Leaf Hound – "Growers of Mushroom" (1971)

Laughing and screaming and clawing and cursing

Fighting my way through this unplanned dream

Basketball is the most popular sport in the Republic of Lithuania.

The second-most popular sport in Lithuania?  Would you believe it’s foraging for wild mushrooms?

From the Washington Post:

Hundreds of Lithuanians ran around with baskets and buckets Saturday in a southeastern pine forest.

Why you ask? It’s the national championship of wild mushroom picking – a competition always held on the last Saturday in September. . . .

A rainy, relatively warm summer created ideal conditions for the foraging festival in Lithuania, where forests cover more than 33 percent of the Baltic country and mushroom-hunting is considered the second-most popular sport after basketball.

“Walking between trees and looking for big brown mushrooms is a great way of spending a Saturday,” said Julius Sostakas, an IT engineer from Vilnius.

Lithuanian mushroom hunters

Mushrooms — fresh, dried, salted or marinated — are considered an essential element in Lithuanian cuisine, used in many dishes to add special flavor to meat, fish and potatoes.

More than four hundred edible varieties can be found in Lithuania’s forests, including edible boletus, slippery jacks, chanterelles, blewits and morels. . . .

A local team called Mushroom Nightmares won Saturday’s contest by delivering 58 kilograms (128 pounds) of mushrooms.

That has to be fake news – right?

Apparently not.  You can’t always trust what you read in the Washington Post, but this story was on the Fox News website as well.  So it’s the real deal.

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I don’t know much about Lithuania.  But based on ten minutes or so of Wikipedia research, it sounds like a pretty interesting place.

Lithuanians use a lot of funny expressions.  For example:

1. Lithuanians don’t have a dirty mind . . . they have “curly thoughts” (garbanotos mintys).

2. Lithuanians won’t give you a lecture . . . they’ll “show you where legs grow from” (iš kur kojos dygsta).

3. Lithuanians won’t lie to you . . . they’ll “hang pasta on the ears” (kabinti makaronus).

4. Lithuanian kids don’t go to the bathroom . . . they “go and visit the dwarves” (eiti pas nykštukus).

5. A Lithuanian doesn’t go crazy . . . his or her “roof drives away” (stogas nuvažiuoja).

6. In Lithuania, there are no fights . . .  just “clarifications of relationships” (aiškintis santykius).

7. A Lithuanian doesn’t talk crap . . . he or she simply “slices a mushroom” (grybą pjauna). 

(Enough with the damn mushrooms already, Lithuanians!)

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Growers of Mushroom was the one and only album released by the English rock group, Leaf Hound.

It is a very good album – I kid you not.  If you ask me, its best song is the title track, which we’re featuring today on 2 or 3 lines.

Here’s “Growers of Mushroom”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: