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foraging

    FORAGING

    Where the Wild Things Grow

    Sarah Naciri carefully ‘wildcrafts’ a way into the local economy

    By

    Across much of the Outer Cape, along wooded trails, the sides of roads, the edges of marshes, and the mouths of rivers, those who pay close attention to the land can discover a wealth of native foods: wild berries, mushrooms, sea beans, seaweed, and shellfish — all of them as indigenous to this area as its earliest people, the Wampanoag, who fished and harvested seasonally here.

    At her table at the Truro farmers market, Naciri holds her 10-month-old son, Khalief, while talking to a customer. (Photos by Edward Boches)

    For some people who know this landscape well, that foraging tradition continues today. If you’ve eaten at Ceraldi in Wellfleet, you may have tasted Michael Ceraldi’s tempura milkweed — he batters and fries the perennial that sprouts along roads and is also food for butterflies. Or perhaps you’ve tasted oysters at one of shellfisherman Jason Weisman’s raw bars — sea beans are an ingredient in the garnishes he drizzles on his bivalves. These salty stalks, which are also delicious in salads, grow on the edges of our marshes and salt ponds. And if you’ve visited any of the Outer Cape Cod farmers markets in June or July, you’ve had the chance to taste wild blueberries gathered on friends’ land in Truro by farmer Arin Hirst.

    Naciri gathers lowbush blueberries, taking just what she and her family will eat over a few days, except during peak season, when she gathers enough to make preserves and freeze some for the winter.

    Herbalist Sarah Naciri is there, too, at all the Outer Cape farmers markets, selling teas, syrups, oils, and salves, all of which include ingredients that she harvests wild from the woods, marshes, and dunes near her Truro home — elderberries, cranberries, sassafras, mushrooms, rose hips, pine needles, nettles, and yarrow among them.

    From late June to mid-July, the woods of Truro offer abundant lowbush and highbush blueberries. While some foragers use berry pickers — handheld shovels with tines that scrape the berries off the plant — Naciri prefers picking more gently, entirely by hand.

    “Indigenous people have been gathering food and medicine here for thousands of years,” says Naciri. “They carried with them and passed down local knowledge about how to use what the land gave them. As a society, we’ve forgotten or abandoned much of that wisdom. But there are still wild plants that grow in abundance and offer us, humans and animals, incredible nourishment.”

    Naciri’s children, Khalief, Ahkiel, and Leela, often join their mom for foraging trips. They help her tend her home garden as well as Sustainable CAPE’s Children’s Community Garden at the Truro Public Library.

    Naciri forages and “wildcrafts” every month of the year here and on trips to northern New England. Some plants, like blueberries, she keeps only to feed her family. She has three young children, Leela, 8, Ahkiel, 3, and Khalief, who is 10 months old. All of them regularly join her on foraging expeditions and help in Naciri’s backyard gardens as well as in Sustainable CAPE’s Children’s Community Garden at the Truro library, which Naciri oversees and uses as a classroom to teach children about growing food.

    Naciri walks the shoreline in Wellfleet. After a morning of foraging for sea beans, she’s off to gather seaweed and pick berries.

    Many of her finds, though, including nettles, cranberries, rose hips, and a variety of mushrooms, become ingredients for her tea blends and seasonings, which she packages for her Wild Blossoms Apothecary label and sells to farmers market customers and to people who find her online.

    Wildcrafting means turning what is foraged into teas, salves, and syrups. Naciri sells hers at local farmers markets and online.

    “Wildcrafting is not for everyone,” says Naciri. It’s not just about knowing where to go, she says. “You have an obligation to learn about the plants you forage, to know what’s in season and when, which part of the plant to pick, and how to harvest thoughtfully and sustainably.”

    Naciri collects wild rose hips, abundant in Truro, and blends them into two elixirs; one she calls Quench Tea and the other Enrich Mama’s Milk Tea.

    Naciri says that sometimes visitors who don’t know or don’t care overharvest wild plants, especially wild mushrooms. “The plants and berries that grow here also sustain wildlife,” she says. “They also provide cover and are an important part of a larger ecosystem.”

    “Wildcrafting,” says Naciri, “means appreciating the gifts we get from the land and taking seriously our responsibility to care for it.”

    FUNGI

    Foraging as an Act of Stewardship  

    For Melany Kahn, mushrooming is a way to get to know your own back yard, cemetery, playground, or sidewalk

    By

    WELLFLEET — Laid out on two folding tables in a classroom at Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary is a cornucopia of wild mushrooms, some edible, others not. Among the inedibles are a rough, spotted golf ball of a mushroom known as a pigskin puffball; a log sporting thin white strands of mycelium — the branching roots of a fungi colony; a large circular brown russula, and a hard-as-a-rock bracket mushroom. On the edibles table and next to a portable stovetop is a bowl of shiitakes, a mountain of black trumpet mushrooms, and a collection of bright golden chanterelles.

