Well, I lost another post yesterday.

A friend who is quite the morel specialist says about the middle of April here.

I have only found them once a couple of years ago around the base of the Elm tree in the yard. They haven't been back since and I left some for 'reseeding'.

I have never walked the farm looking but may this year if I can remember.

Being stuck in the Big Big City, I don't get to venture out nearly as much as I'd like. In college, my plant ecology class took a field trip to Crowley's Ridge in Eastern Arkansas. It must've been late March, just as most of the forest trees were starting to leaf out. We came across a HUGE patch of morels, and 10 of us picked for 30 minutes. This was growing in a wetter area of an upland region. Since then, I've only come across the occasional morel, never more than a few.

I've asked folks who have a knack for finding them. I was told bottomland and the 1st terrace, usually sugarberry/hackberry, sycamore, and wet oaks. Now, I'm not talking swamp, but places that get overflow from creeks during high water, and often have soggy ground. These rains might make them explode. I figure between now and the next couple of weeks would be about right at finding them.

Incidentally, harvesting the "fruiting bodies" of mushrooms has no impact on the population. The vast majority of the fungus is underground doing its decomposition job, and will be ready, willing, and able to make more 'shrooms the next year. Of course, it would be good to leave a few mushrooms to put out new spores for the winds to whisk around, but picking them generally has no effect on the established colonies.

I have seen mushroom kits for morels. I have no idea how hard it is to have any success with these. It's easy to grow fungus (just leave any food out and you'll get all kinds of molds), the tricky part is growing the fungus that you WANT. So, there's an innitial stage where the medium (usually soil or peat) is ripe for any fungus that's floating in the air. Growing a chosen mushroom requires sterility and making sure that your growing area is isolated from wild fungus and yeasts.

If you want to try growing your own mushrooms, I think shitake would be much easier and rewarding.

Sorry so slow to get back. We've took a mini vacation.

We have some old elm trees back in our fence row that were damaged quite a bit by the ice storms we had. I've read dead elms are a good place to look so I'm kind of hoping that one of ours will die and start making morels. lol

I didn't know hackberries were a good place to look. We have those and also have one sycamore (actually a London Planetree).
Those morel kits are pretty expensive. If they produced mushrooms for several years it might be worth it but I'm betting it's much more complicated than that.

That's something I have always been afraid to hunt for, despite a neighbor man raving over some he found just below our house , in our woods.
I have to admit-I dont know mushrooms from toadstools.