Monday, May 4, 2015

Treasure!

I am checking out the crabapple bed to see which (if any) last year's newly planted perennials are coming up.

One astilbe doing well, the other, not so much.  The June hostas are okay.  And while the Japanese painted fern in front of the front bay window is going gangbusters, the 2 in the crab bed barely register.  (So much so that I trample down one of the clumps.  *whine*)

But then I spy something - odd.  What are these?  Some kind of fungus to be sure.  I think at first they might be 'stink horns', but no.  Really different.

Maybe tiny cooling towers for itty bitty nuclear power plants?  Dunno.

I step back and see if I can salvage the trampled fern.  And lo!  There.  Beside the fern - the source of the hollow towers.

A morel mushroom!  I brush aside more leaves and hey!  Another!

Are they around the ferns?  I check the other clump of Japanese painted and yep!  More morels.  I count 4 right now (and the twin towers).    

Now I KNOW they are morels.  They look like morels.  They are the same as ones I find on the web.  Where did they come from?  Why here?  Why now?

And why am I too darn chicken to pick them to eat?   What would you do? LOL

Bottom line - bigfoot here is keeping out of the beds and watching from the sidelines from now on!

7 comments:

  1. They do not look like our morels up here in Iowa. I would really check them out before eating them. The morels here are growing like gangbusters. It is nice to see the new things coming up.

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    1. Please post pics of your morels their, Larry. Mine do look like what I see online....

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  2. Type in "Iowa morels" in a google search and when it opens go up and click images and you can see hundreds of photos. I do see we have some darker ones that I had never seen before. They tend to grow among decaying trees and in timbers.

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  3. There are some mushrooms that resemble morels but are toxic. Please do a search before tasting them. I love you garden, and wish to see it's progress all summer. You can't update your blog if you are pushing up daisies from below!

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  4. Larry & Sue: if you wiki 'morel' you can see that there are a plethora of varieties of morel (ie: black, yellow, longneck, etc.) They all have the common trait of honeycomb top. Sue, I think the ones you mean are those that are convoluted like brains and I know they are poisonous. But I'm such a woose, I'm only going to look at these - at least this year. ;-)

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  5. Hello stranger :-) Sorry I have been AWOL, not much computer time here recently.

    Whilst those mushrooms certainly look like morels (yum yum) I too would be careful before eating them. Is there a Mycology group you could email pictures to?

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  6. BE wary! they don't look at all like our Missouri morels.

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