A Mushroom Machine

 

Hopefully you can enlarge the above photo enough to see the morel mushrooms hidden like easter eggs everywhere. It is what I call a mushroom machine and I probably picked over 30 large yellow mushrooms within the frame of this picture. It is not something I find every year but when I do, I am thankful. This one tree alone filled up both the bags we had brought with us so I had to carry those two bags back to the car about a half mile away and bring to more bags which we filled maybe half way. It was my best year in a LONG time for morel mushroom hunting.

It is hard to show scale of our haul but this is the largest mixing bowl we own and it is full to the top of morel mushrooms, mostly yellow ones this time around. They are soaking for a bit right now and later tonight I'll cut them in half to check for bugs but seeing that it is still a week or before I normally find them, we saw very few bugs and absolutely no ticks which in a typical year can coincide with the latter parts of mushroom hunting season.

This is way more mushrooms than we will be able to eat since only my wife and I eat them so I'll likely give half of them away to make some friends. 

We found them at a place I've never hunted before but one I know fairly well. In fact, this is the very field that I helped my father burn maybe a month earlier. See how green it is as the native grasses have started growing!

Below is the same field seconds after burning though I'm at the complete opposite corner that the above picture was taken. The woods you see in far background of the picture below are where I hunted mushrooms this outing. It was full of multiflora rose which is an invasive plant full of razor sharp thorns looking to rip your clothes and skin so it wasn't the easiest hunting but when mushrooms about, one deals with the pain from the thorns.

We ended up wearing out before we searched even half of what is prime habitat for mushrooms on that farm. So we carried our full bags back to the car and drove home. I'm sure there are lots more we left behind but hopefully they spread their spore and multiply for next year.