It’s been a great long weekend, but apparently all good things must come to an end.
Here are the Geyer St Sheiks (a terrific band – I wish they’d come up to Toronto to play!) performing 16 Tons….
It’s been a great long weekend, but apparently all good things must come to an end.
Here are the Geyer St Sheiks (a terrific band – I wish they’d come up to Toronto to play!) performing 16 Tons….
27th Street 
Hi Mr. Goat or whoever you are. Yes of course you are right. There are plenty of edible mushrooms in Ontario, though certainly not so many as in some other places in the country. Thank you for your comment. I hadn’t actually thought I was confusing anyone. Perhaps my humour is not to your taste and that’s fair enough. This blog is open to comments and I’m easy to reach. I do have a setting on the blog that automatically closes comments after a period of time, and I have that setting on so that I don’t lose comments on old posts. I don’t close comments on particular posts to avoid getting comments. In fact, as blogs go, this one doesn’t get very many comments at all as you can easily see, and I welcome the ones I get, including those critical of my blog, or critical of me personally. I have pretty thick skin. Folks who want to reach me can do exactly what you have done or simply email me. My name really is Eugene Knapik.
Let me say this. If you click on the mushrooms link at the top of this blog, and explore my posts about mushrooms, you will see many pictures of tasty edibles I’ve collected for the table. Anytime I’ve been contacted with specific questions about mushrooms, I’ve made every effort to be as forthcoming as possible, help with identification and so on. Last fall, I was asked by someone who looked at my posts about mushrooms to lead a mushroom walk, and with the caveat that I’m not a mycologist and don’t profess to be an expert by any means – just an interested amateur, I happily did so, and shared my knowledge and experience openly.
It’s true that I protect a few spots that I go to forage, and I do that so I have a few regular spots to go, favourite spots that don’t get much pressure. I suppose when some people enter search terms like “map of king bolete hot spots in Southern Ontario” into Google, they expect all to be revealed. I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed people by not writing about specific places. It seems that my little attempt at humour has at least irritated, and perhaps also offended you. Sorry about that Mr. Goat. This is a personal blog with a fairly limited audience. It isn’t intended as a mushroom guide to Southern Ontario, but I really wasn’t trying to mislead or offend anybody.
There is one thing about mushrooms I post periodically on this blog that isn’t intended to be funny, and I’d like to touch on it in this comment. That is that there are some mushrooms in Ontario forests that are deadly and many mushrooms that, while they won’t kill you, will make you very sick indeed. Please be very very careful about what you eat from the woods. I’m a very conservative mushroom picker. If I’m not absolutely certain of my identification, I won’t eat it. Ever. I’ll collect it, I’ll take spore prints, I’ll show it to others, but I won’t eat it until I’m sure, and I suggest my readers be equally careful.
All this said, although I never thought anyone would read that post and think, oh my, I guess you really can’t eat any mushrooms you find in the woods in Ontario, I’m going to take your comment to heart and in the future I will no longer suggest or imply or make jokes suggesting that Ontario is barron of tasty edible fungus. Some dry seasons, it does seem that way to amateur foragers like me. At other times, the foraging can be pretty good. I’ve posted pictures from some of my better days, and those posts are easy to find. In fact I also have a Pinterest board on Ontario mushrooms. You can see it here: http://www.pinterest.com/eugeneknapik/ontario-mushrooms/.
I hope you come back and visit this blog sometime, Mr. Goat. Have a look at my other posts about mushrooms. I also post regularly about folk music, about my dogs, gardening, artwork and so on. There are occasionally a few stories here, and even a recipe or two. Most of the time, it’s a fairly light-hearted personal blog that reflects my varied interests. I hope you find some things to enjoy here. Once again, sorry if I offended you or the other individual who commented.
Kevin was right on the post – No mushrooms in Southern Ontario – and you closed the comments. So this is why I am posting here. You ignore his very partial list of commonly found edibles in Southern Ontario and decide to use passive aggressiveness (which you call humour) – hippy dippy (what exactly does that mean – probably some outdated cliche about drug users – I wonder how many prescriptions you take..) to imply that Kevin is wrong. So on the record, you are either very ignorant or egotistical. Possibly a good helping of both. Your neck of the woods may have nothing (in terms of mushrooms to eat) , and you may want to educate yourself before you rant and post definitive key words that could confuse those that have not yet had a proper grounding in the basics of mushroom identification. Shame on you.