Already!?

I've been beating the woods and not seen a single one.

Generally I have them come up in my front yard and as soon as they pop up I go hunting.

I usually just fry them in some butter. On occasion, some of them even make it back to the house with me.

funny-that's exactly my method as well. I was going to the garage and kicked one over with my foot. Got to scanning the leaves and the early ones are just barely getting started. We are in a cold snap, but once it warms up and maybe showers a bit more they should be all over. Where we used to live, we had the huge greyish smoke colored ones and the giant yellowish-off white ones that could fill a sack in no time, but here it seems we mostly have the ones the locals have endowed with such a colorful phallus-inspired name. If you already know what I'm talking about, good. If you have no clue you will have to go ask someone else . :)I generally scout out my spots to make sure there is enough for a decent sized mess before I pick them.
butter is good, scrambled in eggs for breakfast, cracker crumbs, fish fry batter, beer batter, tempura batter, you name it.
oh gosh my stomach just rumbled

Shame on you dirtgirl You got my digestave juces stirred up and I am still 3 weeks away from finding any unless we have a whole bunch bett3er eeather than we are having righ now. jim

Uh Oh sounds like I am missing something. I wouldn't know one if it stared me in the face. But they sound good. The only thing I ever knew about mushrooms were that the hippies used to go and get mushrooms out of cow pastures and would get high on them. They also used to suck on toads to get high, some kind of enzymes in their skin. Glenda

I'm jealous! I saw morels selling at Whole Foods this weekend for $60 a pound. I think I've only tried them twice in my life.

Morels and truffles both can be staggeringly high...but I bet the store bought variety are nothing like fresh-from-the-woods morels. Think about garden fresh green beans and then recall the last rubbery bean you ate from a can.
There CAN be a certain "ick factor" involved with these mushrooms since they have both a hollow stem and head and this is a favorite hangout for slugs, springtails, and all sorts of creatures. A good going over is advisable, but some do eat them straight out of the leaf litter. I can't do this since I first took a close look at one and noticed that those millions of specks of what looked like dirt WERE NOT. So, I prefer mine sliced lengthwise as it's easier to check for slugs AND they tend to cook more evenly.
60$$?? Man, there have been years where I had more than I cared to eat and gave the rest away.
I only trust myself with the morels, BTW. Aside from false morels, which to me are hard to confuse with the real deal, morchella is really an odd looking fungus and stands apart from the more dangerous types. I know there are lots of equally wonderful edibles but you only need to screw up once. And even then some people will have a bad reaction to any mushroom, so be forewarned. I picked a HUGE basket of morels across the road one bountiful spring, and selected the very best to give a neighbor in exchange for his letting me bass fish in his lake up the road. I learned some time later that he got horribly sick after eating them and ended up in the emergency room...yet my husband and I ate the rest of that mess of morels with absolutely no problems whatsoever.
I haven't fished in that lake since.

South PA still cant find any. Others have said they are getting them, but not me :(

Found a few dozen small grays over the the weekend.

It's pretty frustrating,, and the time is running out to get more. I have gone out several times now and each time found no more than a dozen at a time, not enough for a decent meal. THe area where I usually cash in on the big nice smoky ones turned up only a handful, and the great big yellowish monsters are completely absent.
At the end of the hunt I have been simply placing the shrooms up on logs and leaving them, hoping at least the spores might still do a bit of good. I recall the good old days 5 or 6 years ago when I used to get sick just thinking about eating another mushroom, and now it's been years since I had a single one.
I have heard a dozen reasons why some people think the "honeyspots" simply quit producing. Is anybody really sure? Since these mushrooms are still not commercially grown, maybe nobody really has them quite figured out yet. SOme say turkeys are eating them all, but I've never seen this happen personally. Sounds possible though. Fewer woodlots, reintroduced turkeys=higher competition for fewer mushrooms? I don't know...

Maybe the areas have been overgrazed by humans?

Morels are the bloom of an underlying fungus. Collecting them is like pruning the flowers off a perennial. Harvesting doesn't necessarily harm the underlying fungus. Though avid mushroom hunters should be using mesh bags, to help spread the spores. Overgrazing is not the cause of decreased mushrooms.

Mainly the bloom is very picky about weather. Temperature and moisture has to be just right. So far this year moisture has been good, but temperatures (particularly night time temps) have been down. Notice the tulips and lilacs are hesitating to open up. They have bloomed, but they haven't really opened.

Last year was too dry for a good morel crop. And the year before was too hot, too early. You need just the right combination of moisture and temperature to get a prolific morel bloom.

I found 12 in my yard today while mowing by the pond. Unfortunately, I mowed over the first 3. All yellow.

I am going to my Dads Camp to look for some morels. But its been so dry and cold here in the u.p. of michigan ,probably won't find any. Oh well, Wish me luck!!

Hello, sorry to bump an old thread, but after a search of GW, this appeared to be my best shot at some expert advice. Thank you for any help you can offer.

Can I possibly mistake a bad mushroom for a morel? These are conical with the brain pattern and I find no other mushrooms that appear similar, but I don't want to make a mistake. The mushrooms that were here last year were taller and slimmer. The ones this year are shorter and squattier, but they both have the conical brain appearance, and are growing in compost in the woods.

Thanks,
Seedmama

Can you post picture? I remember a later morel looking mushroom with a conical root that was advised against. Do a search for morels. One site listed many different types when I looked last year maybe one will match yours.

Sorry I did not bookmark site.

