In years past, I’ve come across nice patches of morels in our woods at the end of May and into June. They seem to respond to a good dose of rain, and a few days after a storm they’ll be popping up through the duff. Word came through the grapevine a week ago that they were out, so I took a long trek through the hardwoods looking for these choice mushrooms. They weren’t showing in any of the places I’d found them before, so I tried to cover as much ground as possible, concentrating on hardwood slopes facing east. As I walk, I can see approximately 15 feet of forest floor in either direction, so unless I zig-zag relentlessly through the woods, my 30 foot swath covers only a tiny portion of the available territory. Finding a patch then requires quite a bit of good fortune because they could be anywhere.
Two walks a couple of days apart produced nothing, though the dog and I both valued the exercise. Then, on a beastly hot day not long after, I was off on a birding hike of my woods with Vermont Audubon‘s Steve Hagenbuch. Vermont Audubon has a great program where they help landowners evaluate their land as habitat for birds. A walk with a good birder is such a treat, and as we were listening to a hermit thrush and an ovenbird, I came upon 4 morels in an unlikely place, scattered in a patch of almost pure hemlock. Two of them were huge, the largest I’ve ever seen. Which didn’t bother me until I happened to mention those two facts to a mushroom-loving friend, that they were found in hemlocks and they were huge.
“Hmmm,” was all she said.
Morels are the one mushroom that I know for certain. They are undeniably phallic, they are hollow, and their tops look like brain matter. I couldn’t be wrong. But I have to admit that my friend’s “Hmmm” made me wonder if my wife and I were going to die from eating some previously undocumented huge faux-morels.
I remained confident, they were delicious, and we’re still here. And you can bet I’ll go back to the hemlocks next time I’m looking for morels.