A bounty of mushrooms flowed out of Ukraine’s forests this fall, reports The New York Times

A bounty of mushrooms flowed out of Ukraine’s forests this fall, reports The New York Times, citing unusual weather: “a dry summer followed by an unusually warm fall and late first frost.” In “I Have Never Seen So Many Toadstools.’ A Bumper Crop of Mushrooms in Ukraine,” Times reporters interviewed Emilia Koleda, a grandmother selling mushrooms on the Kyiv-Chernihiv highway. Noting that her mushroom sales earned her money for firewood and school supplies for her grandchildren, said says: “Mushrooms saved so many people this year…Nature helped us through the quarantine.” Befitting the secrecy of mushroom hunters, the reporters chose as their dateline a Chernihiv settlement so tiny it does not appear on google maps.