Morel Season - The Real March Madness

Well from the increase in comments on this blog and from the explosion of posts on the many morel report boards, it looks like most of you are just like me, and beginning to get real antsy to get back out in the woods and have a look around. I must admit, I have been able to resist the urge so far, knowing full well that ground and air temps are still pretty low, but with such warm weather it is really hard. I can't wait to see these little guys again.

It is a primal urge almost impossible to ignore. Every time I get into the car I find myself noting certain trees here and there. Morels begin to seep into my dreams, both those when I'm sleeping and when I'm sitting in meetings at work or eating with my family. Even when I do not have morels on my mind, they pop up everywhere. For example in the locker room before a workout the other day, I couldn't help but overhear two people talking about past finds and disappointments and the promise of the upcoming season. As the season approaches these conversation become all too commonplace. From the cashier line at the grocery store, nearby diners at a local eatery or even waiting for the dentist. In March and April, all minds seem to be focused on the wonderful morsel that is the morel. What I think of as the true Missouri "gold."

I suspect some reports will be coming in very soon from the southern part of the state. People usually begin report finding black morels by mid-March in areas around Branson and Poplar Bluff.

I do hope the moisture picks up between now and then. It has been a rather dry season in my area and although this recent batch of rain will help, the long-term forecast does not look as promising. But this is Missouri and if you don't like the weather just wait a day, it's bound to change.

Getting back to reports, if any of you find one please let me know. If it is soon, then I would suggest sending a photo with your find and a dated newspaper. I'll take people at their word, but morel hunters, especially early in the season before anyone has found anything, take on a real "Show Me" attitude to claims by anyone, even seasoned hunters like myself.

The photo to the right is of the first morel I picked last year on April 4th (the one on the left). I left the others along with many more in this area and came back and got them a week later when they were of a size worth picking. Happy hunting.

Warmer Weather and Morel Fever

The spring-like weather has brought me out of my winter slumber so it is time to turn my attention back to mushrooms and the hopes for another spring like last year. I was perusing the message boards noticing the anticipation of morels on the minds of my fellow hunters when I saw this post. For those who have already seen it, please forgive the repeat. This comes from the Missouri reports board over at morels.com and was posted by a hunter I have met a few times in the woods.

Feral Boy| Saint Louis, Missouri |
January 16, 2009
Here is a good reworking of a Pink Floyd tune forwarded by David Wasilewski to the Mushroomhunting.org bulletin board:

Wish Shrooms Were Here

So, so you think you can tell,
dead leaves from morels
variations in strain.
Can you tell a great yield, from an empty pail?
A stipe from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?

Is the attachment of gills, adnexed or adnate?
On the ground or on trees?
Don’t die after they freeze?
How’s the odor and taste?
Or, have you replaced
the glory that grows out of doors
for shrooms that grew in a cage.

How I wish, I wish mushrooms were here.
We wore out our soles out on mushroom patrols, year after year.
Looking over the same old ground.
What have you found?
A wasted Bovista sphere?
Wish shrooms were here.

I love Pink Floyd so that tune is sure to be haunting me through spring and into summer.

For those of you like me, who are getting cabin fever and looking at one beauty of a weekend. It's time to take a stroll. Hunting in February? That's right. This weekend and next week look very promising. The dead logs and trees out there are just thawing providing plenty of moisture for oysters. Stick to the same places you would look for morels, but search new areas not your regular patches. As you get those legs ready for morel season, you can also look for those motherlode trees. Trust me, if you find the right dead elm or ash grove and check it early and often, come April your stomach will be full and your hunts a little easier.


And if the weather turns bad again, a little research never hurts. You can search the internet all you want, but you never know what you can find if you go to your local library and enlist a librarian in your search. Some of the best stories and recipes I have seen were from 30 to 40 years ago. Call me old fashion but these kids can watch all the YouTube hunting videos they want. A little research at a local library for old newspaper articles can provide vital information and pay off in woods later.

As Winter Approaches...

the mushroom season is slowly come to an end. The cold nights and lack of moisture the last few weeks have marked the end to an incredible fall season of mushrooms. Normally, I name the year at this time. Like 2007 was the year of chanterelles, as I found them in record numbers. This year I would say it was the year of the hen, but it was really the year of the mushroom here. With the constant and unusually high amounts of rain we received all year, I picked record numbers (for me at least) of about everything from morels in spring, to chants and sweettooth in summer, and of course hens in the fall. I even found more chicken of the woods this year than I have in the past. My cupboards are full of dried mushrooms and I have a nice section of my freezer full of everything from partially fried morels to several pounds of some excellent mushroom duxelle (which takes about 10 hours to make by the way, but well worth it.)

