Carla Clark | For The Republic Chanterelle mushrooms foraged by Mary Lou Nay for sale at her booth during the Columbus Farmers Market, Columbus, Ind., Saturday, July 20, 2024
It’s best to get to Mary Lou Nay’s booth at the Columbus Farmer’s Market as soon as it opens on Saturday morning because she’s amassed a fan base, and she runs out of her wares quickly, especially her mushrooms. Generally, she finds at least one familiar face in the line of people assembled to buy her pies, persimmon bread, fresh-picked berries, pears, pawpaws, rhubarb and, of course, her mushrooms.
The varieties of mushrooms she forages include chanterelles, oyster, lion’s mane, chicken of the woods, maitake, morels and trumpets. She noted that one can’t rely on finding a particular kind in the same place repeatedly.
“There are days when it’s so much fun,” she said. “You say, ‘Eureka!’ and you get a lot. The next year, the same spot may be barren.”
She first started foraging for them out of a desire to do something easier.
“I got tired of bending over to pick beans and potatoes.”
Nay, a Corydon, Indiana, native, grows her offerings on the land in southern Brown County, where she and her husband, Jim, have lived since 1970. The Nays call their operation Nay-ture’s Hilltop Farm. Jim and son, Jacob, who also lives on the property, handle tractor-related functions, such as plowing and discing, on the nearly 40-acre spread.
“They stay busy,” she said. “There’s also grass to mow and blackberries to prune.”
Mushrooms require a lot of moisture, and Nay noted that even if the south-central Indiana area received substantial rain, the ground where she looks for them may be too dry to yield much.
The Indiana Department of Health requires commercial mushroom purveyors to be certified. The course was designed in collaboration with the Hoosier Mushroom Society. It consists of two, eight-hour days where growers learn the nutritional value of the various types of mushrooms, their scientific names, dangerous types – including those that look like edible varieties, times for harvesting and proper handling. When Nay completed it, she was bequeathed the title of a registered wild mushroom identification expert.
“This market is really stringent about certification,” she said.
Before farming, she and Jim had careers as educators. May Lou taught various subjects at Brown County High School, and Jim taught social studies at Columbus East High School. While Mary Lou grew up with gardening, she said she didn’t really delve into it with earnest until she retired.
However, since she immersed herself in the food-growing life, she has at various times purveyed spinach, sourdough bread, persimmon butter, persimmon cookies, strawberry rhubarb jam and pumpkin and butternut squash pulp.
She also has a particular style of bantering with her customers. During a recent Saturday, she joked with a customer about her pie display and said, “I’d have a lot more here this morning, but my grandkids ate a lot of the pies.”
She cited the cost of a pie to another, “They’re $20. Does that seem like a lot? It does to me, too.”
Nay said she enjoys seeing someone in the line whom she recognizes and greeting with exuberance.
“I love my customers,” she said. “One lady came along a couple of weeks ago and brought me a bouquet of flowers.”
Customers also like to share what they were going to do with their purchases. One man said he was going to keep his box of blackberries beside him on the front seat of his truck on a long drive he had coming up later.
It was no surprise that by 9:25 a.m. there were only three boxes of chanterelles left at her booth, and the pies and bread were nearly gone, too. So, like always, she began gathering her supplies and stopped early for the day. It’s also safe to say that in the case of Nay-ture’s Hilltop Farm’s presence at the farmer’s market, popularity breeds brevity.
