Hi all,

The program for the upcoming NEMF foray is looking just great!

The NYMS is looking for a couple of members who are attending NEMF who could spare a couple of hours to sell our extra "Squamulose" NYMS 2010 t-shirts as a fundraiser for our club. Everything will be ready, you just need to sit and collect money!
The hours are:

• Thursday 1 to 5 pm
• Saturday 9 to noon
• Sunday 7 to 8:30 am

You don't necessarily have to sit the whole stint.
Please let me know if you can help out.
Thanks,
Maria Reidelbach

The annual NEMF Samuel Ristich Foray, the 34th, will be held September 23-26th at Soyuzivka, a Ukrainian Cultural Center located in Kerhonkson, NY. This location, 25 miles southwest of Kingston, NY will give access to the nearby Shawangunk Ridge and the southern Catskills.

We are offering a NEMF 2010 Commemorative Tee-shirt embroidered with the colorful Foray logo over the heart. The pre-foray price for the shirts is $16.00. To get an order form go to the nemf.org website or write to nemf2010@verizon.net

The response to registration has been heavy with under 15 places remaining! To download a registration form click here.

We have a forum on this site where we will post information on the Foray as it develops or go to the NEMF website.

I spotted this entertaining headline about new fossil evidence related
to Ophiocordyceps unilateralis and thought I'd share.

Here's a link to the full Guardian article.

We are proud to announce that on Saturday night in Colorado at the annual North American Mycological Association
foray our own Paul Sadowski received the Harry and Elsie Knighton Service Award.

(read more)

Stony Brook, August 7, 2010

Harriman Park is so dry right now that the park is likely to be closed very soon because of the fire danger. While we found very few mushrooms compared to other years at this location, we were pleased to find a very fresh White Chicken mushroom (Laetiporus Cincinnatus) at the base of a chestnut oak near the beginning of the trail. The other good edibles included a few large choice specimens of the Corrugated Milk Cap (Lactariuscorrugis) anda few small Distant-gilled Milk Cap (Lactariushygrophoroides). We found a dozen or so species of boletes, but few were either fresh or large enough to collect for dinner. There were several small mushrooms pushing up through the dried moss banks, and the mushroom of the day was a red Russula, something close to Russulasilvicola. Altogether we only found about 2 dozen different mushrooms, but considering the conditions, these have to be thought of as the core species that fruit even in dry conditions. As for rain, it must have rained here a week or so ago for the chicken mushroom to fruit and for the baby mushrooms to be pushing up, but except for the red Russulas dotting the slopes along the trail, you wouldn’t have seen any mushrooms today if you were with any of the hiking groups we passed. Another foray to this location is on the schedule for late August. Let’s hope the area gets some good rains between now and then.

For a species list, read more...

This came in from club member Leah Faerstein:

We signed up to www.Matteroftrust.org, a group that collects mostly hair and fur to make booms to protect the beaches from oil. From one of their updates, I found these paragraphs:

First, mats made from human hair, invented by hair stylist Phil McCrory  of SmartGrow.net <http://www.smartgrow.net>  after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, were used by  surfers and concerned citizens to clean up San Francisco's Ocean Beach in  November of 2007. Next, Paul Stamets of Fungi.com <http://www.fungicom>  donated Oyster mushroom  spawn which shoots out millions of roots, clinging to the mesh of oil-soaked  hairmats, helping to break down the hydrocarbon bonds in oil to hopefully turn the toxic  waste into landscape-grade fertilizer. The natural process is called “mycoremediation."

And also:

The Oily-Hairmat-Eating Mushroom Project at the Presidio is headed up by  Lisa Craig Gautier, founder of Matteroftrust.org, an ecological public charity.  “The amazing support and media excitement for this project has been  inspiring". The applications of this organic method has world wide  potential for environmental restoration. “People are attracted to  it because everyone understands oily hair and can track photos on Matteroftrust.org  showing how  the remediation research is working away on bunker fuel and used motor oil,  a worse polluter of our oceans." Says Gautier. A wide range of agencies  and organizations have come together to collaborate and advise on this project,  including the Presidio Trust, the California Department of Toxic Substances  and Control, the San Francisco Departments of the Environment, Emergency  Services and Public Health, SF Mycological Society, St. Vincent de Paul  Society and The East Bay Depot For Creative Reuse.

For more information, visit http://www.Matteroftrust.org/

Sigrid Junkermann sent a link to an article appearing in the Nutrition Journal: Both common and specialty mushrooms inhibit adhesion molecule expression and in vitro binding of monocytes to human aortic endothelial cells in a pro-inflammatory environment. Go here to read more. I did not see any mention of butter in the abstract... :-p

Hundreds of deaths during the late summer in small villages in China. Why?

To read about this go here

Club member Dorota Kolodziejczyk sent this in:

"Here's an interesting interview with a mushroom farmer in Long Island from the Serious Eats website."

http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/03/meet-your-farmers-david-falkowski-of-open-minded-organics-mushroom-farming-bridgehampton-hamptons-ny.html

Gary sent me this today so I thought I'd share:

"Here's a link to our article on the 1st case of Cortinarius poisoning in the Western Hemishphere. Watch those Corts!"

http://informahealthcare.com/eprint/Y25jrbi57fNVF7ITyCRh/full?tokenKey&

Dennis Aita sent this in earlier today. Read the NY Times Article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/dining/07truffle.html?_r=1&emc=eta1