Mushroom Mania

  It's here. What I've been yearning and waiting for: April! O month of many joys! Bright green leaves emerging. Birds singing. And - mushrooms sprouting! (insert happy dance here) It will soon be time for the Great Morel Hunt. It's an annual weeks-long tradition for me, Mr. Curious, and my outdoorsy friend, Cheryl. Cheryl & I take a week's vacation from work. We pack lunches, coat ourselves with tick spray, and don backpacks stuffed with paper bags for our finds. We spend our days skulking through the woods, carefully scanning the forest floor for that coveted prize - morel mushrooms.
 Normal folks are out in the local parks enjoying the spring air, playing ball, walking their dogs, etc. They look at us with raised eyebrows when we suddenly emerge from a side trail, all disheveled and dirty, with scratches on our arms and sticks in our hair... How did we get so crazy?

 

 

 
Aahh - to be out in the spring woods again!

 
 
 It all started back in the spring of 2008 when I dragged Mr. Curious to a guided mushroom walk at a local park just for kicks. Very interesting! That summer, I noticed quite a few different mushrooms in our yard. I took pictures of them and then of course I grew curious as to what species they were. My old Golden field guide I’ve had since childhood just didn’t cut it. So, I went out & bought some more in-depth field guides to mushrooms. I found my species and then some. I read the books cover to cover – hmmm, what’s this about edible species?…. Think I’ll go down in the woods here & try to find this one…That was it. I was obsessed. I got Cheryl involved and she’s even more obsessed than I am. We’ve gone ‘shrooming ever since whenever we can and we've found many different types of edible mushrooms. 
 Mr. Curious enjoys ‘shrooming, too. It’s a traditional activity in this area among the old timers and he’d done it as a kid with his dad & uncle. He & I have enjoyed many an afternoon riding our bikes on the local trails and mushroom hunting at the same time.
  It’s true that there are absolutely deadly mushrooms out there, but it’s not as hard as I thought it would be to find safe edible kinds. However, I must warn you if you're thinking of trying this - you HAVE to be certain of what you're doing! Attend a mushroom outing. Read books. Learn all about the poisonous species in your area. Seriously - you can die.
 But I'm mostly discussing morels in this post. I don't want to scare you off - morels are a great beginner's mushroom as far as safety goes. They're unique in appearance. There is only one lookalike to morels - the aptly named false morel. Luckily, the foolproof way to tell the difference is this: morels are completely hollow and false morels are not. If you slice a morel in half, it is empty inside. False morels are stuffed with convoluted fleshy walls and cottony stuff. False morels are (usually) poisonous. Some people have eaten them anyway. Apparently, sometimes they can be consumed with no ill effects, sometimes they cause severe illness, and sometimes they cause kidney failure and death. To me, that's another intriguing facet of mushrooms... Why? How can it be non-toxic, sort of toxic, and/or totally toxic? Are there actually different false morel species? Could be... Anyway, we don't come across them very often, and they do look different on the outside, once you get used to seeing true morels. 

 

                                                           
                                                         Morel -  HOLLOW

                                             
                                                                                   False morel - NOT hollow           
                                                                


 Now that 5 years have passed since that first guided mushroom outing, we've calmed down a bit and narrowed our mushroom target species to several favorites. Each has a time of year and type of location that it prefers. Here in my area, the edible 'shroom seasons are these: Late April is Morel season, and they grow around dead & dying elm trees. July is Chanterelle and Black Trumpet season - more random, they grow in woods with various tree species. September/October is Sheepshead (Maitake) which grow on oak trees, and also Horse Mushrooms, which grow on open lawns or under spruces.

 

 

                                                
                                           A few morels trying to hide from us!

 

 Well, look who we found...

 

 

 But morel season is by far our favorite! It's a combination of things: getting out in the woods at the peak of spring after a long dreary winter indoors. Seeing wildflowers everywhere, listening to birds, even finding box turtles newly emerged from hibernation. We always have a memorable nature adventure on every hike. We enjoy all the little things the woods have to offer whether or not we find any morels. But then if we do find some, or hit a mother lode of morels, we excitedly stuff our packs and go skipping down the trail high-fiving each other.
Another exciting aspect of morel hunting is the secretive mind set that 'shroomers have. We don't divulge our hot spots - or any spots for that matter. All 'shroomers act this way. There's nothing worse than arriving at a favorite spot, only to find that another morel hunter has beaten you to it and all that's left is 'stumps' - what remains after a morel is cut from the ground. (Good 'shroomers cut or pinch them off; we don't pull them out and disrupt the 'roots') We act all cagey when we see another person out on the trails. Who, us? We're not mushroom hunting! We're just taking pictures of wildflowers (we always have our cameras along). No mushrooms here; nothing to see here, move along. Cheryl & I are always muttering to each other "What's that guy doing over there? He's morel hunting, isn't he? Should we kill him?" Ha!

