Santa Cruz mushroomer Christian's Schwarz, who's volunteering for this year's Fungus Fair, snapped this picture of an Amanita Muscaria.
With Santa Cruz’s Fungus Fair around the corner, organizers are going into desperation mode.
“It’s been a terrible year for mushrooms. It’s been so dry and cold,” fair co-chair Phil Carpenter says. “It’s going to be a challenge, but we’ll pull it off.”
Mushrooms prefer steady, consistent rains and a little fog to help them fruit and grow. The past year has made things difficult for event planners from Santa Cruz’s Fungus Federation, which assembles displays of locally picked mushrooms at the Louden Nelson Center for the event.
This year’s season is as bad as any Carpenter has seen in his 35 years volunteering for the event. “There was one year right at the beginning with similar conditions, where the fair was canceled,” says Carpenter, who resembles former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka—granted, that has nothing to do with mushrooms, we just think it’s cool.
In any case, with these fungus lovers, failure is not an option.
“Now we have a lot more momentum and the venue booked and the publicity,” he says. “If we canceled now, it’d be like ‘what?’”
Experienced foragers like Carpenter and Christian Schwarz, who’s currently co-authoring Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast, will lead impromptu talks in the center’s main auditorium, where the federation puts fungal displays.
“We’ll do our best to make it a fun event for everyone who comes,” says Ditka—uh, we mean, Carpenter.
Mushrooming legend David Arora (who first launched the fair), chef Joseph Schultz and tattoo-covered, purple-haired mycology Ph.D. Tom Volk are coming back this year to give scheduled talks. And there will also be lessons on identifying both poisonous and edible fungi.
If in the meantime, any commoners who do stumble across mushrooms in this wintry desert, they should jump for joy at then incredible good fortune and extraordinary field vision. Then bring it to the 40th annual fair, which kicks off Friday Jan. 10.
“We’ll have an ID table,” Carpenter says. “We’ll tell you what it is, and whether or not you can eat and the kind of stuff.”
