Wild Mushroom Season in Europe — A Buyer's Calendar
When wild mushrooms actually reach European kitchens: morel, chanterelle, porcini, black trumpet, hedgehog and more, with available and peak months. Written for chefs buying them, not foragers picking them.
Search for mushroom seasons and you get foraging guides. Where to look, how to identify, what the weather does, which trees to check. Useful if you're going into the woods. Useless if you're a chef, because you're not going into the woods — you're getting a call from a supplier saying the chanterelles are in and do you want twenty kilos.
That's a different question. Not where do I find them but when do they arrive, how long have I got, and what should I be paying attention to.
This is the European calendar from a kitchen's side of the transaction.
The wild ones
| Mushroom | Available | Peak |
|---|---|---|
| Morel | Mar–May | Apr |
| St. George's | Apr–Jun | May |
| Summer porcini | Jun–Sep | Jul–Aug |
| Chicken of the woods | Jun–Sep | Jul–Aug |
| Chanterelle (girolle) | Jun–Oct | Aug–Sep |
| Giant puffball | Jul–Sep | Aug |
| Parasol | Jul–Oct | Aug–Sep |
| Field mushroom | Jul–Oct | Aug–Sep |
| Black trumpet | Aug–Nov | Sep–Oct |
| Porcini / Cep | Aug–Nov | Sep–Oct |
| Honey fungus | Aug–Nov | Sep–Oct |
| Hedgehog (pied de mouton) | Aug–Dec | Oct–Nov |
| Saffron milkcap | Sep–Nov | Oct |
| Hen of the woods (maitake) | Sep–Nov | Sep–Oct |
| Winter chanterelle | Sep–Dec | Oct–Nov |
| Wood blewit | Sep–Dec | Oct–Nov |
The cultivated ones
These don't have a season in the same sense — they're grown indoors and arrive whenever you order them. Two still have a peak, because demand and quality shift with the weather.
| Mushroom | Available | Peak |
|---|---|---|
| Button / chestnut | All year | — |
| Portobello | All year | — |
| King oyster | All year | — |
| Enoki | All year | — |
| Shiitake | All year | Autumn |
| Oyster | All year | Oct–Feb |
| Wood ear | All year | Autumn–Winter |
What the calendar tells you about menu planning
The wild season is front-loaded into autumn and it's brutal. Look at the peak column: nine of the sixteen wild entries peak in September or October. That's your window, it's the same window as everyone else's, and it's about eight weeks long.
Morels are the outlier and the expensive one. March to May, peaking in April, with nothing else wild around them. They're the only significant spring mushroom on the list besides St. George's, which is why they command what they command. If you want a wild mushroom on a spring menu, that's the conversation.
There's a genuine gap in high summer. June to July gives you summer porcini, chicken of the woods and early chanterelles, and not much else. If you're building a July menu around wild mushrooms you're working with a thin list, and cultivated is doing more of the work than you'd like to admit.
Winter chanterelle and wood blewit extend the season further than people expect. Both run to December. Worth knowing if you're planning a Christmas menu and assumed the wild season ended in November.
Buying, not picking
A few things that matter on the kitchen side and don't appear in any foraging guide.
Price moves inversely to the peak, and fast. Early chanterelles in June cost what they cost because there aren't many. The same mushroom in late August is a different number. If a dish only works at peak pricing, it only goes on the menu for six weeks.
Wild means variable. Cultivated mushrooms arrive the same every week. Wild ones don't — size, cleanliness, moisture and yield all shift week to week and supplier to supplier. Costing a wild mushroom dish on a single delivery is how you end up with a plate that quietly loses money in week three.
Yield is worse than you think, and it varies. Trim on wild mushrooms is not a fixed percentage. A clean flush of chanterelles and a gritty one are different ingredients from a costing point of view, even at the same price per kilo.
Availability is weather, not calendar. Every range in the table above is a normal year. A dry August pushes the autumn flush back or thins it out entirely. The table tells you when to start asking your supplier — it doesn't promise anything.
One thing this post deliberately isn't: a foraging guide. Identifying wild mushrooms is a serious skill with serious consequences for getting it wrong, and if you're buying through a supplier that's their licensed responsibility, not yours. Keep it that way.
Where these numbers come from
This is the European mushroom set from DigitalKnife's Seasonal Calendar — 23 entries alongside vegetables, fruit and herbs, with equivalent data for North America, South America and Asia. Free in the app, no account needed, and it flags what's peaking in the current month.
But the table is the point. Print it, pin it by the phone, use it when the supplier calls.