Could foraging for mushrooms help reduce your grocery bill?

A wild mushroom expo will be held in Devon, southwest of Edmonton, on the weekend to teach people about foraging for the fungi.

With food costs rising, more people are looking for ways to reduce their grocery bill. Part of that could include foraging for mushrooms. Martin Osis joined Nicole Lampa on CTV Morning Live Edmonton with more on an upcoming wild mushroom expo Aug. 17.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Nicole Lampa: Why is Edmonton a great area for foraging mushrooms?

Martin Osis: Edmonton is a great area because we’re a little wetter than other parts of the province. Calgary kind of sucks for mushrooms because it’s so dry there and here we’ve got the great river valley and lots of different habitats. Mushrooms love it here.

Nicole: What kind of mushrooms did you bring?

Martin: We’ve got portabellos here. If you’ve had a portabello from the grocery store, it’s just OK, but the fresh ones are dynamite. The other common one is the fairy ring mushroom. This is one that grows on most people’s lawns and a lot of people don’t know that this is an excellent choice for an edible mushroom. There’s lots of stuff that grows on lawns that look like fairy rings, so you need to do a little bit of research and look underneath to make sure that you’ve got all the features that you want. I suggest Googling it or checking out a book for that. At times, you can buy these in different grocery stores at $50 to $60 per pound imported from Europe.

Nicole: What other advice do you have for people who want to forage for the first time?

Martin: If you have anything growing on your lawn,growing in your yard or growing where you walk, pick it and bring it to the big expo that we’re having on Sunday. That’s a great place to start meeting people that can teach you how to forage. We’ve got some courses, lots of walks and lots of talks with the Alberta Mycological Society. So join a society and people can help you.

Nicole: What time of year is best in Edmonton for foraging mushrooms?

Martin: Every time of year. Even in the winter there are people that forage for different medicinal mushrooms that grow on trees in the winter time. Spring brings its own mushrooms. We have morels in the spring, oysters in June, lion’s mane in July and now we’re into portabellos and fairy rings. Every season has its own mushroom.

Nicole: What are the positives of wildfires? I understand that they allow for mushrooms.

Martin: They do a reset on the landscape. A lot of the mushrooms have a relationship with the trees because that’s where they’re getting their sugars from. So when the trees burn, they panic like, “Oh, my God. I’ve lost my partner.” Then they start to fruit all the time so that they can disperse the spores and survive genetically.

Nicole: What can people going to the mushroom expo expect?

Martin: We’re going to have huge display tables of all kinds of different mushrooms. We have a chef from NAIT doing some mushroom tasting. We’ve got a number of lectures going on all day, lots of vendor booths with different mushroom products and outdoor activities like the Friends of Elk Island. The expo is in Devon on Sunday.