I started foraging for mushrooms last year, sometime after morel season, so this will be the first year I’ll be out there looking for those strange brain-like mushrooms. Yesterday after work, I took the dogs out for a little field trip to see if perhaps I could find the first black morels of the season. Of course, I haven’t established any spots yet, so I’m foraging blind. I went to a local place where the dogs could swim while I looked around in the woods. The forest seemed very dry for any kind of mushrooms and I didn’t find anything. The trouble is that I don’t know if I didn’t find any because it was too early yet in the season, it was simply a bad spot, or because I just couldn’t find the mushrooms that were in fact around.

Don’t discount the possibility that the mushrooms were there and I couldn’t see them. I learned last year that spotting various mushrooms can be tricky.  Last year, my brother Salvelinas had been finding Hypomyces lactifluorum, the lobster mushroom, for weeks before I came up with even one.  In most forests they aren’t obvious, hiding under leaf litter, showing just a glint of red, the colour of cooked lobsters. After I spotted a few, I found I could see them very easily, and even spot them from a distance.

Unlike fungi such as the lobster which appear through much of the summer, morels can flush just once each season. For the intrepid mushroom hound, that means that nobody will ever give up a spot. Find a morel spot nobody has stumbled on before and you can return there every year and likely be successful foraging for these delicacies.

Rain is predicted for Sunday. I’m hoping we get lots and lots of it. I’ll be out in the woods with the dogs next Friday, and I’m hoping to come home with my first morels. I wonder if any readers of this blog forage for morels in the spring? If so, I’d love to hear about it. I’m also interested in how you like to prepare wild mushrooms.