Time to explore

[Dave W]

It's been quite a while since I have felt this good about the local black morel season. Temps have ranged between 40F and 80F for the past several days, and now the forecast calls for 1-2 inches of rainfall this afternoon through Friday. Then it's supposed to get sunny and remian mild... nighttime lows in the mid 30Fs for two nights. This is very important. Some years, we get the warmth and the rain and then there's a stretch of nights when the lows get into the low to mid 20Fs. Not good. So I am hoping for the best black morel season here in NE PA since 2005.

I expect to find the first ones of the year this Saturday.

[Dave W]

A sure sign that the Black Morels are coming soon, Urnula craterium aka "Devil's Urn" aka "Black Tulip Fungus."

I always find some of these a few days before the Morchella angusticeps shows up.

Also, while checking an early morel spot ran across this common fungus.

Schizophyllum commune aka "Split Gill" may be found year round.

My area received 0.7" < R < 1.1" rainfall from t-storms Wednesday night. Now (Friday) we're in the midst of a real soaker. Overnight lows projected to stay above 30F the next few nights. Then a warmup, with showers in the forecast. Looks like it's gonna be a great start to the morel season here. Will check another early spot on Sunday.

[Evan]

We had several hours of a good soakin rain this morning. We should start finding blacks tomorrow.

[Old Oak]

Been finding scarlet cups recently...dryad's saddle should be next....then morels!

[Dave W]

You get Dryad's Saddle before morels in Nebraska, Old Oak..? Here in PA the black morels arrive at least 3 weeks before Dryad's Saddle (aka Pheasant's Back, Polyoprus squamosus). Also, around here one of Dryad's favorite trees is elm. So I'm guessing you're talking about the big yellow morels that are found around elms.

[theplanets]

Dave, I've read somewhere that temperatures have to be consistently above the 50Fs during night time for morel to grow. Are you saying above 30F is good enough? If so, we've reached the right conditions here in southern Ontario!

[Dave W]

Temps ranging between 30Fs and 50Fs are not warm enough to get the Black Morels started. What I mean is this. One warm period of weather --temps in the 50-80 range-- will set into motion the cycle that leads to morel mushroom formation. If the weather cools down before the morels pop, then as long as it doesn't get too cold --several consecutive hours of temps in the 20s-- there is still a good chance to get a substantial fruiting of Black Morels, as long as it warms up again and moisture is available.

Around here right now, we had several days of warm sunny weather followed by significant soaking rainfall last Wednesday through Friday. It's a bit chilly now, but not cold enough to hold back the fruiting that I believe will really get started next mid-week. I think we are set up for a good early morel season.

Badly-timed very cold nights are just one problem for Black Morels, but a common problem around here. A completely different problem is when it gets too hot and too dry too soon. We had this last year. Yet another problem is when consistently chilly temps prevent the ground from warming up in time for the budding of the trees. Optimum morel conditions are when three things come together... moisture, warmth, and the trees beginning to bud.

[DufferinShroomer]

Relax a bit Planets you are too early by quite a bit. The issue isnt so much what today's conditions are. The issue is more along the lines of how long has it been since the weather turned acceptably good and what has the weather been like during this time. Morels need warmth and moisture to get happening. The thing is that when the ground gets moisture and the air turns warm enough to matter what you get first isnt morels. No. Doesnt work that way. When conditions in spring become both warm enough and moist enough what happens is the underground morel organism begins to form what is called sclerotium. Sclerotium in my very best extremely technical scientific terms is an underground doo-dad that the morel organism has to grow before there is any hope of fruiting. These underground doo-dads once grown might just produce a mushroom or they might just produce some fresh mycellium depending on what conditions were like during the time since they started forming. My understanding is that these sclerotium dooeys take a couple of weeks to form (dont get out yer stopwatch that is a very general time frame) and you simply can not get morels until after these dooeys finish developing.

So far we have had a whole boatload of rain and the ground is darn right wet. I do not believe that we have had enough warmth yet for the sclerotium to initiate formation. Remember that these dooeys are underground and it is soil temperature that matters not air temperature. So if air temperatures finally make it up to above 50 for a few days that will help, but it wont help nearly as much as 2 days at 74 with the sun beating down on the ground. So take all this talk of magic temperatures as being maybe indicators rather than gospel. For what it is worth I am pretty sure we havent had enough heat yet to get the dooeys doing. I think that by later in next week if the weather forecasts actually happen that we might just have enough warmth to initiate the dooeys. If that happens successfully then we still need 2 things. We need time for the doodads to develop (and I usually think in terms of a couple of weeks) and we need decent weather conditions while they are developing. If we dont get that decent weather then sclerotium development can stop or at least be slowed down. The good news is that decent weather conditions are the sort of thing that spring normally brings which explains why there are some morels in most years. If you want a more detailed explanation of the way this works you can google morel life cycle and get explanations of varying degrees of complexity.

