DETROIT (MCT) — It has been an odd season for morel mushroom picking, as it has for just about any outdoors activity this spring. I was on vacation in Florida in mid-March when people in southern Michigan started posting online reports of finding morels during that wild hot spell. I thought I’d miss the season.
Three weeks later, I returned to sub-freezing overnight temperatures in northern Michigan and not much better in the southern parts.
Last weekend, Andy Beaton from New Boston and three friends went morel hunting in the Waterloo State Recreation Area near Pinckney, picking spots where they had done well, and reported that “it looks like it’s just about over there.”
“Last week I got about 50 nice yellow morels, but on Sunday I only found one that was edible. There were a few others that had wilted so much they were inedible,” Beaton said.
“A couple of friends who went up north told me they did pretty well around Cadillac, and they figure you’ll be able to find morels there for at least another week,” he said.
There are several varieties of genus Morchella mushrooms in Michigan, including black, yellow, gray and white. They are found wherever there are northern hardwoods, especially among elms and ash trees, and in North America they grow each spring in hardwood forests from Virginia to British Columbia.
Morels are among the most highly prized mushrooms by gourmets. They’re an essential ingredient in a lot of French cooking, and dried morels can sell for $10 an ounce or more.
Most morel hunters would rather publish their Social Security numbers than reveal their mushrooming spots, but good areas are mixed woodlands around dead or dying elm and ash trees, and there should soon be a lot more of the latter because of the infestation by the emerald ash borer.
Another good spot is an old apple orchard, but when I went to one of my top spots recently, where a handful of ancient apple trees mark the location of a long-gone farmyard, I didn’t find a single morel.
Hopefully, that’s because recent cold weather in northern Michigan has shut them down temporarily. Morels like daytime temperatures in the 60s and nights that don’t get below 50, and for the past three weeks in northern Michigan it has been a rare day that reaches 60 and many nights have been below 40.
If you’re new to morel hunting, I’d recommend looking at some of the numerous how-to and where-to websites and then give it a try. And don’t get discouraged if you don’t have immediate success.
This is one of those things that you have to do a time or two before you know how to do it.