gravegardens: I have mushrooms on the brain

It’s morel mushroom season here in Michigan. This time of year, I think about those little bastards morning to night. I spend hours and hours and hours out looking for them.

To be honest, they taste great, but if you convert the time I spend looking for them into money, I could buy mountains of regular old buttons and Portobello’s. And, I could fry them in a pound of butter like I do morels and they would taste (almost) as good.

Case in point: On my first hunt this season, I spent 5 hours hiking and found just this one tiny mushroom.

I don’t know if you have ever looked for morels but it is a frustrating hobby. You can read books on how to find them, talk to other mushroom hunters, and walk for days without finding a single mushroom. They're hard to find for many reasons. Here are the main ones:

Looking too early.
Looking too late.
Not enough rain.
Somebody beat you to the spot and already picked them.
Looking in the wrong areas. Or looking in the right spot but one or more of the other reasons above is the culprit.

So, if you look and don’t find any, you can’t just say: Oh well, no mushrooms here. You have to go back a week later in case you were too early. Or, a day or two later after a rain because they can pop up overnight after it rains and you have to beat anyone else that may look in “your” spot. And, you have to keep going back until you are absolutely positive you will not find anything this year. Then you repeat it all the next year in case it was because someone had beaten you to the spot.

I have found spots where I have picked bags of them and, in subsequent years, return to find only a few or worse, none. And yes, I pick them the right way – using scissors or a knife to cut the stem. I have also stumbled across masses of mushrooms in areas that I have walked through for years on the way to my normal spots. Were they always growing there and I didn’t notice them all those years?

So far this year, I have spent approximately 15 hours hunting and have found a grand total of 25 mushrooms. I have found some other interesting things like one of these: