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  • From: Lucky Pittman <lucky.pittman@murraystate.edu>
  • To: nafex@lists.ibiblio.org, ruralKyIn@yahoogroups.com
  • Subject: [NAFEX] Morel mushrooms
  • Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2003 10:26:47 -0500

Folks,
I've been trying to get a couple of free hours to get out and roam the woods for the past couple of weeks, to check out the morel mushroom situation.

Finally got a chance to do so on Friday afternoon - and again, between thunderstorms, yesterday afternoon.

Ran across several likely spots throughout my 80 acres or so of mixed hardwood forest. Most were on east-facing slopes, moist areas - and I could usually spot evidence that the deer had been pawing around, looking for the mushrooms.

First 'shrooms I spotted were black morels(Morchella angusticeps), which are typically the first to emerge. Many of these were beginning to 'melt down', or were showing evidence of critter-munching.

Once you spot one, you just sit down and start looking around - where there's one, there will be more! Didn't take long to start spotting the occasional 'yellow' and 'gray' morel (Morchella esculenta). None were very big - or at least not as large as the ones that used to pop up in the yard of the farmhouse where we lived in MO, back in the early '90s.

Managed to gather about a gallon of yellows & grays, and about half that amount of blacks. Took 'em back to the house, cleaned 'em, and fried up a bunch of those "dry-land fish" at supper on Saturday night.
My wife, the eternal pessimist, continually questioned my ID, but I was absolutely certain of my identification of them. Since some folks evidently have an adverse reaction to the black morel - and I'd never eaten them before - I only cooked a couple of them, but ate them with no gastronomic upset.

As I was harvesting, I tried to get the base, along with some associated leaf mold and (hopefully) vegetative mycelia, which I cut off once I got back to the house, and am experimenting with 'seeding' the fungus into some well-rotted logs, woody plant material, etc. that I've been piling into a big gully below the pond for the past 9 years. Don't know if I'll be successful in getting a colony established there, but figured I didn't have anything to lose by doing so.

It's been a while since I researched it, but at one point in time, a couple of the mushroom spawn vendors, either Fungi Perfecti or The Mushroompeople at The Farm(at Ethridge, TN, in the county where I was formerly in veterinary practice), or both, were offering morel-growing kits.
Wondered if any of you folks had ever attempted to grow morels?

Lucky




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