    Melany Kahn, fungi expert, forager, and children’s book author. (Photo by Hazel Wagner)

    In front of the mushroom bounty is expert forager and fungi educator Melany Kahn, wearing a 3D-printed pin of a black trumpet mushroom. She goes through the characteristics of the mushrooms on display before reading a passage about lobster mushrooms from her children’s book, Mason Goes Mushrooming, published last fall by Green Writers Press and illustrated by Ellen Korbonski. Mason is Kahn’s son, whom she describes as a third-generation mushroom hunter.

    Mason Goes Mushrooming by Melany Kahn, with watercolor illustrations by Ellen Korbonski. (Photo by Oliver Egger)

    “Show of hands — and don’t be shy — if you don’t really like mushrooms,” Kahn says. A few hands rise slowly. “All right,” she says, grinning, “I’m going to suggest, and no pressure here, that you maybe haven’t had wild-foraged mushrooms from the woods of Vermont like a black trumpet or a chanterelle, which go for 70, 80 bucks a pound at the store.” Or, she adds, “Maybe you haven’t had them cooked properly if you have had them.”

    She fires up the stove, laying the pitch-black trumpets on the heat, which sends their rich, earthy aroma rolling across the room.

    Kahn lives in Brattleboro, Vt. but is a regular visitor to the Outer Cape, and she’s here to talk mushrooms with about 20 instructors, volunteers, and counselors at the Wellfleet sanctuary. Her talk was organized by Christine Bates, the sanctuary’s visitor experiences and community outreach coordinator, as a way, Bates says, for the staff to “to know where fungi fit into our ecosystem here and what roles they play.”

    Despite having invited a forager to speak, Bates says that foraging is not allowed on the Audubon property. “We don’t allow any collection of anything on our properties,” she says. Because they are sanctuaries, “We want everything to be left as it is.”

    Melany Kahn spots one of the Outer Cape’s inedibles, a brown russula mushroom, after her Aug. 8 class at the Audubon sanctuary in Wellfleet. (Photo by Oliver Egger)

    The Cape Cod National Seashore does allow foragers to collect five gallons per person per day of edible mushrooms as long as the gathering is for personal consumption and there is no “digging or other soil disturbance.”

    The Independent has reported (see “Not All Fungi Foragers Are Good Environmental Stewards,” Oct. 10, 2019) on the problems of overcollecting and trampling of vegetation in the Seashore, but Kahn says that small-scale individual foraging causes minimal disruption to the environment and is beneficial because it connects people with their surroundings.

    “Foraging is about being really present with the environment around you,” Kahn says. “It’s an opportunity to have kids and adults become stewards of their land, because then they understand their back yards, their cemeteries, their playgrounds, their sidewalks, and the more they become aware of them, the more they start to care about this place that they might call home.”

    A basket of edible mushrooms foraged in Vermont. (Photo courtesy Melany Kahn)

    Kahn says that “mushrooms have gotten a very bad reputation,” due to a lack of knowledge about how to find and safely identify mushrooms. “Even a basic understanding of how the mycological world works, even if you don’t have any desire to eat anything from the woods and you’re scared of it, is a worthy pursuit,” she says. Mushroom foraging, just like hunting, gardening, or fishing, requires knowledge to do safely, she says, and her goal, and, she hopes, now the goal of the Audubon instructors, is to “enhance the accessibility of mushroom education.”

    Kahn serves the audience the lightly roasted and salted black trumpet mushrooms. They have a delicate, umami-rich flavor and a crunchy texture without a hint of sliminess. “It’s like getting a peach off a peach tree,” Kahn says, “and you bite into it and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, that’s what a peach is supposed to taste like, right?’ Wild foraged mushrooms are just a level better.”

    Genevieve Martin, a sanctuary volunteer, says that it is her first time having black trumpets, and although they are very good, “they need more salt and garlic.”

    Black trumpet mushrooms are hard to see, mixed with twigs and leaves on the forest floor. (Photo courtesy Melany Kahn)

    As the workshop ends, the room is abuzz about the world of fungi. Nancy Truitt-Blosser, an Audubon staff member who lives in North Eastham, says that she is excited to share her new knowledge of fungi with both locals and first-timers to the Outer Cape.

    Irwin Schorr, a volunteer for over 20 years at Mass Audubon who lives in Brewster, admits that he had “no interest in mushrooms whatsoever” as a child, but that he plans to go foraging with his grandson, who he predicts will be “definitely into this in a very big way” when he visits.

