Buyers were purchasing chanterelle mushrooms for $6.50 per pound in 2020. (Boreal Heartland Herbal Products/Facebook)

By Derek Cornet

forest products

Bumper season for chanterelles, wild rice decimated due to high water

Sep 28, 2020 | 5:00 PM

It’s been a bumper crop for chanterelle mushrooms and the season isn’t over yet.

Keewatin Community Development Association CEO Randy Johns, who operates Air Ronge’s Boreal Heartland Herbal Products, believes it’s because of all the wet weather in May, June and July. He said there’s still people out picking mushrooms in the region and selling them to his shop for $6.50 per pound.

“It was a bumper year for chantrelles, there were a lot,” Johns said. “They came out early and then they dried up when it got hot, and then they came back when it cooled off.”

Johns explained there are plenty of cranberries ready to be harvested as those plants also did well with all the rain during the summer. He’s currently purchasing cranberries for $8 per pound and juniper berries for $9 per pound. Johns noted the juniper berries will be used in the distilling industry to flavour gin.

“It’s juniper season right now and we have a demand for those,” he said. “It’s a low evergreen tree and it gets berries instead of cones. They are blue or purple.”

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While it has been a good season for some forest products, Johns mentioned wild rice, blueberries and fireweed didn’t grow as well as expected.

“Blueberries were nothing. Nobody even brought us blueberries to sell,” he said. “We didn’t get that much fireweed because it didn’t grow well in the wet weather.”

Against the Grain Wild Rice co-owner Larissa Muirhead mentioned the family operation brought in less than 10 per cent of the amount expected during an average year. In the last five years, she noted two have been “terrible” with 2020 likely being the worst.

“It was definitely the high water,” Muirhead said. “The little bit of rice that might have been on Meeyomoot Lake was just blown away by the high winds we had in August and September.”

In total, Muirhead believes they harvested less than 10,000 pounds of rice as opposed to more than 100,000 pounds in a normal year. She added the entirety of this year’s harvest has already been sold and there will be no rice to carry over into 2021.

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derek.cornet@jpbg.ca

Twitter: @saskjourno