metalhead said:
i was looking through the books preview on google under kea words morel cultivation patent or somthing simmilar and found in one of stamets's books a whole chapter on his experience with morels it's pretty interesting the book is growing gourmet and medicinal mushrooms. he gives a whole layout of the growth parameters and what not. there are pictures of morel mountains grows which look to be elata. They have alot better yeilds from what i've seen from mills. and pics of primordia. it's pretty interesting check it out. any way i recieved a verry clean culture and started about fifteen experiments with it. pics to come soon! the myc is very light and grows like crazy and was into the grain layer in my jars in like 3-4 days. i also started no nute agar cultures. will they form sclerotia on no nute agar? i shure grows fast on it.
Morel Mountain was Gary Mills. But owned by different people.
Terry Farms was Gary Mills.
Neogen was Gary Mills.
Midsummer Organics is Gary Mills' which is his own.
All of them were Gary Mills.
A VISIT TO MOREL MOUNTAIN, MICHIGAN
Spores Afield, April 1992
reprinted from the Detroit Free Press
(Mason, Michigan) -It's a little hard to believe. In Mason, Michigan, a
town of 7,000, one of the world's delicacies is growing inside a yellow-sided
building in an industrial park. It's called Morel Mountain, and it's the
only place where morels are grown -- other than the woods of springtime.
Since March 1989, it has been home to this famous fungus and its smoky,
earthy flavors. The morels, growing in an unusual environment, seem to be the
most natural part of the operation. The more unlikely discovery inside this
barracks of a building is that Morel Mountain is a high-tech, international
endeavor that promises hefty long-term profits for its owner, Domino's Pizza
Distribution Inc. At $25 a pound, these morels aren't cheap. At the peak of
the springtime harvest, wild morels are just $8 to $9 per pound. Dried morels
cost $90 to $160 per pound, but one pound of dried equals 8 to 10 pounds
rehydrated. Price really isn't an issue, said Perry Mulleavy, general
manager of this Domino's subsidiary. Even though indoor cultivation takes
away a bit the wild morel's cachet, morels never will become a commodity like
white button mushrooms, he said. "The morel is a special niche. It's a
high-end gourmet product. In our opinion, we have the Mercedes of the
cultivated mushrooms. We want to retain that." Indeed, all mushrooms once
were found only in the wild, but the effort to cultivate morels didn't start
until 1982. Mulleavy still calls it a pilot project, even though the company
is producing 350 pounds every week. Increased yield and more plants are
planned. Mulleavy calls the 7,500 square-foot Mason plant too small and hopes
to be producing morels at a larger plant by the spring of 1992. Its location
is what Mulleavy calls "proprietary." Translation: None of your business.
How he explains cultivated morels: "They're grown indoors, in a
greenhouse-like environment, where we actively control the growth
environment. They're grown in soil." No home growing tips here; details are
proprietary. "People have been trying to cultivate morels for 100 years. We
were able to put all the necessary pieces of the puzzle together to do just
that," Mulleavy said. Morel Mountain sells all it cultivates to hotels,
restaurants and gourmet retailers. Ask how much the company could sell if
production were up to par, and Mulleavy uses the word "proprietary" again. A
check with Balducci's, a New York City gourmet retailer, reveals that a
$39-per-pound price hasn't fazed any customers since Morel Mountain morels
started being offered. The owners said only chefs notice any difference in
taste. "They're not as intense as the wild ones in spring, not quite," said
Charlie Balducci. "They're very close and very good." Wild morels have a
stronger, more woody smell. Scott Hershey of Hershey's Steak and Seafood, a M
ichigan restaurant, said Mason morels are just as good as wild, and he's
using been them for almost 10 months in appetizers and soups and to accompany
entrees. "I guess the fun is that they're available year-round. The response
that you're able to get from your guests when you put fresh morels on a plate
in front of them . . . just kind of blows their mind." To order from Morel
Mountain, call 1-800-926-6735 weekdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Central Standard
Time.
The Best of Spores Afield
The newsletter of the Colorado Mycological Society
March 1994 Electronic Edition, Part 3
Wayne Harrison, Editor (wharrison@aol.com)
MOREL MOUNTAIN REVISTED
Spores Afield, October 1993
reprinted from The Washington Post
by Caroline E. Mayer
Sex. It's as straightforward as that. That's the secret to Morel Mountain.