    As the fungi students — soon-to-be fungi teachers — file out of the classroom, Kahn walks outside, where a heavy downpour has just soaked the ground. All around her mushrooms explode from the damp earth, their tiny heads climbing upwards between stones, tufts of grass, and patches of sand. There is suddenly a whole world of treasure out there that had previously been hidden.

    Mushrooms don’t have to be edible to be worth noticing. Kahn says. “You know that feeling when you’ve lost something and then you find it? It’s like ‘Eureka!’ ” She smiles before spotting a brown russula rising between fallen pines — not to eat, just to admire.

    KITCHEN TABLE

    Nettles Make a Silky Spring Soup

    Wild things to make hearts sing

    By

    The nettles are up! I’ve never been so grateful to see a wild green. Nettles sting, yes. But they’re free and prolific. And right now, they’re tall enough to harvest.

    Wild nettles
    Wear gloves when you pick wild nettles — they’re delicious cooked, but even the tender leaves sting. (Photo Elspeth Hay)

    I first learned about nettles from my friend Ish. Her mom knew all kinds of folk remedies and recipes, and she brought me a nettle soup after our first daughter was born. Nettles have been used as a tonic since ancient times. But they’re not just good for you, they’re good, period. They have a kick that spinach lacks.

    Nettles grow all over the world, but Ish showed me where to find them here. We looked in disturbed areas with wet soil — paths along streams or ponds and along dirt roadsides. She told me that nettles sting thanks to hollow stinging hairs called trichomes on the leaves and stems, which apparently act like tiny hypodermic needles. When you brush against them, they inject histamine and a cocktail of other unpleasant chemicals into your skin that make it red and painful and itchy. She taught me to hunt for nettles in long sleeves and long pants, and to wear gloves while cutting the leaves off the stems. And she showed me how the hairs disappear with cooking.

    The one stroke of good luck we are having these days is an early spring and plenty of time for walks. Keep your eyes peeled and your gloves in your pocket, and you just might come home with fresh greens for this soup.

    Irish Nettle Soup

    Makes 2 big bowls or 4 small ones

    This soup is adapted from Darina Allen’s Forgotten Skills of Cooking. In light of the fact that we’re all trying to take fewer trips to the store, I’ve made suggestions for substitutions at the end of the recipe. You’d be surprised what you can get away with.

    3 Tbsp. butter

    1/2 cup chopped onion

    1 medium potato, peeled and chopped

    1 qt. chicken stock

    5 oz. fresh nettles, washed and chopped

    1/2 cup whole milk

    Melt the butter in a soup pot over medium heat. Add the onion and potato and stir. Season with salt and pepper, cover the pot, and turn it down to low. Cook for 10 minutes, or until the vegetables are beginning to get soft.

    Add the stock, turn up the heat to medium, and bring to a boil. Turn the heat back down and simmer until the potatoes begin to fall apart.

    Add the nettle leaves and simmer another few minutes. Be careful not to overcook or the greens will lose their flavor.

    Add the milk, puree the soup, and taste for salt. Season as needed and serve piping hot.

    Substitutions: Instead of butter, you could use olive oil, vegetable oil, lard, chicken fat, or tallow. In place of the onion, scallions, shallots, or leeks work, or 1/4 cup of wild onions or chives; or 3 cloves minced garlic. Substitute a turnip, rutabaga, parsnip, or Jerusalem artichokes for the potato. Use vegetable stock or salty water if you don’t have chicken stock. Any kind of milk or cream will do — or omit it.

     

    in the wild

    Not All Fungi Foragers Are Good Environmental Stewards

    Overcollecting and trampling disturb a delicate symbiosis

    By

    mushroom in the Wellfleet woods
    Careful mushroom foragers known not to disturb the “duff” that creates good conditions for fungi. (Photo Sophie Ruehr)

    The Outer Cape’s sandy, acidic soils are generally seen as inhospitable for food crops. But every fall, people travel from across New England and farther afield to visit our dunes and pine forests, looking for the special mushrooms that thrive in nutrient-poor soils and in symbiotic relationships with pines and oaks.

    The number of mushroom foragers has increased in recent years, said Bill Yule of Haddam, Conn., who was picking mushrooms at Wellfleet’s Great Island in the Cape Cod National Seashore last week. Yule drove here expressly to forage, as he has done for many years.

    No one the Independent interviewed for this story would admit to selling foraged mushrooms from the Outer Cape to fancy restaurants in the city. One Russian collector at Great Island told a reporter that there were “no mushrooms today” as she filled the trunk of her car with fungi.

    Bill Yule knows his king boletes from the bogus ones, but he worries about overcollection. (Photo Sophie Ruehr)

    Yule said that not all foragers are respectful environmental stewards. “Some people come out and grab everything they see,” he said. “Some people rake the pine duff, looking for matsutake buttons to sell in Boston. It’s not huge, but it gets bigger every year.”