One thing worth noting is that in general the warmer weather happens further south on this continent than it happens further north. So the folks south of us find morels before we find them here in Ontario. That warm weather (often warm enough for dooey initiation) creeps northwards and morel fruiting follows along a couple of weeks behind the line where dooey initiation is happening. You can watch the line on the progression maps where the morels are being found and it is extremely unlikely that the harvest is going to jump northwards by 500 miles overnight. What does happen though is we will get some warm weather around the time when morels are being harvested 200 miles or so south of us. That warmth gets our dooeys going and while we wait for that to happen the morel harvest creeps closer and closer to us and when the harvest line reaches us our dooeys are done and we live happily ever after except if the Liberals get elected.

Interestingly I think it is just morels that have to deal with sclerotium. That doesnt however mean that later in the summer a day of rain guarantees mushrooms the next day. Nope. That isnt the way it works. Other sorts of mushrooms often need a spurt of mycellium growth before they will fruit and that too can take a week or two from the time of getting a serious rainfall. This is especially noticible in a dry year where we have gone a few weeks without rain. When we finally do get rain the moisture gets used for mycellium growth and fruiting doesnt happen until some time later. In a year where we get weekly rainfall you wont notice this too much because mycellium is always in action and a rain will often give a fruiting mushroom a growth spurt. But you certainly will notice the delay in a dry year.

I want to say dont get yer dooeys in a knot and just watch the progression maps for timing but it doesn no harm to get out in the woods a bit early. You cant win a lottery if you dont buy a ticket. I think though it is quite a bit too early for us. One clever thing you can do if you are ambitious is to hook up with the Mycological Society of Toronto. They have a general meeting in Toronto on the evening of April 22. They will conduct some business and there will be a guest speaker. There will be likely over 50 keen mushroom hunters in attendance and you can ask around if anyone has found anything yet. You can be pretty sure that if a morel has been found anywhere near Toronto the whole group will be talking about it. They wont tell you where they found it of course but at least you will get a feel for what is happening in the woods. You dont even have to join the group. They allow prospective members to attend one meeting prior to joining or attend one foray so you can get a freebie. For that matter the first foray of the year will happen on April 27 in the Kleinburg area and you could use your freebie to attend that foray and go into the woods with the group. To do that you need to contact the foray director to find out where the group meets and get approval (everyone is always approved they just wanna know who all is coming) to join them. If you go that route and have trouble hooking up with the foray director let me know a few days before the foray and I will help hook you up. Membership is a real good deal in my opinion, especially for the organized forays. Their website is at http://www.myctor.org/index.html and I highly recommend the group to anyone in Southern Ontario interested in mushrooms.

[Evan]

They are just starting here. We spent less than two hours in the woods and found 21. They are mostly still small. We had a out a half inch of rain on Friday and warm days since. I hope we get some more rain to really get them popping. I'll post a few pics from the woods later.

[Dave W]

Nice Evan!

My old Studebaker computer takes its time to load a long thread like this one :-) I'm guessing I'm not the only one with this issue. So I'm gonna continue this discussion on a new thread "Morels!" I'll link this thread to the new one within my first post. .

[Calvert]

"...and when the harvest line reaches us our dooeys are done and we live happily ever after except if the Liberals get elected."

Ha!

[theplanets]

DS, thanks for keeping me from running through the woods. Found only 2 yellows last year and didn't want to miss it for the world this time around.

Will definitely consider going out with the Mycology Society on their foraging, it sounds like fun.

[Calvert]

DS, thanks for keeping me from running through the woods. Found only 2 yellows last year and didn't want to miss it for the world this time around.

Will definitely consider going out with the Mycology Society on their foraging, it sounds like fun.

I always find yellows in that period when the leaves are fully out on Maples, but not yet out on Ash. I'm in Ottawa, so a little north of you, but we're nowhere near to seeing leaves, there is still scattered snow looking out the window into the forest right now.

