Actually this is one of my favorite locations for gathering chaga over the last few years and I usually travel between 500 and 1,000 feet distance parallel to this road which normally in the early evening has a car drive by every 5 minutes or so. This is a chaga hot spot as I have collected some huge chaga on yellow birch just 1/4 mile away from where I’m walking tonight though this area here is primarily white birch.
Most of the chaga here tonight are early in their development and I will not gather any of these though I will possible harvest some in the next 2 to 3 years.
All of these birch trees are still able to produce leaves but probably within the next 5 years the chaga mycelium within the tree will have completed its cycle. A few years before a chaga begins to appear on a tree the mycelium has already sealed the tree’s fate so harvesting chaga while the tree is still mostly alive makes no difference to the tree’s lifespan and the best qualities in Chaga are most available while the tree is still sharing its nutrients. Older Chaga from already dead birch trees are not suitable for making tea, a good example of this is the large Chaga shaped like an angel in my (Chaga page) it was nice to look at but not a useful medicinal mushroom and I hope no one is gathering to use or selling old chaga collected of dead birch trees to anyone.
Here is a tree I harvested 4 lbs from 2 years ago, it is still producing twigs with new buds and the chaga is also growing back as you can only see a little of the light brown area at the bottom of the Chaga where it was chopped.
This photo is a couple new Chaga emeraging from this same tree.
Here is the top section of this same tree with a couple of nice Chaga horns just under the top branches. A large birch like this one may produce many lbs of Chaga.
Now I’m on my way back to my car travelling on the opposite side of the road a few hundred feet in the woods and I finally found my first one over on this side after check this area a few times over the last 3 years, it is quite a nice one as well, as it will be easy to harvest being at ground level and should increase in size in a year or 2. The Chaga future is looking good as long as a clear-cut doesn’t roll down the lane. ciao
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