Family and roots — it’s in the name. Two people, a patch of West Kelowna, and a lot of miles walked in the bush before any of this had a price list. This is how it happened. This is my story.
That’s the cabin. That’s my family. And that’s me and my cousin Tim. That’s where it began.
Summers out there with buckets — blueberries, wild raspberries, whatever the season handed over if you were paying attention. Nobody called it foraging back then. It was just what you did.
Me, Sam — still my oldest friend — Jessi, and two other buddies. No plan worth the name. We'd heard there was a big fire in the Yukon the year before, so we pointed the car north — and somehow picked up a contract when we got there.
Twenty-four hours later we were being flown into the bush. Packed our gear down to the valley floor, built camp out of poles and plastic, and picked and dried for a solid month. That was the first time mushrooms paid for anything. SourToe cocktails and a bad-a%$ game of Slapsize.
Every photo I had of it burned in 2023. Sam still had these in his albums.
August 2001, Darby Montana. Another burn, another camp built out of poles and plastic — screens strung up, buckets everywhere, dogs underfoot.
This is the part people don’t picture when you say you pick mushrooms for a living. It’s a camp, a crew, and a lot of ground.
I was coming off back surgery, finally cleared to move again. May 2010 — Terrace Mountain. The mountain had burned the year before, and morels come up out of burned ground by the thousands the spring after a fire. That’s the work that brought me to Kelowna.
While I was here I met up with the friends I’d played volleyball with in this town when I was eighteen, nineteen.
I met my wife that spring. Everything after this point is the two of us.
We got married, and our journey together began hand in hand.
Hot Knox played that night. We started the band in 2011 and we’re still at it.
That is the column coming over the ridge, shot from our own yard.
The McDougall Creek wildfire came through and burned our lives down. The house went, and everything in it.
The world changed that day. We didn’t. Same people, same forest — both parties resilient by design.
First the ground came clear. Then walls up, floor down, the mountain behind it still wearing the burn.
It isn’t finished. It’s going up.
Spring 2024. We picked morels off the burn. And in the fall we did what we always have.
Fire takes everything above ground. The mycelium underneath it survives, and come spring it fruits — that’s exactly why morels blanket a burn. And that’s why we’re still here.
We survive. We grow. We live. Into the woods we go — stay curious, be adventurous, and never stop looking around the bend. You never know what life will bring.
We grow blue oyster, lion’s mane, shiitake, king trumpet and chestnut in West Kelowna, picked fresh to order. We still walk the bush for morels off the burns, lobsters and chanterelles through the Okanagan and the Kootenays.
No warehouse, no middlemen, no mushrooms that ride a truck for a week. Same as it was at the cabin with a bucket — just more of it, and now you get some too.
Thanks for the support — I hope you enjoy the farm.
— W
