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maybe the chanterelle season moved
Monday, August 17 2026
This morning on my walk with Charlotte, I took her up the Farm Road to the Chamomile Headwaters Trail and went up that to check the chanterelle patch. Since I'd discovered another patch of chanterelles yesterday and it was producing an off-season bounty, maybe there would be chanterelles in my best patch as well. And wow, there were more chanterelles there than I'd ever seen before. I should've brought a bag with me. Instead, I was forced to use the belly of my teeshirt to collect them as I had yesterday. And I had to work fast too because I'd neglected to apply any mosquito repellant. I grabbbed the chanterelles without caring about how much pine needles and such came up with them. The question from all this is: why are chanterelles appearing now, a month later than their usual season. Do they always last that long and I hadn't noticed? Or does the season shift around depending on the rain? It's rare to have this much rain in mid August, so perhaps this is their normal response to that. And perhaps the July drought had postponed the season. These questions can only be answered after I've observed chanterells across many summers with wildly different characteristics.
This afternoon I tried to come up with a chore I could do while keeping an eye on Neville so he doesn't wander off and have some heart-accelerating adventure. So I returned to the long-procrastinated task of fixing the radiator I removed from our neighbor A's upstairs bathroom. I figured out how to pressure-test it using rubber gaskets and some brass fittings that were able to plug up the nonstandard union fittings on either end. Then I was able to introduce air into one of the fittings with an air compressor. This air leaked out at a visible crack that I then tried to repair by soldering on a copper patch. But not only was I unable to get that copper patch to seal that crack, but I found a failed joint in another part of one of the two proprietary manifolds. I don't know what I am going to do, but just being able to pressure test it is huge.
Late this afternoon I cooked up a pan of chanterelles with onions and another pan of kale and collard greens from the garden as well as a box of Barilla campanelle pasta. The cookable greens in the garden are pretty moth-eaten at this time of year and it can be difficult to get all the little caterpillars off them, but I did the best I could.
When Gretchen came home, she immediately had to be in a meeting, so I ended up eating my chanterelles with campanelle pasta in front of my computer by myself. Later Gretchen wanted to watch Louder Than Fear, a documentary of the life of the drummer Travis Barker (of Blink 182), mostly because he's a vegan. It was a pretty good documentary up until the point where Barker marries a Kardashian, after which there was a lot of talk of God that suggested a marriage founded on poor critical thinking skills. Barker suffered a lot of loss in his life, some of it the kind that comes when the Learjet you're flying in crashes, and the density of his tattoos are insane, so there were plenty of hooks for poignancy. He's also a cautionary tale of why it's not a good idea to walk around desensitized to pain killers; you never know when you're going to end up in the hospital with burns over 65% of your body, and if you do, you will want pain medications to work.
It was my turn to sleep with Neville in his corral tonight, and it took him hours to settle down and fall asleep. He kept whimpering and then not satisfying whatever need he had. Eventually I just left him in the open front doorway of the house (with walk-through screen to keep out the mosquitoes) and eventually he got up, went outside, and pooped. After that he was good.
I notice when I am outside with him at night, there are almost no mosquitoes. This suggests that the bats living in our bat house are either eating them all up or discouraging them from flying entirely.
My chanterelle harvest this morning after I'd picked out most of the pine needles and leaf debris. The Ryobi impact driver is for scale. Click to enlarge.
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