Toward the close of January, one clips the rose bushes down to stumps and sets the watch for asparagus and strawberries – neither of which, I must say, are particular favorites of mine beyond their role as harbingers of spring, when they start turning up in markets, usually in February. At the farmers market on Saturday last, I was presented with a large cardboard box filled with goodies from Capay Farm; the box was a chore to lug home, weighted as it was with red potatoes and orangey Meyer lemons several sizes larger than the golf-ballish spheres that appear on our little bush, but it did solve some of the week's issues in provision. Lemons, despite their sunniness, are wintry; so are fellow box-travelers purple broccoli and Nantes carrots, bright orange and shapely. The box bore no whiff, no hint of springtime, no strawberries or asparagus, nothing but a reference (in the leaflet explaining the box's contents) to the strengthening sun at the farm and the coming peach harvest. Through a heinous oversight, I broke the box down and put it in the compost bin instead of handing it over for reuse.

The sun might cast some occasional kindly rays in January, but mostly it's been rain, damp, and cold: fungus weather. Near the rose bushes, all over the floor of the garden, in fact, mushrooms have been popping up. Generally we pull them out and throw them in the compost bin too, since the odds that they're toxic seem unacceptably high. But recently the Chronicle ran a mushroom-gathering story featuring a huge color photograph of candy caps, which look as if they've been dipped in cinnamon powder and are notably undulated at the edges – almost exactly like the ones peeking up in great numbers amid the alyssum and near the boxwood hedge. I brought some in, laid them next to the photo, and, despite a terrible temptation to conclude that ours are indeed $125-per-pound candy caps, could not quite decide. A common term applicable here is prudence.

As of this writing, the mushrooms, having failed the lactation test (candy caps are supposed to ooze a milky fluid when the bottoms of the caps are cut) remain in quarantine on some paper towels. Their gatherer, meanwhile, knows he should join the Mycological Society of San Francisco (www.mssf.org), which convenes the third Tuesday of the month from September through May and presumably commands the expertise to tell him whether his midwinter bounty can safely be eaten or must, instead, join the box in the bin.

But will he?

Paul Reidinger

paulr@sfbg.com