Definitely check out the Mushroom Club. I was a member of Ottawa's, and then after Sherbookes (QC). The Sherbrooke one quite small and very friendly, everybody knew each other. They were so welcoming. Ottawa's a little bigger and doesn't have the sense of closeness, although there are a lot of nice folk. Toronto's very big, and I have never been on one of their foray's.

Sometimes people in these clubs can be a little pretentious, but chances are you'll end up hunting with some nice people who share your enthusiasm.

That reminds me, I need to renew my membership. Foray's here start beginning of May!

[DufferinShroomer]

It is tough to beat the organized forays for learning opportunities. For the Toronto group spring forays frankly are mostly morel hunts and while often some other species are collected it is the prospect of collecting morels that keeps everyone interested. The fall forays have a different sort of feel and focus. On a typical foray the group meets in a pre-selected easy to find location. Often there will be a choice of several forests within a 10 minute drive of the meeting location and the foray leaders often will have scouted a bit and try to select the best one for the day. The caravan then moves off to the forest du jour parking area. A bit of hovering around while folks migrate to the smaller groups they will hunt with and off to the woods baskets in hand. Generally the name of the game is to collect a good specimen or two of everything you see. Often that gets derailed a bit if there is a decent fruiting of choice edibles but mostly the game is to bring back as many different species of fungus as you can. At some pre-determined time (usually allowing for 2-3 hours in the woods) the group meets back at the start point. Tables will have been set up and gathered specimens get displayed in some sort of order depending on the number of species that are brought in. A september foray might well see 100 different species collected and I have seen forays gather in the order of 150 species with 30 sets of eyes wandering the woods. That is pretty impressive. Once everyone has returned and is accounted for the foray leaders will attempt to identify every species collected, one at a time. This is where you can ask questions about how to differentiate similar species, talk about edibility and generally pick up and examine a specimen that has been identified. The duration for this process can easily be a couple of hours on a foray where 100 species are collected. Quicker of course if less is found. All of the species identified are recorded and eventually a list makes it to their website. Somewhere in there you want to keep an eye out for folks returning from the woods. If someone finds say 30 boletes only one will make it to the identification table and the rest go directly to the cooler in the trunk of their car so you can learn quite a bit from the folks who put 8 specimens on the table and still have a full basket of edibles for the cooler. Bring a lunch. Sometimes after the whole thing is done a few die hards who still have some energy will go back into the woods or perhaps try a different forest up the road. Almost everyone brings whatever identification books they own and that is a great opportunity to look through a few books to see if maybe they are better than the ones you own. Some of the members have astounding identification skills and have been doing this for decades.

Some thing that wont happen is you will not show up and be shown all of the best spots in the province to pick mushrooms. All of the members have their own preferred locations for picking and those 'secret' spots are pretty much never where the organized forays are held. The foray locations have to be in forests big enough to accomodate up to 50 foragers and their cars and lunches so the group is a bit restricted in where they can hunt. So if someone joins just looking for primo spots they will be disappointed. Nor will the members blurt out the locations of their favorite spots to a new guy who shows up for a freebie foray. You can get that sort of information but you have to do it the hard way by making friends with some of the folks in the group. Having said that , the foray locations do have mushrooms and sometimes a lot of mushrooms.

The spring forays though are morel hunts. Yes they do identify all the species returned but that can happen in about 5 minutes because really except for morels and false morels there isnt a whole lot happening in the woods. The september/october forays are way more interesting from a learning perspective. The one downside to the organized foray thing is that they are organized forays. By that I mean they have to be scheduled at the start of the season and they have to arrange for foray leaders to run the things. That means that if there is a torrential downpour that day or if it hasnt rained in a month and there are no mushrooms to be found the foray still happens. That isnt a fault of the group it is just the way it has to happen. It generally isnt an issue for the fall forays because there always seems to be enough rain to keep stuff fruiting but it is entirely possible for a spring foray to happen a week too early to find morels and all you get is a nice walk in the woods. You get to pick your spots with a bit more precision when you go out on your own.

Meanwhile we continue to get rain in a way that hasnt happened in years. Looks like we will get some warm weather as well this week. If this keeps up we could be set up for an outstanding morel year. I keep looking at the progression maps and wishing there was some sort of hurry up button to push.

[theplanets]

I'd love to go out to one of these forays, especially the Cain foray in muskoka.. but with a full time job and 2 kids, time is hard to come by. Will muster some time in the early mornings to go and forage for morals. When you find that "hurry up" button for the morel map, let me know.