhizomes in autumn (when it is still pretty sweet) and only harvest 10-20% of one area. Look for them on large rocks and fallen trees for accessibility. Also, ferns are awesome! Another “fairy” plant throughout different cultures.

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Two photos of rock tripe (Umbilicaria mammulata), also known as “rock guts” and “tripe de roche”. It is a native lichen with a leaf-like shape and can be found growing on any exposed rock or boulders along the Canadian Shield near forested lake shores. Lichens are amazing complex organisms created by the natural symbiotic relationship of fungi and algae. When you find large rock tripes it means you are in a clean, healthy ecosystem. Rock tripe looks like leathery green-brown elephant ears when fresh but shrivels up and looks like grey-brown to black leaf litter when old and dried. The front side ranges from pale grey-brown to deep red-brown and the back is black. It is hard to tell how large each rock tripe “leaf” is from the first photo so I’ve included the second photo with my hand for scale. These are late winter / early spring rock tripes, so they were much bigger when fresh. Winter is taking its time leaving this year, it snowed yesterday and it’s snowing as I type. If we didn’t have the grocery store and the pantry was getting barren — we’d be looking for emergency survival foods. This rock tripe lichen is technically edible and can be treated like Chinese black fungus (Umbilicaria esculenta) to prepare it as food. Re-hydrate dried specimens and thinly slice into strips. You may want to marinate them or pickle them before eating to improve the flavour. In Chinese medicine the “rock mushroom” is considered a restorative and it could be a traditional spring ritual to eat it as a medicine rather than a survival food. Laboratory tests of Umbilicaria esculenta have revealed antiviral properties which back up its traditional uses in Asian cuisine and medicine.

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Scarlet elf cup mushrooms (Sarcoscypha austriaca/ dudleyi) are one of the first mushrooms of spring here in the Ottawa Valley. They have a white to flesh-coloured underside and a rich vermillion red interior. I am convinced this mushroom belongs to the fairies. They are considered edible but there is little to no info on actually eating them. What makes a mushroom a choice edible? The popular vote and market price I suppose. I’ve seen them eaten raw, stuffed as appetizers but think they are best pan-fried in butter or bacon fat with fiddleheads and feral asparagus. I think they would do well in a hot and sour soup as well... Have not experimented with drying and rehydrating them yet. They taste mild/bland and they take on other flavours. When you see scarlet elf cups in the woods it means you should look for morels and oyster mushrooms in the following weeks. ~ Sarah

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We had quite the two day wind and snow storm! We went from no snow to almost a foot over night! The power went out and we couldn’t get the back up generator working, but we stayed snug and warm as we live in a rural village and are lucky to have a wood stove and a wood shed. More snow is forecasted... Our property is covered in fallen branches including this birch fork covered in not-turkey-tail mushrooms. The give-away for it not being turkey tail was the muted colours and the toothed pores underneath. Turkey tail is a polypore and is smooth and grey-white underneath, the pores so tiny they are almost invisible.

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The interior of a chaga conk, a fungal growth on birch trees that is a sclerotia or mycelia mass rather than a fruiting mushroom. The conk pictured was harvested this winter when we took the baby for a walk in the forest. Maybe he’s a lucky charm! The outer bark of chaga is hard and black with a crackled surface, but the interior is softer like fresh cork and ranges from bright yellow-orange to reddish-brown. You want to use all of it as the whole thing is medicinally potent.

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New post over at our blog to get you ready for spring foraging! Spring goes by fast and the season for most of these edibles lasts only 1-2 weeks, so it is good to be prepared! What are you looking forward to harvesting and eating?

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Spring is coming soon to our Northern climes! It is time for foragers and chefs to get ready for spruce tip season. Here’s a teaser of the locally wild harvested spruce tip goods we’ll have in the online shop tomorrow (shop link is in our profile). Spruce tips make a lovely tea, cooking/baking herb, and flavouring for syrups, beer, soda, and liqueurs.

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The edible and medicinal mushroom goodies coming soon to our online shop. We love our mushroom medicine! Been busy processing and packaging new products. Finished a photo shoot today am am now attempting to get all the goods in the shop and a newsletter sent out. No rest for wicked, even when you have small children!

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Dried turkey tail mushroom rosettes from inoculated maple logs on our own property. Did you know you can grow your own medicinal mushrooms at home in your yard? Hoping to find time to write an article on it for the blog! In the meantime we are juggling shipping and making products for the shop. These turkey tail mushrooms will soon be available as a medicinal mushroom broth blend and a plain double extract tincture.

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It is right in the heart of maple syrup season right now in the Ottawa Valley. Right now most locals are in the bush at their sugar shacks wild harvesting and boiling down maple syrup on wood fires the same way the local Natives taught their ancestors to do it centuries ago. This is my father’s set up at his 83 acre farm. His sugar shack is is the very back woods of the property. He’s often in that sugar shack for the whole month of March and if I do catch a glimpse of him, he’s more of a wild creature of the wood with leaves in his beard than human after a syrup season.

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Thanks to the unseasonably warm sun we’ve been having, the gold moss stonecrop is is perfect for harvesting right now as a wild edible in Northeastern Ontario. It is a tiny, juicy, succulent moss-like plant growing on large, sun-exposed rocks. Stonecrops are normally sweet and pleasant, but the gold moss variety is spicy as in hot! Treat it like fresh jalapeño or a Thai chilli. We want to try to make a dried cayenne powder substitute (might be more like wasabi though) and also a fermented wild hot sauce inspired by @pascalbaudar — you could also make hot salsa, hot pickles, or add it as local substitute in any recipe with hot peppers in it (Indian curries, Thai curries, chili...).

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Our recommended books on mushrooms in North America. We are in Northern Ontario, Canada but most of these books are for anyone on our continent. If you are looking to identify wild mushrooms, use medicinal mushrooms, or learn how to grow mushrooms - there’s a cool book for you in this selection. Title with cover not shown is “The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms”.

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Busy in the workshop making Shroomami — umami mushroom powder of awesomeness. It is made with wild giant puffball mushroom, delicious shiitake mushrooms, and a few tasty dried alliums. It can be used as a meat rub, veggie seasoning, or as a thickener for soup, stews, and gravy. We put it on everything; chicken, pork, eggs, sautéed mushrooms, noodles, popcorn, soups, stews... even in homemade mac n’ cheese. Mushrooms, especially dried mushrooms, are packed with intense flavour - there’s no need for msg when you have fungi! We’ll have this in the shop this coming week along with the other wild edibles we’ve been working on.