California Foraging Calendar 2026

In October, the species inside their typical California window are wild grape, chicken of the woods, porcini, chanterelle. Those windows come from 30,573 research grade observation records in California, corrected for how many people were out recording. They describe when each species has historically been found here, not what is out there this week.

Jan 1 to May 31 in California, peaking around May 15. That is derived from 3,150 research grade records of Morchella in California, adjusted for observer effort. It moves year to year with spring: the live panel on this page reads the USA National Phenology Network Spring Index at three points in California and tells you whether leaf out is running ahead of or behind its 30 year average this year, which is the best available signal for whether the morel window will be early or late.

Only partly. 14 CCR 4306(a) states: "No person shall willfully or negligently pick, dig up, cut, mutilate, destroy, injure, disturb, move, molest, burn, or carry away any tree or plant or portion thereof, including but not limited to leaf mold, flowers, foliage, berries, fruit, grass, turf, humus, shrubs, cones, and dead wood, except in specific units when authorization by the Department to take berries, or gather mushrooms, or gather pine cones, or collect driftwood is posted at the headquarters of the unit to which the authorization applies.". California inverts the Oregon and Washington pattern. Nothing is gatherable by default; berries, mushrooms and cones become lawful only where a posting exists at that specific unit's headquarters. A separate subsection caps any allowed collecting at five pounds per day. Note that California state forests may be governed by a different agency under a different rule, which is covered separately on this page. This is our reading of the regulation and not legal advice.

Not from this page. This is a timing site; identification is a job for a person with the specimen. CDC states that poisonous mushrooms often resemble and are difficult to distinguish visually from nonpoisonous, edible mushrooms, and that cooking does not remove or inactivate the toxins. Take it to a person: the North American Mycological Association keeps a free list of volunteer identification consultants organised by state, and Poison Control is on 1-800-222-1222 around the clock. Where a species on this page has a lookalike that authorities name, the lookalike is named and identification is left to a person.

Because most of them are folklore copied between websites, and these are derived from records. Two corrections in particular move the dates. Counts are divided by the total observations of everything in California in the same month, which removes the effect of how many people happened to be outdoors; that shifts the peak month for about a quarter of the species on this site. And fruit and nut species are counted only from records an observer annotated as fruiting, because a raw count of a plant peaks when the plant is most photogenic rather than when it is ripe. Elderberry raw counts peak with the flowers, two months before there is fruit.

For the spring species, yes, and the panel at the top of this page measures it. It reads the USA National Phenology Network Spring Index First Leaf surface for three points in California and compares this year against the 1991 to 2020 average, giving the shift in days. In California that applies to morel. It does not apply to the autumn mushrooms, which fruit on late summer and autumn rainfall rather than on spring warmth.