Grisons: two kilos, and ten days off each month

Switzerland has no single mushroom law. It has twenty-six, because collecting rules belong to the cantons, and that makes it the best place in Europe to see how differently the same activity can be regulated. Grisons, the country's largest canton, chose an approach almost nobody else uses.

The regulation rests on three restrictions at once rather than one. The first is quantitative and sounds familiar: two kilograms per person per day. The second is temporal and does not sound familiar at all: collecting mushrooms is prohibited from the first to the tenth day of every month inclusive. The third concerns numbers of people: collecting in groups of more than three persons is forbidden, families excepted. On top of that, collecting for sale is prohibited — gathered mushrooms may be passed to third parties only under a cantonal exemption permit. The basis is the cantonal nature and heritage protection ordinance, in article 1 paragraph 2 letter a, article 10 paragraph 1 and article 12.

The ten days are worth pausing on, because the idea is genuinely unusual and repays understanding. A quantity limit acts on one picker: it tells them how much they may take. It says nothing about how many pickers will pass through the same patch of wood. If fifty people walk there each day in season and each takes the lawful two kilograms, the forest gives up a hundred kilograms a day, entirely legally.

A calendar closure works differently. It does not restrict an individual basket. It removes a third of the days from the season and does so for everybody at once. In practice that means every patch of forest regularly gets ten days with no pressure at all, whatever the local population and however many visitors arrive. And ten days is roughly what many species need to put up fruit bodies and carry them through to spore release.

The limit on group size is equally considered, though at first glance it looks odd. A two-kilogram-per-person limit stops working as protection the moment a coach pulls up. Twenty people with lawful baskets carry out forty kilograms, and do so within the rule. Banning groups of more than three closes that door without needing collective limits that nobody could enforce. The exemption for families shows at the same time what the provision defends against and what it does not: it is aimed at organised collecting, not at a Sunday walk with children.

For a visitor the practical conclusion is simple and very concrete. When planning a trip to Grisons, look at the calendar before looking at the weather forecast. A week falling across the turn of a month may land entirely inside the closed days, and then the best flush in years is beside the point. The safest dates are in the second half of the month.

It is also worth remembering something the cantonal rules do not cover, and which in Switzerland is a separate institution. Many communes run an official mushroom inspection, to which the day's picking is brought sorted by species. The seasonal hours of such points are often set around the walk home, that is around the early evening. Inspection does not replace the rules on quantity and closed days — these are two layers of the same system, one about the resource and one about health.

The landscape of Grisons explains why the canton guards that resource so closely. This is high mountain country, where coniferous forest runs up the steep sides of valleys and the growing season is short. Mycelium grows more slowly here than in the warmer, damper woods of the lowlands, and recovery after heavy collecting takes longer. A rule that would look excessive in a lowland plain looks like ordinary caution in a valley above twelve hundred metres.

The ban on collecting for sale closes the arrangement and deserves a sentence of its own, because it is framed more sharply than is usually assumed. It is not only about trade: gathered mushrooms may be passed to third parties only under a cantonal exemption permit. The rule therefore does not separate a sale from a gift by intention alone but requires official consent to move a picking outside one's own household. For a visitor that means a basket gathered in Grisons is, as far as the law intends, a picking for one's own table rather than goods or a present for the guesthouse keeper.

It is also worth noticing what the system does not contain, because an absence can be as telling as a provision. There is no fee, no registration, no obligation to carry a document, and no list of species that may not be picked at all. The canton is therefore not trying to steer what a picker chooses, nor to know who is walking in the woods. It steers intensity only: it spreads it through time, caps it by volume and breaks it into small groups. This is regulation of pressure, not regulation of access — and it differs fundamentally from the Spanish permit system, though both grow from the same concern for the resource.

And one more observation, because it closes the whole axis neatly. Grisons neither bans collecting nor requires a permit. Instead it regulates three variables that nobody else in Europe regulates together: how much, when, and how many of you. The result is a system in which the right to collect is left intact while pressure on the forest is spread out — and it manages that without a single form.

Two kilograms only after the tenth day

In Grisons, collecting is closed from the first through tenth day of every month; on other days the ceiling is 2 kg per person per day. Thus 29 August 2026 falls inside the calendar window, but other prohibitions remain: roughly fifteen fungal reserves allow no picking, and seven species are fully protected. Tools, deliberate destruction and groups larger than three are prohibited, except families. Sale requires an exemption. Boundaries must be checked on the official map. A canton notice dated 27 August also kept an absolute outdoor-fire ban across most of Grisons because of drought; the current fire map is authoritative and municipalities may be stricter. Alpine terrain and weather require planning. A lawful harvest still does not establish edibility.