The season drawing to a close does not mean that there will be no more mushrooms. I am sure if I looked hard enough I could still find a hen or two especially if I went a little bit further south, but I am literally henned out so I probably won't be heading out anytime soon to look for more.

And in a few weeks, I'm sure I will get the urge to walk the woods again. There are two mushrooms that you can find in abundance during the warmer spells of winter. The first I will mention only in passing. It is the velvet foot or Flammulina velutipes mushroom . I DO NOT recommend that novices hunt and eat this one as it has a very poisonous look-a-like, the deadly galerina. Although many mushrooms are poisonous, few are truly fatal, but the galerina is one of them. Look at the pictures on the right. The first one is velvet foot and the second one is the deadly galerina.
Can you tell the difference? This is one case where you have to take a spore print to be absolutely certain. Velvet foot should give you a white print, galerina will produce a rusty brown spore print. Until you really know what you are doing, it is best to just stick with the cultivated version of this mushroom, Enoki, pictured last. You can hunt it down in the produce aisle of you local grocer or some of the finer restaurants in town.
It took me about five years before I trusted myself to properly identify this mushroom and I still pass on it many times I see it just in case. However, they are quite tasty. If you have ever had tried enoki then you know a little bit of what I mean. Though they look completely different and even taste different they give you a hint of the flavor of those found in the wild.

The mushroom that you can find around here all winter that is good for beginners is the oyster mushroom or Pleurotus ostreatis. I usualy find these in woods with more softwoods (elm, willow, and maples) so I hunt for them in the same locations I hunt morels in spring. Look for downed logs in these areas and check them even if there hasn't been any rain. The cold nice and frost often provide enough moisture to keep them flushing as long as the daytime temps are in the 40s. Oysters can survive temps down in the 20s, so even hard freezes have little effect as long as the days warm up a bit.

So if you didn't get your fill of wild edibles this year, do not fret, there is still a chance to find some nice oysters. I tend to avoid older specimen who have that slight fishy smell, but I know plenty of people who eat them as well. In my opinion they aren't quite as tasty and the texture can leave something to be desired, so I generall only pick the younger ones, especially those still in the button stage. The one good thing about hunting in winter is NO BUGS so not only do you not have to worry about ticks and skeeters, but your mushrooms are nice and larva and beetle free so you can keep all you find.

Another reason I mainly look for oysters where I hunt morels is that you can never start scouting too early. Finding that dead elm or recently blow down or chopped off cottonwood, sycamore, or maple and making note of it can pay huge dividends come spring when you can be the first to these trees with the potential to produce 50 to 100 morels. If find some of these, check them early and often come April, especially those with lots of exposure to the sun. Last year I found a nice mess of morels around one of these trees. So, even if you don't find any oysters, a winter walk in the woods can be well worth the effort.

Fifty Pounds in one Day

OK, so you have just hiked to the top of a steep hill and find yourself looking at oak after oak to no avail when you come across this. I spotted this one at nearly 100 yards out. It was huge, literally the size of a beach ball.

This has been an incredible year for hens and this one topped all. I had never seen one this large in my years of fall hunting. And get this, I didn't even pick it. I just took some photos showed it to some hunters to be, that were with me and walked away.
I know what you are thinking. How could you do that? How could you turn your back on such a marvelous specimen? Well, there were several reasons so let me lay them all out for you.

First, take a look at this picture. This thing was bigger than my backpack and probably approaching 30 pounds. Hauling that back down the hill I scrambled up and back to my car seemed like more of a chore than I wanted.
Second, the underneath of many fronds were just turning yellow. Yes, it wasn't too far gone for eating, but it was on its way and let me move on to my next point.
Third, did I say I had already found 14 other hens that afternoon and had over 20 pounds in my vehicle?
In the end I only picked about 8 of the 15 or approximately half of the 50 pounds or so I uncovered today. I only came home with two nice hens and gave the rest away to the hunters to be. They were eager to try some, though I cautioned that they only try a bit at first, to make sure they were not allergic, as a few are.

I also came across a small patch of sweet tooth that were big and bug free. Like the ones I found a few weeks ago, these were atop a rocky ridge right above the outcroppings. They were a nice treat. I saw some hericiums of all three varieties, purple gilled lacaria and some oysters but all were too old for the table.

