Crowds come from across Southeast for mushrooms
Claudia Littrell moved to Cave Spring a couple of years ago and started the Cave Spring Mushroom Club to meet new people. Saturday she was meeting new friends and renewing old acquaintances from all over the Southeast at the Georgia Mushroom Festival at Rolater Park in Cave Spring.
“I started to see all of the amazing things people do with mushrooms, the science behind it and decided we’re going to have to have a festival,” Littrell said.
Anthoni Goodman, from Birmingham, is in the process of creating the Alabama Mushroom Society. He brought a number of unusual mushrooms to the event.
“I think more than anything else people tend to stay in this because they become part of a community. People can go out and forage for mushrooms together and our organization will start doing dinners and forays together,” Goodman said.
Taylor Palmer, from North Carolina, brought some Reishi mushrooms that he found on hemlock trees in western North Carolina. He got into ‘shrooming when he was on a hike and saw one of the Reishi mushrooms sticking out off a tree.
“It was bright red and shiny and just caught my attention, it just called me,” Palmer said.
Palmer doesn’t even know the name of the most unusual mushroom he’s come across.
“It was a little blue one that turns wood blue,” Palmer said. “As it eats the wood it turns it blue so you can take that wood to make a blue spoon or whatever out of.”
Terry Ledbetter, from Red Level, Alabama, came to the event in hopes of learning how to start a similar event closer to his home in deep south Alabama.
Cave Spring’s Nancy Fricks was cooking up sausages and mushrooms so that visitors could have something to sample.
“These people come from all over ... Florida, Pennsylvania, it’s really educational,” Fricks said. “This is something we’re new to. They can tell you the medicinal purposes of mushrooms, how good they are, the ones you need to stay away from.”
Tradd Cotter, from Mushroom Mountain, South Carolina, had 40 to 50 varieties of mushroom spawn for sale.
“It’s like a culture for mushrooms, every one of these bags — if you plant them correctly — can grow 30 to 50 pounds of mushrooms, it’s like mushroom seed,” Cotter said. He was one of the featured speakers at the day-long event.
Littrell hopes to pull together all of the different groups across the Southeast to grow the Mushroom Festival into an even larger event next year, in fact she said it would be a two-day event in Cave Spring in 2019. She said that next year she hopes to bring in several professional chefs who are experts in the preparation of the different varieties of edible mushrooms.