Follow the rain...

Its not the prettiest specimen perhaps but what you see there is my first maitake for 2012. (It turned out to be my first and ONLY maitake find in '12). I've already cooked it up and eaten some and it's delicious.

We've finally had some rain around here but, except for a large patch of what I believe are honey mushrooms, there hasn't been much to speak of coming up locally. I think we need a lot of rain to overcome the very dry soil conditions from earlier in summer.

So I used the precipitation map here...
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ridge2/RFC_Precip/
...to find out where the most rain fell. I noticed that there's a National Forest just to the west of where I live that had an extra 1-2" of rain from a recent storm...So today I hopped in my car and a short drive later I was foraging around a park where the ground was noticeably wetter and there were quite a lot of mushrooms around.

Which goes to show you...You might have the perfect spot but if that spot hasn't had rain for 3 weeks you're not going to find many mushrooms. Sometimes you have to follow the rain.