Mountain Loop Road and the lack of mushrooms

 Before I describe our mushrooming (or lack of) trip this past weekend I thought I would reflect on attempting to grow tomatoes in Washington. Tomatoes hate Washington. It is just too freakin' cold in the summer for tomato love. So I had this tomato plant... It grew into a giant and produced nothing. Until mid-August when Jay's mother noticed, during her visit, tiny little tomatoes growing. Just this week, I picked them because it was dropping into the 30s at night. So I ended up with a bowlful of almost ripe or fully green tomatoes. But lucky us! They like the gorgeous glass bowl (wedding present!) and are ripening in our house. The moral of the story - I only buy cherry tomatoes for next year.

 Now onto the mushrooms - I'm sure that is what you really want to hear about anyway! Well, there isn't much to say! We found tons of mushrooms that were new to us and we were not willing to eat any of them without some expert around to tell us we wouldn't end up on the toilet all night. But I think a bunch of them were edible! Like this lovely purple mushroom to the left. We think this is a blewit and they are supposed to be good to eat, but we were not brave enough. It was fun to see them though! I also found tons of milk caps and russulas. Many of these are supposed to be tasty as well, but some can make you sick. Again, we left these behind too. *Sigh* Finally, we did find some edibles! The Pig's Ear below is a gorgeous mushroom that is good when it is young except for one problem. Our guidebook says "often riddled with maggots".....so we left those alone too because these were not "young" looking specimens.

So we stuck to what we knew!  Our friends Ralph and Jackie had joined us for the day - which made finding nothing even more fun. At the end of the day we had chanterelles, hedgehogs, and oyster mushrooms. The best part? There was enough for each couple to go home with for one meal. We got skunked, but not totally skunked!

Pig's ear!

Scaly pholiotas, I think, on this big old tree.

Jackie, Jay, and Ralph pretend that we got a ton of mushrooms! Yup.