The Good Life in Aggtelek National Park Part 45: Getting the Garden Ready and Mushrooming Course

The land outside the courtyard fence has been left untouched for decades except for the regular firewood plundering by our neighbours. Since we need more space for our garden, and since most of our fruit trees are diseased or dried out, we decided to clear some land of the invasive acacia and try and save the remaining fruit and nut trees. Together with our colleague Norbi, we spent about a week clearing the land. The bigger trees were cut and stacked, amounting to about 2 m3. We broke up stacks of brush and branches for fire starters into various sizes, but the amount was just too staggering to deal with. Composting this stuff was not an option, so we ended up having to burn several piles of brush. Not wanting to lug buckets of water from the hozuse to douse the fire, I simply brought back ice chunks from the nearby frozen Bodva River flood waters near the house and dumped the ice on the fire. Sometime this month a CAT will come by and pull out all the stumps, after which we will ask a neighbour to plough in some horse manure so that we can plant some young fruit trees in the autumn. There is some amazing wood stacking art out there (just google it)...maybe next year. In the process we found a lot of taplo mushrooms on stumps,  possibly some scarlet elf caps, and some Judas ear mushrooms on a couple elderflower trees. It would be nice to keep the Judas ears around since they are edible, but like the taplo mushrooms including my favorite chicken of the woods, they also destroy their host tree.

This kind of information is becoming more and more important to me since I began a basic mushrooming accreditation course last month. Considering it is in Hungarian (with la lot of Latin thrown in), scientific, a matter of life and death, and the fact that I have not been in a classroom for a quarter century, I am worried I might have bitten off more than I can chew. Luckily last year Attila Karoly, one of my former students at Little Britain Services, was kind enough to send me one of the textbooks we are using. I was able to borrow another from our friends the Koltays in Aggtelek, who I have mentioned several times for their great forest fruit and mushroom products. The first day I was overwhelmed with the brutal new vocabulary. It is not even the scientific terms that are my main problem, but basic Hungarian adjectives describing the many different shapes of the mushroom stalks, caps, gills...It also a challenge for the teachers, who have never had a foreign student before. The course is 70 hours stretching from February until November 7th and the exam. Run by the the Miskolc Mushroom Association, half of the course will be in the classroom, the other half in the Bükk forests. If I can pick with 100% certainty 15-20 types of mushrooms by the the end of the course, then I will be satisfied. As it is, we need to be able to identify 110 mushrooms for the exam.

In the meantime, March 5th rolled around. This date did not mark International Woman's Day for us, but rather the date when our Spanish olives were due to be tasted after 3 months jarred in brine. We opened our last yummy bottle of Blaxland Estate 2012 Shiraz, I made some hummus, and Kata lit the candles. The olives were so bitter that they were inedible...even after 30 days of rinsing every day and 3 months in brine. We are going to wash them off, rinse them regularly for a few more days, and re-jar them and see what happens.