President's Message

By Chester Laskowski


Se no takai hiti ni heta ari kino kogari
Mushroom hunting:
Tall people
Are no good at it.
Yayu

Incredibly, with this month’s general meeting and the election of next year’s officers, our official 1995-96 mushroom season will be over. Mushrooming, itself will continue with Sierra moreling and Dr. Desjardin’s “Higher Fungi of the Sierra Nevada” class in June. In July, we gather for our mid-summer potluck picnic which for the last two years has been held in Joaquin Miller Park in the East Bay. This year it will be held on Sunday, June 30 at 12:00 P.M.. All members are invited to bring family and friends and a potluck dish to share, something for the grill if you like and drinks, plates and utensils for yourself. Information on the picnic will be announced on the Mushroom Hotline for June. Stop by to say “Hello” or spend the afternoon. Fred Stevens brought a collection of 46 mid-summer species to our 1994 gathering. Following a season of prolonged fruiting of Matsutaki, hedgehogs, and black and yellow-foot chanterelles, who knows what this summer might bring. Herb Saylor will close our season of lectures this month with a talk on his published specialty, “The Hypogeous Fungi of California”. This year’s mushroom cultivation classes and cultivation field trip were extremely well attended. We are negotiating opening the fall season with a lecture by the owner of Petaluma Mushroom Farm followed by a field trip to his growing facility in Sonoma County.

The announcement I made last September of the coming NAMA Foray still holds, but has been pushed forward to the Spring of 1998 to fit the schedule of the Asilomar Convention Center. We especially need to fill gaps in our slide collection to put on the best show possible for NAMA, so the extra preparation time is welcome. Many long time members have put together personal slide collections and we need your help building a permanent traveling exhibit of high quality color enlargements of mushrooms. We hope to build this exhibit from the best of the slides our members provide. Please, we need your offer of the proudest of your slides to permanently represent the best of the MSSF.

The enthusiasm and readiness to assist with projects and in emergencies that dozens of members, officers and Council chairs, as well as the circle of friends have made my term as President a great pleasure and very satisfying. And this includes even those of you who through your attendance and show of interest in lectures and events essentially gave a vote of confidence in the programming and efforts we have made for the club.

I would genuinely like to invite anyone in the club to offer suggestions on areas of interest to them, and ideas for the improvement of the club. My phone number is in every Mycena News.

Thank you all for the part you played this year.

-- Chester Laskowski


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