Quite often, I’m torn between walking and exploring the land and getting to work on a project that needs to be done. We currently only get to the property on the weekends, and for me, it can be very challenging not to use the property as an excuse to avoid the necessary work.
This was especially true in May, because I still hadn’t really experienced all of the land and because we live in Morel mushroom country and May is the time when you can find them in our area.
Being a novice, I had only the internet versus actual experience to rely on to determine exactly when I should forage and where exactly which areas of our property might have the highest likelihood for having Morels. What this meant was that I was out exploring every weekend in May (i.e., not working as much as I should have been).
A walk to the farthest reaches of our property and back again can take an hour if I’m walking at my usual, not-so-fast pace. For the first three weekends, I focused my efforts on our front woods and our middle woods. I searched the edges of the woods, around recently fallen trees, on south-facing slopes … Nothing.
A couple of those foraging weekends, I ran across the neighboring farmer’s cows in our front woods, which did end up shortening my excursion into those woods; I high tailed-it back across the fence as soon as I saw the cows, realized that they saw me, and saw them “cautiously?” walking toward me.
A side note: when originally talking with the farmer about his renting some of our land for hay, he asked if he could allow his cows in our front woods for one day each year and I had said “yes” without asking what time of year that one day was. I did talk with the farmer later to ask whether I needed to be afraid of the cows and whether there was a bull in the mix; I explained that I liked to walk and explore each time I came up; he said his cows and his bull were just “big babies” and there was no need to fear them. He asked if pasturing them more than one day there was OK and I said “yes” – so long as I had no reason to be afraid. He again reassured me that everything would be OK and that they were just like big pets who wanted to be scratched / petted. Whew.
The last weekend in May, Ed joined me in my morel search and we walked through the back woods. Finally, we got lucky and found a handful of very large morels. Some we found were too far too gone; so, we left those in place to hopefully re-establish more next year. Our biggest finds came off trail in a ravine-like area on the south-facing slope. I also found a number of very large but tender Pheasant-Back mushrooms (Cerioporus squamosus) of which I only harvested a couple. Ed was not as enthused about these as I was; I have since learned that these are quite tasty and tender when harvested early and have a delicate watermelon smell and flavor.
Talking with a neighbor that evening, we learned that they had harvested 29 large morels that day and that the previous weekend had yielded them over 80 morels. We also learned that we were right in noting that the ravine areas tended to have the larger amounts of morels. Asking how one preserves such large harvests, we were told that cutting them in half and freezing them was one of the better methods. In terms of preparing morels, our neighbor said their favorite method was just to fry them up in some butter, onions, and garlic with a little salt and pepper. Yum!
I look forward to searching for morels and Pheasant-Back’s again next year, now that we’ve gotten to know our property and the associated timing a little bit better. In the meantime, I’ll need to find more recipes…
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