While I didn’t come upon a blue hookah smoking caterpillar on any of the mushrooms at Knickercane Park last week, I did discover a wide variety of mushrooms. It seems this year there’s an abundance of them popping up everywhere, more so than usual, and not just here in the Boothbay region. I met a couple from Rhode Island there, having lunch, who couldn’t help but notice me on the ground shooting pics of the fungi fruits, and during our brief conversation they said it was the same in Rhode Island – plentiful mushrooms everywhere.

No doubt you have some in your yard and have found them on walks through the woods. I don’t know about you, but at Knickercane I began to feel like I’d been cast in an Elvira (Mistress of the Dark) B horror film and any moment the mushrooms were going to sprout legs like the brooms in Fantasia’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

I contacted Tracey Hall, environmental educator at Boothbay Region Land Trust, and asked her if this was a weather-related phenomenon. Hall agreed there were more mushrooms around than she’d seen in  years. And here’s why:  “It’s a combination of weather conditions affecting humidity and moisture levels,” she said. “It’s created the ideal conditions for them to reproduce.”

Admiring the array of mushrooms is one thing. Eating them is quite another. Unlike Alice, it’s unlikely that a blue caterpillar will be around to tell you if you should eat a wild mushroom let alone what would happen to  you if you did!  So unless you know wild mushrooms, don’t plan on including them in your next stir fry. And be sure not to let your canine friend eat any while you’re out walking. Distract him by saying something like, “Hey Rondo! Is that a ... squirrel over there?”

There are several mushroom field guides and a couple Maine Mushroom Facebook pages you can consult before placing a wild mushroom in your basket.

Toadstools and mushrooms: Have you ever wondered what makes one or the other? From the research I’ve done, toadstools are poisonous shrooms ... that’s your Death Caps and  Fly Agarics. These are the delightfully color-topped shrooms in reds, oranges and yellows, to name two.

And I can’t write about mushrooms without mentioning fairy rings. These rings, sometimes arcs, not full blown rings, are where the fey, or fairies, dance after a rain. But never go into the center of a fairy ring. You may find yourself in the Land of the Fey to never return, and, if you did return it could be 100 years later!

I worked at a mushroom farm in Franklin, Connecticut for a few months back in the mid-late years of the 1970s harvesting the tasty morsels. When I moved here in 1988, I was looking for some mushrooms and there were numerous packages of Franklin’s crop. The farm has been closed for quite some time I hear. Interesting people work in mushroom farms and some very entertaining ones at that; in particular, there were two guys who used to do a Yogi and BooBoo shtick that had us all dying from laughter: “Hey BooBoo, check out the shrooms in this pic-a-nic basket ....”