As I awoke this morning to snowflakes landing on my frostbitten windows, mushroom season felt far away. Autumn in Vermont is phenomenal yet fleeting, and it is hard to watch the long awaited fall flush shrivel up with the snow.

As many readers probably imagine, mushrooms are quite the common topic of conversation in our home. Ari and I often like to list our top five favorite wild mushrooms, and maitake (Grifola frondosa), or hen of the woods, consistently makes the cut. However, I always forget how much I love maitake until I experience my first bite of the season.

Were it not for the neon pink, grotesquely phallic elegant stinkhorns, I never would have noticed the hen hiding in plain sight in downtown Northampton, MA.  Just when I thought the 2012 season had come to a close, the foraging gods have rewarded me with a final, long awaited treat. 

As I scoured the woods in a last ditch attempt to find a hen before the looming frost, I grew increasingly hopeless with each step on the raw ground. After a dry, underwhelming season, the soil was finally saturated after a week of relentless rain. If the soaking rains had come at any point throughout the summer or early fall, the woods would have been teeming with fungal diversity.

Yesterday was the first day of fall, and it seems we have hit a turning point in the foraging season. After a mediocre summer harvest, fall has announced its arrival with a formidable flush.

The woods are full of teeth right now – not only is lion’s mane starting to ferociously flush, but hedgehogs are popping up along moist riverbeds and streams. Fall has arrived, at least in northern Vermont. 

Forgive me, foragers. Life has been hectic, and a month has past since my last ForageCast. Fortunately, I have nothing but good news to report. After two long-awaited prolonged showers, the woods are beginning to burst with mushrooms. The rain coincided with a cold front throughout the region, which means we are starting to see the full cast of fall fungi. The past couple days I have been starting to find yellow foot chanterelles, hedgehogs, and porcini, and today a reader submitted a photo of a maitake that generously fruited on a stump right in his backyard!

Foragers throughout the region are searching tirelessly for the coveted golden chanterelle. Some - especially those who have known producing spots - are finding pounds of chanterelles, but most are finding only a few. Unfortunately, I fall into the latter, considerably hungrier, faction of foragers. When I think of all the pristine patches I left behind in Ithaca, I want to hop in the car and drive six hours, but that would be against my better judgment.

As I write, I am comforted by the steady pitter-patter of rain falling on my roof. Gazing out my window, the ominous gray clouds on the horizon make me positively giddy.

Regular readers may have noticed that blog postings have been more infrequent than usual recently. Jenna and I are getting married this weekend, so we have been busy with wedding preparations. Meanwhile, the mycelium has been busy doing its thing, though in northern Vermont the woods still offer only slim early season pickings.

I am here to tell you that morels really do exist. This may not sound like a mycological epiphany, and I am well aware that many of you flatlanders have been finding (and promptly devouring) morels for weeks now. Of course, I too have found plenty of morels in past seasons, and there was a time last spring when morels felt like a tangible, edible reality. But after an epic search that began prematurely with a hiccup of balmy weather in March, I was starting to wonder if the universe was playing a big trick on me. Do morels really exist, I began to question, or are they the pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow, always just out of reach?

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first: my morel count is still at zero. Zero blacks, zero yellows, zero half-frees. Not even a lousy false morel.

I was harvesting fiddleheads and nettles today when a big, fleshy mushroom near the forest’s edge popped into my peripheral vision. A morel? No, clearly not – it was growing on a rotting log and had a brown, frisbee-shaped cap. As I looked closer, I realized my first mushroom foraging food of the year was not a wild species at all – it was a shiitake!

We hope you’re as excited as we are about the upcoming Northeastern mushroom foraging season! While you wait patiently for morels, in the mean time you can get excited about the 2012 workshop season with The Mushroom Forager. This upcoming week, The Mushroom Forager’s 2012 workshop season will be kicking off with a fun-filled workshop at the Horticulture Society of New York in New York City called Mushrooms Wild and Cultivated. Participants will be introduced to the region’s most distinctive and delicious wild mushrooms, as well as inoculating a shiitake log to take home. 

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time staring at the forest floor recently. My futile and often maddening pursuit of morels continues, as I find myself gazing relentlessly at the parched ground and praying for a spring miracle.

The morels are teasing me again, flaunting their spongy faces and cooperating beautifully for foragers throughout much of the Midwest and Eastern Seaboard. Whether you’re from Mississippi or Michigan, chances are you are finding morels, and flooding my inbox with tongue-tickling photos of juicy blacks and yellows.