I managed to find one very fresh hen on a nice slope so I could take one of my favorite "uphill underneath" shots. The fresh hens I found today were very dark and brown, however they varied to light tan, as seen in the one above. There were plenty of small ones that I left behind so unless the cold really sets in, the hens may be here for a good while more. So, keep checking those oaks. If anyone is in Mid-MO and wants to try some hen, just let me know. I have plenty to spare.
Happy hunting.

The Halloween Mushroom

Well not too much out in the woods these days as the rains has become fewer and farther between and the night and days grow colder. However there are some good fall edibles still in abundance. The kids and I returned to the scene of our first hen hunt yesterday only nine days after walking it previously and found a new flush of hens on several trees. With the lack of rain and being so fresh these were some of the cleanest, I have picked and took record time to clean. That is an often unmentioned downside of finding a 20 pound hen of the woods, the 3 to 4 hours it takes to clean is from bugs, dirt and to trim of embedded debris.

We also came across a nice chicken that had sprouted wings since last we had visited the trail. The kids really got a kick out of how "Halloweeny" the mushroom was. Anyone need a costume idea?



Here they are with their Halloween find. Notice how well the mushroom goes with my daughter's pants. Thanks to Jon Rapp, once again, for such fabulous photos. He is really spoiling me.

Sulfur Shelf - Chicken of the Woods

Normally, when I do find some nice chicken of the woods mushrooms they are Laetiporus cincinnatus or the white pored variety. But I had a few minutes to spare so I thought I would check one of my sweettooth patches out real quick and see if anything was still up. Unfortunately there were no sweettooh but I did find some pretty yellow fungal fingers beginning to stick out of an old dead snag. I left them alone and returned 4 days and a good rain later to find some real beauties of Laetiporus sulphurues.
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Here are a few pics that Jon, a local hunter, he takes such great photos I rarely use my own camera anymore.









In the end I came home with three nice one pound clusters of some of the freshest chickens you can find. Made for some good eating and even had enough left over to dry some for winter.

Fall "Fowl"age

The colder nights not only bring on the glorious fall foliage that Missouri is known for, but it tends to stir up some most delicious fowl as well. This is not the traditional birds that most hunters seek out, but rather the fungal variety that us mushroom hunters are hoping to track down. Namely Grifola Frondosa or the hen of the woods mushroom. In Japan it is called the Maitake mushroom, where it is sought out high and low as a delicacy and medical remedy for many forms of cancer and other health conditions. Maitake literally means dancing mushroom, which is what happens when you first come across a nice clean one.

I happened out with my kids today. They love to hunt mushrooms but being only a month shy of turning four, they are not quite ready to traverse the woods. However, that is the good thing about hen of the woods. They are so big and in this area no one else really hunts them, so you can usually spot and pick them right off the trail when conditions are right. And right they have been for the past two weeks. So I was not surprised when a known hen producing tree had a nice beauty sitting at its base. That is a bonus of finding a hen, note that tree for years to come because they grow year after year in the same spot. The one we found today weighed in at a little over 2 pounds (another bonus of finding them, lots of mushroom). The one in the picture measured about 13 inches across by 10 inches wide by 9 inches tall. I usually find mine at the base of oak trees but they do show up around other trees as well. When prepaering for the table, brush of any dirt and cut or break off the fronds. If it is a young specimen you can also use the central stem, however, I find it a little tough unless you prepare it slow like in a stew. I prefer to lightly saute mine in oil and serve over fish or on a salad. But they are excellent grilled, baked and about anyway. It has a taste that is hard to describe but many, including myself prefer it to morels, so it is a worth a try if you are lucky to find one. See http://www.mushroomexpert.com/grifola_frondosa.html for more information.

We also happened on some chicken of the woods or sulfur shelf mushrooms. These would have been ripe for the table had I been out last week. They were beginning to fade and a little long in the pore so we left them behind. But that is another fowl fungus that can be readily found in fall and the bright orange really stands out. I usually find them on old black fallen logs and stumps, but you can also find them on scars and breaks in live trees (primarily oak).

If you haven't managed to get out in the woods, it is time to get hiking before the winds of winter move in and end the mushroom season for good. Hen of the woods dries very well and is a good mushroom to store and eat on those cold winter days.

Ahistory and kids on the maitake trail (photos by Jon Rapp)