Our trip was a blast. It was very nice to be looking for mushrooms so early in the year compared to what we are used to out here in Colorado. However, the drought conditions in Texas made searching for them a little more difficult than in years previous. We learned that last year’s Morel season was the best they had seen in 15 years. Had we known this, we would have probably waited to go out to Texas until a different year to look for Morels specifically. So we switched gears and searched for city mushrooms in heavily watered areas. This technique gave us some good success. We found quite a few different genera most all a little past their prime, but there were a good handful of edible and living samples that we brought back and cultured on Thursday of this week. I will give you a better summary of the mushrooms we found in the next article.

If you would like to see some of the samples of fungi that were found in Texas last week, make sure you attend the Colorado Mycological Society meeting this coming Monday at the Denver Botanic Gardens. The meetings start at 7pm and usually wrap up around 9pm. We will be displaying dried samples of Ganoderma, Pleurotus, various Polypores, Earthstars, Lentinus, Lactarius and a few others that were found last week in Austin, Athens, White Oak, and San Antonio. We will also be displaying a few fruiting grain jars of Pleurotus columbinus as well as bags of oyster mushroom spawn made with green techniques.

On another note, our Pink Oyster mushrooms came from Kauai Fungi yesterday for our project that we are doing at a few botanic gardens. Kauai Fungi was kind enough to donate a spawn bag of their tropical variety of Pleurotus djamor to our project. We plan to do a fungi demonstration inside a tropical conservatory. We also just acquired a culture of the Golden Oyster, Pleurotus cornucopiae. I think the two fruiting together would be stunning.

The bags of oyster spawn we made before we left for Texas are starting to form primordia! (primordia are baby mushrooms) This means they are already eaten through their substrate and are starting to want to fruit! We expanded them 12 days ago, so this says to me that our ‘Cold Pasteurization’ concept works just as fast as standard pasteurization methods! Stay tuned for a detailed description of this project, from start to finish, within the month! The bags of spawn are destined for Jackie’s Farm for expansion and fruiting, and if you take one of our seminars this summer, coming to a backyard near you!

In conjunction with the Colorado Mycological Society, Amateur Mycology is pleased to announce our first annual morel hunts of 2011. James and I have the itch early this year so we have reached out to some of the other fungi folk in warmer climates than Colorado. We have been speaking to McCartney at the Texas Wild Mushrooming Club and Chad and Jude at ediblemushrooms.org in Oregon about planning morel forays. Both of these trips are in the early planning/ discussion stages right now and we are the assessing the interest of others who may want to attend. We will more than likely do a road trip to our destination and then camp or cabin when we get there.

If you:

1. Are interested in attending morel forays.
2. Have good out of state mushroom contacts (in particular TX & OR)
3. Are interested and have transportation (particularly RV’s or vans)
4. Have ideas or suggestions about regional places to check out.

Please contact:

james@amateurmycology.com or graham@amateurmycology.com

Oregon forays are scheduled for third week of May, Texas the first week of April. For more information, watch the youtube video by McCartney about Texas morels below, or check out the 2011 Morel forays at ediblemushrooms.org.