Let’s Landrace Morel mushrooms TOGETHER.
(Granted they don’t make seeds, but they do make spores. Would GoingToSeed Except Mushroom Spores or would this over complicate things?)
Apparently there exist Multiple Species & Ecotypes of Morel Mushrooms. This means lots of genetic material to breed from meaning lots of room to improve on the Morrel mushrooms.
Morel Mushroom have the Potential to become a HUGE INDUSTRY to anyone who knows not just how to grow them commercially but also to breed/Landrace a COMMERCIAL VARIETY!
Anyone who Forages Morel Mushrooms knows How Unpredictable they can be, and how little Yield you get for your Effort (Low R.O.I. Return On your Investment). Hence why the Price of Morels is so High (Meaning VERY PROFITABLE thus Imagine how much GoingToSeed can Grow if a small part of the profits get donated to GTS instead of going to Governments who don’t know how to do much good with it)
My Goals for a Morel Mushroom landrace are
Increase Yield (As Much as Possible or Nature allows)
Improve Flavor (Possibly Breed New unheard of Umami Flavors)
Make Ridiculously Reliable, Just Like with any Landrace should be!
Discover the Pleasant Unexpected surprises to Morel Mushrooms (Let’s hope the unexpected surprise of breeding/Landracing Mushrooms doesn’t lead to Food Poisoning or Death )
Also I remember Watching a Video on YouTube by the Modern Witch Doctor who found out how to farm Morel Mushrooms, but unfortunately she Deleted it
Thankfully I still have it because I also download videos just in case!
Or if internet goes down…
From what I’ve also Learned, Woodchip Mulches such as Paul Gouchi’s Back To Eden Orchard had Morel Mushrooms just poppin up making me think HMM… Woodchips grow mushrooms like crazy…
Regardless of what happens, Anything I should Learn/Know before Starting? Maybe how to Collect Morel Mushrooms Spore efficiently (Is it Similar to how Compost Tea is made?)(Or Better in Dry form?) and how to make them grow! or any other Undeleted YouTube Videos still available for me to watch? Maybe other Sources you guys can point to?
Let’s CROSS POLLINATE Ideas & Notes!!!
My typical method of making mushroom spawn involves tossing mushrooms (ends and pieces) into a blender with lots of water, then pouring the slurry over likely habitats in the ecosystem.
Some species of morel seem not quite edible to me.
I think mushrooms present unique barriers to breeding them under the landrace model. Thr most noteworthy is that spores can travel for hundreds of miles in the air if not thousands before setting down making a locally adapted cultivar near impossible.
However they can be bred and adapted for different traits. Mushroom cultures in agar plates can be trained to grow in different environmental conditions and with different food sources by slowly introducing these foods and climates to successive generations. For example people are breeding oyster mushrooms to eat cigarette butts. Also Indoor growers take tissue culture from the most productive mushrooms to expand into future grows. As they repeat this process they get mushrooms that are best adapted to their indoor grow environment and the ideal ones for their clients.
Morel mushrooms present really unique challenges enebro for mushrooms. Many morels have symbiotic relationships with various trees meaning that to grow morels intentionally one would first have to plant an orchard. People are discovering techniques that allow them to fruit outside of symbiosis but these techniques are closely guarded and highly complex in nature requiring a controlled environment with chemical stimulation of the mycelium. I’ve heard that rooting hormones play a major role in this artificial environment.
I’m tired and perhaps left out some details. I hope this is a coherent response.
It seems to be quite an ambitious endeavor to me, and as much as I love the idea, I do not have the time nor the money to invest in such a project, and even less knowledge about the mighty morel. I do hope you find someone who can make this actually work.
I collected morel mushrooms, blended them up, and poured the slurry over charred wood in my yard. The next year, morels grew in the yard, the only time before or since that I found them there. Being mushrooms, growing outside, I can’t say that my actions had any influence in the matter. In the wild, I often find the large yellow morels in association with cottonwood trees. I often find small black morels in association with aspen.
I collected oyster mushrooms growing locally in a number of locations in my ecosystem, blended them up, and poured the slurry into logs. The logs fruited. I feel confident that the inoculation caused them to grow there.
Mushroom spores very likely fall very close to their fruit. The vast distances and quadratic nature of distribution quickly dilute spores from far away.
Thank you for such Valuable Info!
Some species of Morel not so edible, hmm interesting. I’m not a Mushroom foraging expert by any means so thank you for the tip!
Thank you!!! I didn’t know Mushrooms could eat Cigarette buds.
