Harvesting Crops You Didn't Plant

Most crops involve a lot of labor.  It's been that way since the Fall in the Garden of Eden.  Man had to toil by the sweat of his brow.  The story continues to this day.  You work the ground, prepare the seed bed, you sow the seeds and water them in, you weed, and you (hopefully) harvest.  It is a painstaking process fraught with difficulty.  When it all comes together, though, it is worth it!

There are other 'crops' that plant themselves, so to speak.  God takes care of the rest.  Today we'll talk about one such crop.  Right outside our kitchen door, if you would walk thirty feet due north in the St. Augustine grass, you would find our "honey hole."  We discovered Chanterelle mushrooms!  The beautiful, delicious mushrooms come up time and again in the same vicinity.  All we have to do is keep our eyes open for them.  We walked out and picked a mess of them in the colander.  We picked even more a few days later.

Chanterelles are a bright yellow/orange color and they really stand out on the forest floor.  They have ridges which are a little different than gills and they run down the stem.  They grow in the dirt - NEVER on wood.  They are abundant after a summer rain.  People say that they have a fruity scent, like apricots, but I can never smell that.  My sense of smell was never very discriminating, and I still haven't completely recovered my ability to smell a lot of things since Covid.

The cap of the chanterelle is irregular.  The coloration is a show-stopper.  It's hard to miss this on the ground.  In the past before I knew what they were, I completely ignored them.  Or I kicked them over.  What was I doing?!  Wild foraged chanterelles go for $25 per pound at farmer's markets, I noticed.

One thing we wanted to make sure of when getting started is that we didn't want to eat any toxic mushrooms or eat any mushrooms that would send us into a hallucinogenic trip.  There is one toxic look alike called the Jack-O'Lantern mushroom.  It is an orange color, but it grows out of wood and has gills instead of ridges.  When you know what NOT to pick and you check and double check the characteristics of the desired mushroom, you can feel confident to enjoy the fruits of your forage.

Enjoy them we did!!  Weekend breakfasts are the best.  We always enjoy fresh-picked eggs, but today's eggs were going to be kicked up a notch or two.  Tricia sauteed the chanterelles with onions and peppers in butter in a cast iron skillet.

Then she added a half dozen eggs to the veggies and chanterelles and buttered some homemade toasted bread.  We ate like I would think kings and queens ate, enjoying every morsel until the plate was clean.

Rain is in the forecast and it is still hot and muggy even if it is almost mid-September.  That means more chanterelles will spring up on their own.  You can count on the fact that we'll be patroling the honey hole where the chanterelles grow.  Harvesting a crop I didn't plant almost makes me feel guilty.