    Matsutake and porcini, also known as boletes, are both tasty mushrooms that grow in piney woods across the Cape. They can command high prices, $40 to $50 per pound and sometimes higher.

    Liam Luttrell Rowland, the chef at Spindler’s in Provincetown, said this week that, on rare occasions, he buys local matsutake harvested by trusted foragers.

    “I don’t like the idea of someone coming to the Cape and making a bunch of money harvesting mushrooms,” Luttrell Rowland added. Safety and legality are his top priorities, he said.

    Mushroom fever breaks the rules

    Within the boundaries of the National Seashore an individual is allowed to pick up to five gallons of mushrooms per day for home use. Digging in or disturbing the soil while collecting, however, is strictly prohibited. Furthermore, collecting mushrooms for sale is “completely illegal,” said Seashore Supt. Brian Carlstrom. “It’s for personal consumption only.”

    Carlstrom said that citations have been issued for overcollection in the past. Although the Seashore is not actively monitoring mushroom foragers, “Our rangers are looking for anything that might seem excessive,” he said.

    Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Sanctuary has also experienced some illicit collecting.

    Director Melissa Lowe Cestaro said that people often forage in the sanctuary despite its strict

    no-collection policy. “We require people to stay on trails,” she said, “and foraging takes you off-trail and sometimes into sensitive conservation areas.”

    Cestaro said that illicit foraging has been a problem each fall in her 25 years at Audubon. Mushroom hunters often sneak into the sanctuary from West Road, parking their cars a few feet away from the signs prohibiting collection.

    From the large quantity of their hauls, Cestaro infers that foragers might be selling their mushrooms. “Sometimes I see people with a carload of mushrooms,” she said. “It’s not like you can eat a truckload in a day.”

    It’s a sport for the Russians

    Lucy Lins of North Falmouth was the disappointed forager at Great Island last week whose car trunk contained several boxes of boletes, of which porcini are a subgroup.

    Lins is Russian, and she said that mushroom foraging is the Russian equivalent of recreational fishing. “It’s a sport — something you do just for fun,” she said. “You spend time outside and walk around.” Lins claimed that she would enjoy foraging even if no tasty mushrooms could be found.

    Ilya Bernstein of New York grew up in the former U.S.S.R. and has spent several autumns in Truro. He explained that collecting mushrooms is a popular weekend activity in Russia.

    “Russian peasants, traditionally, have had very little food of their own,” Bernstein said. “For long stretches of history, they ate mushrooms.” In the 1960s it became fashionable among city dwellers to spend a day foraging in the countryside, he said.

    Russian foragers look specifically for boletes, Bernstein said. He doubted that anyone was selling them, though. “They’re very beautiful,” he said. “But [boletes] look better than they taste.”

    Foraging on the Cape has a reputation among the Russian foragers.

    “There’s a story that Russians tell — a mushroom horror story,” Bernstein said. “One day, someone went and gathered several bags of mushrooms. They were stopped by a ranger in the parking lot and forced to dump them all out” — a complete waste of perfectly good fungi. “From the perspective of a mushroom picker, it’s a complete outrage,” said Bernstein.

    Guarding mushroom knowledge and ecosystems

    Overcollecting and trampling of forest vegetation could have long-term effects on Cape Cod’s ecosystems, and mycologists worry that if word gets out about the valuable species growing here, the situation will only get worse.

    Wesley Price, head of the Cape Cod Mycological Society, said that foraging has increased in recent years. “The awareness of what we have is growing,” Price said. “Caring for that resource is not always foremost in people’s mind when they’re foraging.”

    Although there’s little research on how much harvesting is too much, overcollecting could result in fewer fungi. If mushrooms are collected before they have a chance to drop their spores and reproduce, “it could impact the overall health of the species and genetic diversity,” Price said.

    Bill Neill, a mycologist and co-author of Cape Cod Mushrooms, said that the increasing number of foragers in the woods is changing the landscape. “It’s not like people go from point A to point B,” said Neill. “It’s all cow trails, meandering though the pines. Certain places just get so trampled. It must be taking its toll.”

    Fungi play important roles in the ecosystems of Cape Cod. Many fungi live below ground, where we can’t see them, and their mycelia — tiny, spindly roots — are microscopic. In one square foot of soil, there are miles of mycelial threads, which connect to surrounding trees to exchange nutrients and water.

    Without these symbiotic relationships between fungi and trees, “There would be a lot less forest than there is now,” Neill said. “Out in the wind, it’s a very hostile environment, and fungi are a big reason why the forests can survive.”

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