WAIT HOLD ON… Could we By accident make a Last Of Us Situation from that video game with Landracing Mushrooms? Because Mushrooms can consume Cigarette buds, what’s to stop them from consuming us like the Cordyceps mushrooms do to ants or Wasps? Genetic Differences at the subkingdom level? Look…
Regardless with Morel Mushrooms, I plant on Inoculating them onto the Woodchips in my Future Back To Eden Style Food Forest. Probably doing in like Lofthouse did, chopping the Bottoms of Morels into a Blender and pouring it all over my Woodchips.
That person might me or someone else reading these forums. Regardless I hope we will be able to Cross Pollinate info with the person who does. If everyone focus on a few Landraces/Cultivars we could all benefit from the combined effort when Exchanging Seeds/Spores!
hmm… Good Question from my Foraging experience People say the find them often under the following Trees…
Elm Trees (Ulmus americana and others Species)
Tulip Polar (Litrodendron tulipifera)
Ash Trees (Fraxinus spp.)
Apple/Crabapple Trees (Malus spp.)
Black Bird Cherry (Prunus serotina)
Bitternut Hickory (Carya cordiformus)
Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis)
Probably many more cuz this ain’t a Complet List
I’ve encounter Morels in Forrest edges near my Suburbs when they Stopped Spraying Pesticides the Previous year or 2. They were growing Underneath Lots Sugar Maple trees with 1 Crabapple tree thus confirming the apples part of list. Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t believe the Sugar Maples were the reason a Morel pooped out of the ground, I think it was sole Crabapple but who knows. This Forrest also had Sycamore & Tulip Poplars the further in you went in so maybe that also influenced the environmental choice for Morel?
It’s my understanding that morels take several years to populate an area before they fruit so it’s likely that mushrooms you found were not from the slurry, however mushrooms also defy our understanding of them at times.
The spores that land close to the fruit that grow will grow in the same food source as their parent and eventually meet their parent via mycelia threads. when they meet their parent they cease to be two individuals and swap dna and combine into a single organism. Another reproductive strategy that they have is dispersal from insects consuming the spores and dying on other trees etc.
My one experience with morels was in a subdivision with no trees nearby. The area had once been a river basin, and after I found morels I did some research.
Apparently morels will hibernate in a walnut-sized mass for as much as 100 years before emerging again when conditions are favorable.
Apparently by putting down a thick layer of woodchips I reactivated the morels that had lived on that river bank before the river was diverted underground so the subdivision could be built.
Interesting, thus this is how Morel Mushrooms Hybridize. That Makes it easy since all we have to do is bring Spores from different Places and have them grow next to each other and Boom Landrace Achieved (Although if they all become one, isn’t it more appropriate to call it a Diverse Cultivar then? Rather than a Landrace?)
Hmm Maybe this is why they are so Difficult to Domesticate/Landrace?
That is Fascinating, Hmm if we can get them to Hibernate like that, then maybe we can consider that a Mushroom “Seed” “Tuber” if you will? Meaning now we can easily Store/Trade Mushroom Seeds on the GTS Forums right?
So basically Build the right environment and they will come? Fooking AWESOME!!!
That explains why Paul Gouchi with his Woodchip method was able to get soo many Morels just poppin up just like that. When I get land I will sooooo do that and tell you guys about it!
Only if it’s in a place where models have once grown. I’m not sure if other mushroom also “hibernate” this way, but if not I suspect they have their own long term survival techniques.
The way you easily store and trade mushroom cultures is by taking a tissue sample and growing it out in a Petri dish filled with agar. This will be an exact clone of the parent and can be further divided as needed into virtually infinite number of clones. Another method is to grow it out into a liquid culture-basically a jar of sterilized sugar water that is set up in a way that a syringe can draw from it to inoculate more complex food sources.
People also store and trade spores either just as spore prints on paper or spores suppended in sterilized water in syringes.
That is so awesome! Thank you for sharing this with us! (INTO THE RABBIT HOLE I GO )
Could we put Mushroom spores in the GoingToSeed Landrace Mixes? (Rather than just only Plant Seeds?)
Putting mushrooms into the Going To Seed Landrace Seed Swap would require multiple people working on the same species of mushroom, and a steward to receive donations, and people interested in receiving the spores.
When I ran a seed company, I used to share oyster mushrooms spores collected on pieces of paper. (I collected them on huge sheets of paper, then cut the papers to the right size to fit in my seed packets.)
This summer I was lucky enough to pick buckets of morels. They were picked by Clear Space Force Station in Alaska in a predominantly Spruce tree forest that had burned the prior year.
I collected spores. If you want some and some dehydrated morels for your project let me know.
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