Mind your Morels

I used to not know anything about mushrooms, and I mostly still don't. However, I do know a morel when I see one and somehow I kept finding them in my own backyard this spring!

Found on April 28th.

It all started one beautiful spring afternoon. Still early enough that the lawn hadn't even had it's first mowing. With so much fresh green renewal, I was stalking around the yard looking for young dandelion greens. I feel like the change of seasons really brings out this special appreciation for various things in the natural world. My appreciation of the dandelion is certainly fleeting by now, but at the time... after a long winter, it was a thrill to have fresh edible greens growing in such abundance.

It was while I was scrounging around for dandelion greens that I happened to see something out of place in grass. I remember I almost didn't believe what i was seeing. Is that a .... a morel? Holy crap, we have morels! 

Then as I stood up, and glanced about... I saw another one... and another one. Now it wasn't like there was a whole field of them growing or anything, but it was still absolutely thrilling to find as many as I did. I think even the chickens were confused as to what I was even looking at. I had some brief paranoia that the chickens would eat them... but they apparently had zero interest. *phew*

I plucked them all up and put them in a container... sending my boyfriend a pic to verify the identification... just in case.

Morels, are an edible mushroom. They are very hard to find (would I have even seen them if I wasn't already inspecting the ground for something else?). They only appear under 'just so' conditions and only during a very specific window of time in the spring. 

From April 28th

Now, I really had no idea what I was doing. First of all, and I didn't know this until afterwords, you do not pull up the whole mushroom. You should leave the root behind. This will hopefully encourage them to grow back again next year.

One of the first things my boyfriend wrote back in response to the pic that I had sent him was: Leave the roots in place!

So going forward, I will only harvest them using a knife and cutting them off at ground level, so as to not disturb the roots.

Another thing I didn't know, but do now, is that when you store them fridge, you want to keep them in a paper bag. A plastic container or something airtight will encourage the mushrooms to rot (maybe it had to do with trapping moisture?).

We ate them for dinner.

Found on May 8th

Then a week or so later I was out and about in the yard again. I think I was checking on the chickens. As I was walking back to the house... I thought I noticed something different under the canopy of our great Norway Spruce. 

MORE MORELS! And they were massive! I didn't know morels could even get this big. All the pictures I had ever seen of them, had them more along the size of the first batch I found this year. The very first one I spotted was nearly the same size of my hand (as you can see in the image above).

under the Norway Spruce

Again, the chickens were curious what I was doing, but had zero interest in the mushrooms themselves. *phew* As soon as they realized I hadn't found any yummy bugs, they went back to their regular programming. 

Morels for dinner again! Yay!

From May 8th

I just couldn't believe it. It was literally like finding treasure. I don't know what they run for, but apparently they can be expensive. And for some reason they were growing in our backyard... AND I found them not once, but twice (and technically a third time, but they were ones I probably overlooked). Maybe it was a good year for morels in our area? I have no idea. We have NEVER found them in our yard before. I really don't know how this all works, but I started wondering... why now? Why after all these years do we suddenly have morels growing in our backyard. Could it be the chickens? In both cases they were in areas that the chickens have spent time scratching around in the past year... could they have kicked up some spores? Are my chickens mushroom farmers?

As is the case with other fungi, morels like growing near dying trees... or dead/dying wood of certain trees. The first find was under our ancient apple tree. The ancient apple is so old that I feel like it's going to fall over any year now. It's trunk is completely hollow from the sky to the earth. Over the past year one of it's main branches died... and it's on this side of the tree that the morels were growing this spring. The morels must have been feasting on the root wood that was dead/dying from the branch death. I am told that morels REALLY love dying elms the best.

The second find was under our Norway spruce. I'm not sure why they were growing there, but they were not concentrated to a small area as they were with the apple tree. The morels under the Norway Spruce were all over the place... including partway under a second nearby Norway Spruce. Maybe there was something the morels liked about the canopy of these trees? (there were some I had over looked that were hidden by the branches of the Spruce that were low and nearly touching the ground)

DELICIOUS! We didn't do anything fancy. We just washed them to get any bugs off. Morels are hollow, so sometimes there might be bugs hiding up inside. I guess usually it's hard to find wild edible mushrooms that haven't already been nibbled on by other wildlife, so in most cases the nibbling and insect damage was pretty minimal. After washing we sliced them into strips and cooked them in butter in a frying pan. YUM!