Similar in appearance to morchella esculenta. Cap is detached from the stalk about half way down. Fruits 10 to 15 days after the Verpa Bohemica. Color varies from grey in young specimens to almost black in older ones. Hollow cap attached to stalk at lower edge. Fruits in early to mid-May under aspen, birch and balsam fir, occasionally under maple and red pine. Edible and considered choice. Hollow cap attached to stalk at base. Fruits in middle or latter half of May.
Look for this when the oak leaves are in the "mouse-ear" stage. Fruitings often occur in the same spot for several years. Found in old orchards, beech-maple forests, oak woods, burned over meadows, swampy ground under elms, and occasionally on lawns. Edible and choice. Fruits in late May to early June under oak, in beech-maple forests, old orchards and rich garden soil, and around stumps and stubs of elm trees that have been dead for several years.
Gathered around a campfire with a handful of Interlochen faculty and staff on a cool evening, the conversation turns to morels as naturally as breathing. Not where because I want to hunt them, but where because suddenly I cannot seem to find them anywhere, despite what has long seemed a sixth sense. In hardwoods, while walking the dog is all Chad will venture. Another friend, Tim, shares his method—a morel growing technique—by which he swears he has doubled his crop every year.
My mouth waters to think of them. It is a rare gift for someone to share their site, their cache. There are stories in the South of mushroom spots being handed down in wills. Tim Keilty, of Leelanau Natural Beef in Cedar, has two sites near his house, and when he finds someone who has slipped the fence and is cutting his mushrooms he gives them a choice: pay his property taxes or hand over his mushrooms.
They always hand over the mushrooms. The rest of us, those without homes surrounded by copses of ash, the rights to farms from generations past, or little riverside acres to call our own, are left to forage state parks, national lakeshores, and even golf courses.
While any public space may be fair game, no one is going to share their sacred site, and finding cut stems and realizing someone else has discovered your mushroom mecca makes for a sad day. If morels love the charred remains of pine forests in Washington, dying and dead elm trees throughout the East, they also love the white ash in Michigan.
Especially when those ash trees are old and dying. As emerald ash borer spreads and takes these old trees with it, will morels disappear as well? Miller schools us in ash, identifiable by their gray, diamond-groove bark and opposing leaf structure. More importantly, he shows us how to recognize the older trees, those just beginning to peel their bark. Beneath these, morels seem to flourish. The four of us work up a valley and climb the hills. Ash tower overhead, leaning left and right, creaking from time to time.
Our feet crunch the forest floor and we are magnetized by those trees that are just beginning to disrobe their bark. I scan the horizon, my mind untethered, unpracticed, a loose jumble of daydreams and quests, mapping shapes without effort. This is, this has always been, how I see morels best. Not by staring them down, but by letting them materialize in my peripheral vision. I look across the forest floor, to where the valley bends brown waist toward the breast of the hill and see the first along my periphery, almost out of view.
A morel rises conically against the chiseled gray bark of ash. Farther on, another morel juts, barely visible, lightly yellow against leafy litter. Hint-Onion bags allow the picked mushroom spores to fall to the ground which produces mushrooms the next year.
Select only fresh, young mushrooms that are undamaged. After a mushroom matures, it begins to deteriorate. One spoiling specimen can contaminate a whole bunch. Use a knife to cut the mushrooms just above the ground. Trim off the lower stem and brush off any loose dirt before placing in your collection.
Keep your mushrooms as clean as possible. Keep mushrooms cool, shaded and well aired until you get home. Dress properly for the weather and terrain. Take rain gear, map and compass and know how to use them. Explore foraging ». For the beginning mushroom hunter, the morels are the safest group among the more than 2, kinds of wild mushrooms found in Michigan.
Like all wild mushrooms, morels require quite specific conditions of temperature and moisture to grow. Some springs are good for morels, others poor.
Warm and wet conditions are best, and cold and dry can mean almost total failure of the crop. Large burn sites in forested areas are ideal for morel mushroom hunting, especially in burned areas where jack, white or red pine once grew.
0コメント