Curious about mushroom foraging? It’s an ‘exceptionally good’ year to start in Southern California
LOS ANGELES — Southern California isn’t the most obvious place to forage for mushrooms. Mushrooms thrive in damp and dark places, a description that doesn’t always match the climate of drought-dried Los Angeles.
But during L.A.’s rainy season — from mid-October to mid-April — local mushroom lovers still hit the trails.
“This is an exceptionally good mushroom year,” said Bat Vardeh, the field trip chair for the Los Angeles Mycological Society, walking through the trails behind Canyon View Park in Aliso Viejo. “This is not common, just walking around and seeing mushrooms left and right.”
Vardeh, 26, essentially eats, sleeps and breathes mushrooms. When she’s not leading Mycological Society forays (group trips to identify fungi), she runs another group called the Foraging & Mushroom Hunting Women of SoCal and forages on her own to reduce food waste. Even when it comes to work, she’s hunting for ’shrooms.
“Technically, I get
