News and thoughts from the Bosque Village

We traveled across the state to spend two nights in Senguio, Michoacán, for their annual mushroom fair (La Fería de Hongos).

Senguio is a small town close to Ciudad Hidalgo.  Once a year its residents host the mushroom fair.  They set up a long table full of identified wild mushrooms.  Several stands sold spores of shiitake and oyster (seta in Spanish) mushrooms.  Town restaurants cater the event with a wide variety of mushroom dishes including tamales, posole, tostadas, soups, burgers and more.  One table was set up with over 20 filling choices for mushroom quesadillas!

The fair was tastefully organized with events and educational workshops throughout the weekend.  There were tours of the area, workshops on medicinal mushrooms, even a hot air balloon making workshop.

We felt warmly welcomed by the town.  The director of the fair, Carlos, was busy the entire weekend coordinating events and activities but still took time to chat with us.  The owners of the restaurant “El Coyote” were so kind, offering to take us mushroom hunting after the fair.  We were stuffed again and again with mushroom treats.

Senguio was decorated with mushrooms!  Mushroom trash cans, mushroom posters, even little kids dressed up in mushroom suits.  The drawing on the fair poster was the winner of a drawing contest among the children in Senguio.  We loved looking at all the entries.

For anyone interested in mushrooms, this fair is very impressive.  It was well organized and attended by some of the most respected mushroom experts in Mexico, including Pátzcuaro resident and author of our favorite regional mushroom book, biologist Horalia Díaz-Barriga Vega.

So we send a big virtual thanks to the lovely people of Senguio.  We’re looking forward to next year!

The Mushroom Fair / La Fería de Hongos photoset on Bosque flickr

Oh, we feel so sorry for our poor tomato plants.

They have a hard life in this climate.  During the dry season we choose a few to water with our kitchen greywater, but aphids become a problem.  During the rainy season they tend to rot, so this year we planted several of them in pots that we can move in and out of the rain to protect them from too much water.

And then the hornworm showed up.   At first we thought, “How pretty!” and snapped a few pictures and let it be.  Then we looked the worm up and found that it is the culprit that has eaten the first 4 signs of fruit on our Oaxacan tomato plants!

We will be on the lookout for more of these little buggers and try to get some yield this year from our tomato plants.  We are not planning on using any chemical control to get rid of them, however they will be great food for our chickens!  Hopefully some of the local birds will come help us out as well.  Hornworms are notoriously difficult to find since their green color matches the plants, but they glow under black light.  At night we can use a black light flashlight to easily spot them and remove them from our tomatoes.

Thousands of mushrooms have begun popping up all over the forest in the last couple of weeks.

Four obvious mushrooms grow here in the forest that we can harvest to eat.  There are a number of other mushrooms that are edible and those with experience sometimes harvest them for food or medicinal use.  The first ones to pop up every year are the “Yellows” - Amarillos. The scientific name is Amanita caesarea.  Because other mushrooms in the Amanita family are very poisonous, if there is any question about whether we’ve got an amarillo or not, we don’t cook it up to eat.

The amarillos are incredible to add to dishes for body and distinct mushroomy flavor.  Around here people roast them on a comal to eat for a snack, letting them cool a bit before eating plain, with just a touch of salt.

At the Bosque we try to spread the mushroom love as far as possible, so we add them to soups or send them to the Casita for folks to add to their eggs in the morning.

The next edible mushrooms we expect to see are trompas.  Trompas grow like crazy here.  After a couple of rainy days it is easy to walk around and collect bags full of the bright orange goofy-shaped mushrooms (though, as wikipedia mentions, this mushroom is not a ’shroom at all, but a parasite that grows on mushrooms).

And apart from the edibles, hundreds of other mushrooms are all over the place.  Some prefer to grow under the pines, others under the oaks.  Some grow on trees, others on the ground.  The beginning of mushroom season is our final sign of life returning to the forest after months without rain.  We welcome the forest fungi!

Read about the list of mushrooms at the Bosque here.

Tomatoes are in season.  This means they are cheap - as little as 3 pesos per kilo (about 10 cents per pound).  So we bought boxes of tomatoes to preserve them so that during their most expensive time we can still enjoy salsas and tomato sauces for pasta without paying nearly six times as much as we can pay right now.

This year we made two types of sauces, and skipped canning whole or diced tomatoes.  We made about 10 quarts of savory sauce for pasta or minestrone soups, and 15 quarts of spicy salsa for tacos, chips, or Mexican style soups.

Sterilizing jars:

Blanching tomatoes to easily remove their skins:

Laura removing skins off of 15 kilos of tomatoes!  She was good at this:

Ingredients for the spicy salsa:

And the final product:

Three years ago we started grafting quince and pear trees onto a native fruit tree. Read how we graft in this past entry.

Today, we have over 1,400 grafted trees throughout the Bosque. Walking around the other day we spotted one tree that is doing particularly well, with several small quince fruits starting to show up.

These grafted trees are a very clear example of successful permaculture and food forestry.  The pear and quince trees have strong, native roots of the manzanillo tree, and require no water, fertilizer, or care.  As we mention quite often, we would love to keep irrigation to a minimum at the Bosque.  Planting fruit and nut trees that can survive here through the dry season is a total win.  And a volunteer here right now recently spoke very highly of quince jam he made and preserved in a farm in Europe…  we may be trying that soon!

The fruits showing up remind us of our need to make a solar dehydrator and think of other ways to preserve and use the fruits.  Pear cider?  Quince jam?  Ideas?