Before we enter an old woods road outside Helmetta on foot, local woodsman Ralph "Rusty" Richards remains seated in his GMC Jimmy and explains mushroom-picking.

"I've been picking mushrooms for 40 years, but I'm an amateur," says Rusty, now in his late 70s, who has lived around these local Pine Barrens his whole life. "It's better to be an amateur. It's too complicated to be a professional. An amateur is a guy who goes out and picks only what he's picked before, only the ones he knows. His knowledge may be only one, two mushrooms."

Rusty's knowledge is of four: stumpy, hen of the woods, the chicken mushroom, and puffball. These four are "safe and recognizable" to Rusty.

What is safe and recognizable to an experienced mushroom-picker is foreign to the person with lesser knowledge. At 54-years-old, I have lived in or around the Pine Barrens around Helmetta my whole life. I have heard mushroom-picking stories as long as I can remember from my family, which has lived in these woods continuously for more than 100 years. But I have stayed away from eating woods mushrooms.

Simply put, EAT THE WRONG MUSHROOM AND, AT BEST, YOU GET SICK. AT WORST, YOU DIE.

"Stumpies," also known as honey mushrooms, grow at the foot of a tree in the Pine Barrens around Helmetta. They are from the genus Armillaria.

"What you want to tell an amateur is just enough to get involved safely," Rusty says. "If you (as an amateur) go beyond this, you're on your own. You could be eating the red zone. If it is the death-cap, they're going to rush you to the hospital. They're going to replace your liver, replace your kidneys, and you're still going to die."

For me, this is only my second mushroom-picking venture. In October 2004, Mike Talnagi, another mushroom-picker from an old-time, local family, took me to Snuffy Hollow in search of hen of the woods.

"Don't take anything for granted," Rusty says. "Don't go by the description. Let somebody show it to you. It has to be identified to you by someone who knows 100 percent. Whenever you eat wild mushrooms, it is always wise to keep a little. If you had a reaction, the hospital or doctor could always say this is what you ate."

Rusty credits a brother, Norman "Red" Richards, with teaching him mushroom-picking.

"I started with the cauliflower (hen of the woods) mushroom, because it was very recognizable," Rusty says.

Rusty's graduation to picking a second species "took years of picking one", the hen of the woods. Then, he added stumpies, verifying them with another local mushroom-picker, George "Hank" Talnagi, uncle of Mike.

"He looked at it and immediately identified it (as a stumpy)," Rusty says.

Years into mushroom-picking, "I'm still only picking two" species, Rusty recalls. The next mushroom on his list was the chicken, which he learned through his knowledge, information from people, and probably from what was written about them.

"Finally, my last venture was puffballs," says Rusty, who turned 79 in October, recalling this began about 20 years ago. "Asking questions, go to the book, using knowledge."

As Rusty notes, "Timing is important in picking mushrooms. Mushrooms come and go."

Rusty Richards, a longtime mushroom-picker in the Pine Barrens around Helmetta, holds stumpy mushrooms.

Are the mushrooms in season? Are they ready for picking? Are they buggy? Are they too old to pick? Were environmental conditions conducive for mushrooms?

"The weather is critical in mushrooms," Rusty says. "If you have a drought, you have to look hard for very few. If it's wet, they'll be growing profusely."

On this early September Sunday, we are in search of stumpies, which Rusty also calls tan and yellow stumpies, the name coming from their color and where they are commonly found: on stumps or the bottoms of trees.

They also are known as opienki, a Polish-language word. The root, pien, means stump in Polish, according to a friend and Poland native, Dr. Agata Ptaszynska.

Formally, they are members of the genus Armillaria, commonly called honey mushrooms, according to members of the New Jersey Mycological Association.

Rusty has a specific spot in mind, where he has seen stumpies already this season.

"Ok, let's take a walk, hope nobody was out there," Rusty says.

Rusty heads north, crossing Helmetta Boulevard into the woods.

"Now, I'm looking for dead trees, stumps, oak trees in general," Rusty says.

On the bottom of a dead oak, Rusty locates a patch of stumpies. He cuts them with a kitchen knife, then bags them in a common plastic convenience store-type bag. Then, he moves on.

"Aha," says Rusty, seeing another patch of stumpies from a distance.

For awhile, we work this hardwood area, Rusty having oriented himself, using what presumably is the wooden remnants of an old deer-stand in the trees.

"This is one of my favorite picking areas," Rusty says.

Mushroom-pickers frequent these local woods. But, out of the old-time families from Helmetta, only a few carry on the tradition: Jimmy Talnagi, who is Hank's grandson and lives in Hank's former house at Jamesburg Park, for example. Mike Talnagi moved to Tennessee a few years ago. Hank Talnagi died— not from a bad mushroom!

As we walk, Rusty and I talked about the declining interest in working the ecosystem. Will my generation be the last of the old-time-family woods people in the Pine Barrens around Helmetta?

Did I eat any stumpies? Of course. After all, the legendary Rusty Richards showed them to me.

"I'm going to trust you and eat this," I tell Rusty.

Weeks later, I am healthy, writing this column....