"It's a simple process and just took a simple mind to figure it out," jokes
Gary Mills, director of research of the 3-year-old Michigan company. Perhaps,
but Mills and his colleagues at Morel Mountain have succeeded where scores of
other scientists and fanatics have failed. The Morel Mountaineers have
figure out how to replicate the sex life of one of the more high prized (and
highly priced) wild mushrooms so it can be grown year-round in a small,
commercial hothouse. Morels. Know-nothings walk right past these
spongy-looking coneheads in the woods, often dismissing them as pockmarked
toadstools. But mention the word "morel" (or "merkles" as they are sometimes
called) to any mushroom maven, and praise is prompt. The mere sighting of
one "makes knees tremble, hearts pound and lips shake with a slight but rapid
involuntary motion," says John Ratzloff, a Minnesota photographer who became
so enamored of morels that he wrote "The Morel Mushroom" (Voyageur Press
1990). And fanciers tremble and shake at Morel Mountain's headquarters, a
nondescript rural warehouse 90 minutes west of Detroit. Outside, the only
tipoff to what's inside are three small, wooden morel sculptures - and the
15-foot pile of dirt in the back. "That's part Michigan soil, part composted
pine bark, but that's all I want to say about it," says general manager Perry
Mullen. But inside the prefab metal building, in six 17-by-24-square-foot
windowless rooms, culinary gold is relatively easy to find. Each sterile
room contains 700 green plastic tubs of dirt on the floor-to-ceiling metal
racks. In some of the rooms, all one can see is dirt; morel caps haven't
pushed through that special mixture of soil yet. But in other rooms, it's a
breathtaking sight: thousands of morels, many 3 to 4 inches high. Some are
leaning, some stand at attention, all waiting to be delicately snipped and
shipped to stores and restaurants around the country. Next to truffles, no
other fungus receives such wide acclaim. The reason is simple - its taste.
"The difference between morels and button mushrooms... is like the
difference between cheese and chalk,: says Ratzloff. The morel should not be
eaten raw, but when cooked it has an intense, earthy flavor. That fact,
combined with its ability to adapt to a variety of dishes and sauces, makes
it a favorite among chefs and mycologists, who have tried to domesticate morel
s for hundreds of years. Even Thomas Jefferson tried. "Mycology textbooks
have always said that the person who happened to figure out how to grow
morels would be a millionaire," says Mills. "Well, guess what? They lied.
'Cause I am here washing trays," he says, rinsing out plastic green tubs
that only hours before were overflowing with morels and dirt. "God's the one
who made morels," Mills is quick to acknowledge. "We just figured out how to
grow them commercially." You have to understand, MIlls explains, that the
whole purpose of any organism is to survive and reproduce, and the morel is
no difference. And it's reproduction that Morel Mountain has tried to
encourage, week in, week out (although Mills and his colleagues snip off the
delectable morel caps before they have a chance to reproduce.). The morels,
meanwhile, come from spores Mills has carefully collected and selected and
kept in a desiccator locked away in a laboratory several miles away. Each
week several petri dishes are inoculated with a handful of these spores,
which will grow into an intricate network, much like a spider web. To the
untrained eye, this network, called a mycelium, looks like fuzzy mold. The
mycelia love to eat, says Mills. So to provide nutrients, Mills adds them to
a cooked mixture of oats and dirt. Placed in sterilized plastic packages,
this mixture is kept for four weeks where the mycelia can eat their fungal
hearts out. But the morel must "shift from the vegetative stage to the
sexual stage; to do that, we have to simulate spring," Mills explains.
"Spring" takes place in those six windowless rooms, where the mycelia are
placed in dirt, sprayed with water and kept at 65 degrees. After four weeks
the mycelia break through the earth, and the mushroom caps begin to form.
Two weeks later, there's about a half pound of morels on each tray - some
400 pounds in total. Morel Mountain sells a kit to help you grow your own
morels. The "Morel Mountain Morel Mushroom Garden" is a bag containing a
cubic foot of dirt and sells for $36, plus shipping. For information, write
to Morel Mountain Co., P.O. Box 158, Mason, Mich. 48854, or call
1-800-926-6735. 1994 footnote: As of March 1994, the price for the Morel
Mushroom Garden is up to $53.28 shipped to points outside Michigan.
Edited by AcidHorse (03/20/09 12:53 AM)
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I just emailed a friend who was a turf grass major about that photo, asking him to I.D. the grass and some other shit. Hopefully he can shed some light on this subject. I also asked about what chemicals the grass might put into the environment, and what microbes associate with the grass. I don't know why I havent done this before. I have so many smart people I see all the time, forestry professors etc. I'll be taking a fungal biology class next semester, that will be the shiznit.
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