WHO GATHERS YOUR SPECIMEN
Ten years in Europe.
A new shop in Canada.
Same two people, same species, a new forest. The numbers on this page were all earned over there - the Canadian shop has only just opened.
ShroomsBloom is not a warehouse. It is two people who have spent ten years walking into forests before sunrise for one mushroom, Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric, the мухомор of Eastern Europe, and learning, season after season, how to dry and rest it properly.
Ten years, more than 10,000 customers, close to 2,000 written reviews - all of that was Europe, and none of it was Canada. In Europe this mushroom is not exotic: it is a familiar part of forest culture, gathered and traded openly, with entire communities built around identifying and preserving it well. What crossed the Atlantic is the experience, not the customer list. In Canada the record starts with your order.
What the European years taught us
Almost everything that matters happens in the first forty-eight hours. Pick at dawn, when the caps are firm and cold. Never wash them - water dulls the red and invites rot. Part the caps from the stems before drying so the heat reaches evenly. Dry low and slow at 40 °C, then finish with a brief rise to 90 °C. Then leave them alone: three months of rest in a sealed pouch, in the dark, is what separates a proper specimen from a fast one.
Ten years of doing that in Europe, and of answering thousands of customer letters about it, is why our caps stay brick-red instead of turning brown, and why our powder mills light cream-ochre instead of the dark, scorched grind you often see elsewhere.
Who writes the journal
Eve Jung has been picking mushrooms since 2016. The first seasons were European, in the birch and pine country where this particular mushroom has a name in every language and a story attached to most of them. The picking moved to the Coast Mountains of British Columbia, which is where every specimen sold here comes from.
There is no biology degree behind any of this, and it is better said out loud than left to be discovered. What there is instead is ground: the rules she keeps are the ones the forest teaches and the old pickers repeat. Leave the mycorrhiza as you found it. If you are not certain, it stays where it is. Everything comes out in an open woven basket, so the spores of what you picked fall back along the path you walked.
Two of us walk the ground, and the work behind the shop is not delegated: the same hands brush the needles off on the spot, part the caps from the stems, run the dryer for its thirty-six hours and close the pouch. The film on this site is that day, filmed in real time.
The journal is the reading that goes with it, and Eve Jung writes it. It started as a field notebook, drawings made where the mushroom stood rather than copied off a photograph afterwards, and the habit of putting down only what is actually in front of you came with it into the articles. That notebook was never about one species: chanterelles, morels, matsutake and the bracket fungi get the same page.
The folklore pieces are sourced and the sources are listed at the foot of every one, so you can check the reading rather than take a word for it. Where the record is disputed, the articles say it is disputed. They are history, language and habitat, written by someone who spends the autumn in the forest and the winter in the archive.
Everything in the field journal is written here, and the reading behind it is listed at the foot of each piece.
About what nature does, and what we are allowed to say
People write to us about the forest, about walking into it before sunrise, about why a red cap under a birch has held human attention for a thousand years. We understand the pull. Nature has been the oldest company people keep, and this particular mushroom has walked beside northern cultures for as long as those cultures have had stories.
People ask what it does. There is a great deal written about this mushroom, and we are not the ones who get to summarise it for you.
Health Canada does not permit a business selling a botanical specimen to make health, wellness or therapeutic claims. So we make none, in either direction. And the literature would not let us make a simple claim even if we were allowed: the same reviews that discuss possible applications also record poisonings, hospital admissions and a firm warning against self-medication. Anyone who hands you a tidy answer about this mushroom is selling you something. Usually the mushroom.
What is not in dispute is the history. Amanita muscaria has been treated as an out-of-the-ordinary mushroom for thousands of years, set apart from every other mushroom by the reindeer herders of Siberia, by Sámi, Norse and Slavic tradition, and written about continuously ever since. That record is public. Read it yourself: the ethnography, then the chemistry, then the arguments, then the rebuttals, and read the criticism beside every claim.
Our part stops at the forest floor: gather it properly, dry it properly, cure it properly, and tell you exactly what we did.
Why British Columbia
Amanita muscaria is mycorrhizal - it lives in partnership with the roots of living trees, which is why it cannot be farmed. Every cap in the world is wild by definition. The birch, pine and spruce forests of British Columbia give us the same partnership our European forests did, on a coast where the autumn flush is short, cold and clean.
We pick one cap and leave the colony standing. The mycelium underground can live for years; taking a single fruiting body harms it no more than picking an apple harms the tree. That rule held for ten years in European forests and it did not change when we crossed the Atlantic.
These forests fruit once a year, so the shop carries one autumn at a time: you can buy fly agaric from this harvest, or wait a year for the next one.
Nearly 2,000 European reviews, kept
We did not leave them behind. Every review written by our European customers over the years was exported when the old shop closed, and it is still sitting in that export. Bringing them across is slow work and we would rather do it properly than in bulk, so what you will find on the reviews page today is only what has been written since we opened here. When the old ones go up they will carry their original dates and say where they were written, because a European review presented as a Canadian one would be worth nothing.
Read the reviews Those 2,000 are still in the European export · the page below starts at your order
How to reach us
A person answers, usually within a day: info@shroomsbloom.ca. Orders paid before 6 pm Vancouver time go out the same day, tracked with Canada Post - a flat-rate tracked parcel or Xpresspost, your choice at checkout. If you are near Vancouver, you can collect it in person instead of waiting on the post.
Botanical specimen · not for consumption · 19+. What ships is a dried cap for a collection or a study shelf; the specimen page sets out what Amanita muscaria is, where it grows and how it is told apart from the mushrooms it gets confused with.