Hi seedmama!
Funny this should pop back up because I was just thinking of morels today, as many of the "indicator plants" are just starting to make an appearance, which means the shrooming season is surely not far away. They can be fickle, though!

I did not think to check your page...what state are you in? I am not terribly familiar with mushrooms in my area of Illinois, much less another part of the country, so I am afraid my advice will be limited to So. Illinois or this part of the general midwest.
The ONLY mushroom I trust myself completely with is the morel, and although some will tell you that the FALSE MOREL (Gyromitra esculenta by my books) can be mistaken for a morel, once you see one side-by-side it is really hard to believe this might happen IMO. The false morels I have seen look like slimy nasty things that a goat coughed up, and are quite different from the spongy brain-like appearance so typical with morels. Of course there is a large range of variation among types of morels; some are tiny and yellowish to smoky white, the wonderfully large charcoal colored giants that fill a sack so quickly, and even the ones that, uh, have such an off-color yet effectively descriptive name around here. I can only tell you it refers to a certain part of a dog's anatomy and I CALL THEM SIMPLY "MUSHROOMS". I really would have been happier had I never heard them called that, but the corruption has been done. The only other even remotely similar mushroom , to me, are the stinkhorns, and that would be a stretch of the imagination. And frankly, if you went so far as to consider something that foul an item you might place anywhere near your mouth...you deserve to eat one.

It should also be noted that you can STILL get sick from eating morels, even when you KNOW They are the real deal and you have eaten them in the past without incident. This happened to mepersonally, I may have posted about it previously. A neighbor of ours has a wonderfully productive bass lake and I asked if he would accept a sack of mushrooms in exchange for the permission to fish it. The deal was struck, I spent a few hours hunting a mess of shrooms, and then selected only the biggest and best among these to give to him--my husband and I ate the "culls". Maybe a week or so passed and my husband ran into his wife somewhere and she said he got extememly sick immediately after eating them and spent the night in the hospital having his stomach pumped or something. I am still not sure what happened in this case as we ate the others ourselves without incident and this guy has been fixing batches of mushrooms all his life.
So things can always go awry.

If you could post pics of your mushrooms in question, or give a more detailed account of them, it would really help. I went through some files I have of my own finds through the years but they really aren't good enough quality.

The false morels I've seen looked rounded and brain-shaped and didn't look much like morels at all, but I've seen a few photos on the internet of false morels that look more like real morels and I can see where someone could eat those mistakenly. The website below says "If it isn't hollow, don't swallow." It says that if the stem is filled with a white cotony fiber instead of hollow, it's not a morel. Morels are always hollow. Hope that helps.

Here is a link that might be useful: Identifying morels

This website has good descriptions of both also.

Here is a link that might be useful: Morel Identification - False Morels

christie sw mo:
good links, and pretty good photos.
The "beefsteak morel" is the closest thing to what I have been occasionally seeing here-false morel- and it just looked so vastly different that I would never touch it.
But the ones that made my neighbor sick were the wonderful giant "yellow" morels. I felt really badly about that but it is also good to keep in mind that not everybody reacts to "ok" mushrooms the same. And I have also heard that alcohol consumption with certain mushrooms can make potential reactions even more severe.

THere is so much argument over morels-- are they yellows, greys, blacks...hasn't there been any genetic testing to finally settle the disputes over what is what? I guess the difficulty is that when you are in the woods there are BUNCHES of variation in color, growth habits...and not too many of us are carrying North American Field Guide to the Chromosomes of Mushrooms.
I have picked giant yellows before that had totally charcoal tips, like they were a half-yellow, half black hybrid.

go out with an experienced hunter, and if in doubt toss it out.

As a child my father always was very happy to find the beefsteak mushrooms. He considered them the better tasting one. Now they are considered as poisonous. I have been wondering if it is a matter of picking time or what.

We ate them too but my parents quit collecting them when they found out more about them.
From what I've read:
Some have a higher concentration of the toxic substance than others. I don't think it's timing. I think it varies from one area to another.
The poison accumulates in your body. So even if you've eaten them safely in the past, you could still drop dead the next time. Not worth it at all.

In my case, where the yellow morels made our neighbor sick, I honestly think it was an environmental issue where the morels picked up toxins in their immediate area and passed it on. The woods across from our house was at one time fenced and the owner temporarily kept a few head of cattle there.
i always felt rather sorry for these unfortunate creatures since if no hay was brought in they had to forage as best as they could among the trees. Right before they came and finally moved them to pasture, the owner brought in a nasty round bale that stunk horribly, like mildew. I can't say for certain if there was a connection, but a few days later there was a dead cow in the woods and they had to have the rendering truck come pick it up. It was about 5 or 6 years after the cows were moved out that we picked the biggest mushrooms in the general area of where the bales were often dumped out, and I wonder if there wasn't something toxic still lingering in the soil or leaf litter.

just a guess, but the giant yellow ones are supposed to be 'safe" and obviously they weren't for one reason or another.

FOUND SOME!!!! My co-worker brought me one the other day saying she found it growing in her bark mulch. The bagged bark mulch she had bought at HD and laid out last October!! Jealous and utterly ashamed I headed out to our "stump field" today determined to find a morel. I found six. None overly big or "huge" or anything but they're out that's the important part. I'm hoping it'll rain in the next day or two. That oughta really make 'em pop!

I normally sautee in butter, but I might have to try the batter method. I wonder if I could stuff the hollow stem with something yummy before batter frying. . . hmmmmm. . . In the meantime today's small bounty is headed for tonight's homemade "gourmet" pizza :)

Anyone else have a favorite morel recipe to share?