Finding a Mushroom Machine

 

With a full day forecasted to be without rain and perhaps a bit of sunshine, I drove back down to the farm for another round of morel mushroom hunting. I checked underneath the tree where I found the bulk of the morels earlier in the week but none had returned. So I decided to walk back to another part of the farm I hadn't checked during my previous trip and that is where I found a mushroom machine.

For those of you new to my blog, a mushroom machine is a recently dead elm tree under which morel mushrooms will grow in great abundance. In fact, all those mushroom above were all found under the same tree. Mature elms were and still are decimated by the Dutch Elm Disease, a fungal infection spread by beetles and root grafting. But the elm trees can reach an age where they can propagate before become infected and so there is a continual source of new elm trees growing up and quickly dying again before they even reach their middle teens. After their death, the elm trees secret something that spurs morel growth in some sort of symbiotic relationship. I stood underneath enough dead elm trees to know this is true though I don't understand fully they why. You can find morels under other trees as well. I've found them under living silver maple trees and a few other species, but if I find a bunch of them, it will be under a dead elm tree, aka a mushroom machine. 

Blogger Steve asked a couple questions that I thought I would address here for the benefit of others who might have missed his question. The first has to do with propagation of morels. With gray morels, I find the bulk of them under recently dead elm trees where they will pop up mainly in the first spring after it dies and perhaps a spring or two afterwards. After that, they will disappear again never to be found in that spot. So since they are just passing by or just remain spores until a elm tree dies, I don't worry so much about them. Yellow morels found later in the season however can grow more sporadically and not necessarily under a tree. When I was young, we used to carry bread sacks to pick morels but then we heard that it might cause them to disappear because we don't leave any behind to "go to seed" so to speak. We then switched to mesh bags presumably to allow spores drift out over the ground as we walk around looking for more. Does this help? I don't really know I guess. Over the years we've had some really good morel harvests in certain areas of the farm only to have a long dry spell where we won't find many yellow morels. It might be from over picking or it might just be that whatever triggering mechanism for them to grow is cyclic and depends on something we just don't fully understand. We take precautions by leaving dried out yellow morels behind to do their thing. Morels will pop out of the ground and after two or three days will become quickly dried out so we leave a fair share behind. Morels are also very difficult to spot so we also miss probably a large number of them too. In summary, I've never not found any morels when the conditions were right as they are this year so my bet is that the weather is more important than any propagation or lack of propagation that occurs due to our consumption of these delicacies.

Another question Steve asked was how morels work. For most of my life, I haven't really known. It was always just understood that whatever causes them to work only works out in the wild. But recently there I am reading more articles of people who have successfully bred them in captivity. I haven't tried it myself but they generally involve harvesting the spores and spreading them in the appropriate material outside. Part of me would like to try it at some point but the bigger part of me likes things as is. I generally find enough to itch that need that occurs every spring and enjoy the hunt which brings me to parts of the farm I wouldn't normally walk through. If I had them growing by the bucket full out my back door, they wouldn't taste nearly as good and I'm sure I would take them for granted.

I've still found only gray morels (one perhaps was a yellow but was hard to tell for sure) so that means that yellows should start popping up soon. We've got the moisture right now but just need a few nice sunny warm days in the 70's to get them popping. They are much bigger than gray morels but don't have nearly the intense flavor. However, if I don't find a one this season, I'm still a happy man as gray morels are my favorite and I've had the best season in perhaps decades for finding them.