Mushroom season begins: You can love mushrooms without a stomach

It starts to rain and gets cold. Some people huddle their shoulders uncomfortably under their functional jackets. “Come under the beech tree roof for a bit,” says Ben Nurgenc. It is almost dry under the huge beech tree crowns, typical of the Sachsenwald east of Hamburg. The ground is soft and moist. Ideal for mushrooms. And that's why we're here.

We find the first ones on the trunk of a dead birch tree - lots of small, poisonous yellow ones. Mushroom guide Ben lets the others describe the mushrooms. In the end, everyone agrees: green-leaved sulfur head, a “decomposer” that lives on dead wood. He's as poisonous as he looks. Too bad. Disappointment can be read on some faces.

The interests differ: Practically all participants collect mushrooms to eat. Most people booked the tour because they wanted to expand their repertoire.

Ben, on the other hand, is committed to nature conservation. He is a conceptual artist and has also trained as a mycologist and maps the fungal occurrence in ecosystems. Mushroom tours are his third mainstay.

This is a growing industry as more and more people discover their interest in mushroom picking. The Waldsam company that Ben works for makes it clear on their website that their tours are not about collecting. But not everyone understood it that way.

Ben now has to capture them and try to pass on his own fascination for these intermediate creatures to his guests.

Sophia, a preschooler, finds everything in the beige-brown carpet of autumn leaves: there, a whitish umbrella mushroom with flakes on the umbrella. One person immediately knows: “Ah, a pearl mushroom!” But Ben lets him go from hand to hand first. We should look closely and describe what we see.

The tasty pearl mushroom, which grows in symbiosis with beech trees, has a deadly poisonous counterpart, the panther mushroom. You can recognize it by the “mountaineering socks” around the tuber, as Ben says. That's why it's so important to remove mushrooms completely from the ground for identification. The damage to the root system, the mycelium, is bearable. When a small piece of the hat breaks off, the break turns reddish. The proof: a pearl mushroom.

He still won't be taken away. Ben hangs it tenderly in a fork of a branch. “Then it can sprout more widely,” he says, meaning it can spread its seeds further. So that there will be mushrooms again next year.

Mushrooms are becoming fewer, says Ben, because it is becoming drier, due to intensive forest use and soil compaction caused by huge wood harvesters. “Even the fact that we’re standing here in a group like this isn’t that good,” he says.

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This is impossible for us laypeople to recognize. It's sprouting from the ground everywhere. The broad-leaved wood turnip, an edible mushroom, “but not that great”; the pink radish helmet, poisonous; the stiff coral, edible. Honey fungus, a parasite, grows on a tree trunk. “Pretty sure he killed the tree,” Ben says. Bare mushrooms, crack mushrooms, fly agarics - there is enough growing in this forest for a mass murder of people.

It's getting light because the sun comes out - and because we're transitioning from the gloomy beech forest into a light coniferous forest. “It’s not that interesting mycologically,” says Ben. But suddenly there are chestnuts.

Lars, whose daughter is sleeping on his back, arrives with a boletus the size of his thumb. “Spruce boletus!” he says triumphantly. Ben points to the brown net on the trunk. It's a bile bitterling that can mess up an entire pan of mushrooms. How does it taste? “Like vomit,” says Ben.

He sensed the group's hunting fever. “Anyone who still wants to collect chestnuts is welcome to stay,” he says. But nobody dares. The tour is over. But didn't we want to talk about Täublinge?

Ben lets us take some mushrooms from the compartment he filled during the hike. He holds up one with a pale red hat. And then comes the sentence that many were hoping for: “Woman deafening,” he says, “honestly, a little hotter than the porcini mushroom.”