 

 

 

 

 

  WaHOOO - a mother lode! Look at the photo carefully - there are morels all

  over this little patch of ground.  About 20 mushrooms are visible. We picked 320 morels in this one spot!

 Yet another fun part of this pursuit is the fact that morels can be very elusive, with the seeming ability to appear and disappear in the blink of an eye. They resemble other things - or rather, other things resemble them. Pine cones. Rocks. Leaves. Lumps of dirt. Dirty golf balls. As a side note: we seem to find golf balls in the woods no matter where we go, even when we're nowhere near a driving range or golf course, or even houses. I am not kidding; there are golf balls everywhere. I'm starting to think that golf balls have come to life and are breeding in the woods of America. But anyway, back to morels. You need to develop your 'morel eyes'. Once you've found some, this gets easier and you do get better at spotting them. We squat down to get a ground level view and circle around looking from different angles. We ruffle through the green undergrowth with our hiking sticks, looking for morels hiding underneath. You wouldn't believe how often we accidentally step on one. Aargh! Then we freeze in place, afraid to move at all as we strain our eyeballs even further.

 To be successful at all, you need to know your trees. Once you're familiar with trees, it's easy to spot elms and in our area that's where most of the morels grow. They can also be found under tulip poplar and ash trees. They have a symbiotic relationship with elms (as do a lot of mushrooms and trees). I think it's incredible how fungi and trees live together - it's another hidden world in nature. Mushrooms that have this relationship with trees are termed mycorrhizal.

All fungi have extensive networks of  'roots' called the mycelium. In the case of mycorrhizal fungi, the mycelium stretches through the soils underground and attaches to the fine networks of feeder roots from the trees above. They have a mutually beneficial arrangement. The fungi help to fix soil nutrients to the tree roots and the tree roots give glucose to the fungi. Here's the crazy part: the fungi mycelium are actually not roots. The mycelium is the real organism (like a tree) - the mushrooms that appear above ground are just the fruiting body. So really, picking mushrooms is like picking berries or apples. The mushroom appears above ground to spread spores (like the fruits spread seeds). In the case of morels, it is said that when the host elm tree begins to die, the underground morel mycelium sends up numerous mushrooms in an effort to spread spores and reproduce before the host tree dies. For the morel hunter, the tree's loss is our gain! Healthy elm trees don't usually have any morels growing under them. The mycelium is probably there, but it hasn't sent up any fruiting bodies. Cool, huh?
 We've found the most morels under elms that we term "crusty".  A crusty elm is half dead with the bark on the smaller branches starting to crack and slip off. It might still be alive with leaves on some of the twigs, but you can tell that it's days are numbered. Once the elm is bald and dead, no more morels.

 

 

                      

                                                The happy result of a day foraging


 I can’t say why mushrooms are so intriguing to me. I think they’re all fascinating - poisonous, edible, whatever. They’re pretty, and they just sit there begging to be photographed. It’s strangely thrilling to forage for them, discover them, and then eat them if possible. Maybe it stirs up some kind of primal hunter-gatherer instinct. Whatever it is, I urge you to get a good mushroom guide, study it, and then join us in the wonderful world of mushroom hunting! It's a great way to get some exercise, enjoy nature, and receive the ultimate reward for all this craziness - the unbelievably rich, nutty gourmet flavor of these fabulous fungi. As an added bonus, many studies have been showing the powerful medicinal and immune system boosting properties of various wild mushrooms, not just morels. So when we eat them, it's nice to know they're actually doing us some good. Just remember, wild mushrooms must be cooked - no eating them raw or you'll have a day of, er, intestinal upset.

 I will continue with a second installment regarding morels next time. After all, you'll need to know what to do once you return home with a big ol' bag of mushrooms. Meanwhile, enjoy yourself out there!