Senor_Hongos said:

http://www.thefarm.org/mushroom/morel.html

Good luck.

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AcidHorse said:

Senor_Hongos said:

http://www.thefarm.org/mushroom/morel.html

Good luck.

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Horse crap.

That site is not accurate.

get this and read it.
http://www.mssf.org/mnews/0303mn.pdf
http://www.mssf.org/mnews/0705mn.pdf

http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/wo.jsp?wo=1986006247&IA=WO1986006247&DISPLAY=DESC

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4594809.html

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Senor_Hongos said:

AcidHorse said:

Senor_Hongos said:

http://www.thefarm.org/mushroom/morel.html

Good luck.

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Horse crap.

That site is not accurate.

get this and read it.
http://www.mssf.org/mnews/0303mn.pdf
http://www.mssf.org/mnews/0705mn.pdf

http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/wo.jsp?wo=1986006247&IA=WO1986006247&DISPLAY=DESC

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4594809.html

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And? I have read those before. The first link gives a different cultivation method by Litchfield and the second link is by him as well. Those just give different methods than the one from The Farm. The third link is the patent which no one has successfully used but the owners of its rights.

Please notice the similarity of this section of the patent and the steps approx. 19-23 of The Farm's method.

Quote:

In the second variation, sclerotia, i.e., hardened sclerotia that have been developed in the jars, are directly inoculated into a substratum, and the additional mycelia which grow therefrom are induced to the sexual cycle, without adding nutrients.

An important aspect of the invention is induction or triggering of the fungus to the sexual growth cycle in which ascocarps are produced. One important contributing factor in induction is deprivation of available exogenous nutrients to the fungus so that assimilation and storage of nutrients by the fungus ceases or significantly slows. Accordingly, the environment of the fungus is altered from a nutrient-rich environment to a nutrient poor environment. For purposes of this invention, a "nutrient poor"" environment is an environment lacking readily available nutrients for supplying developing ascocarps, whereby the nutrients for such developing ascocarps are the nutrients which have been stored in the mycelial and attendant sclerotia prior to induction.

Another important factor which appears to contribute to induction is exposure of the fungus to high quantities of water in the substratum in which the fungus is growing. Typically, the substratum is hydrated substantially to saturation for the purpose of promoting induction of nutrient-rich mycelia and attendant sclerotia to the sexual cycle. By substantially saturated is meant at least about 90% of the capacity of the substratum, but preferably approaching 100% capacity. Preferably, during exposure to high quantities of water, there is a continuous exchange of water. This may be accomplished, for example, by percolating water through the substratum in which the fungus is growing. Although Applicants are not bound to any theory as to why the high level of water seems to promote induction, the water may provide a triggering "shock" to the system, e.g., by change in osmotic pressure.

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How can you say with certainty this method doesn't work?

Your thoughts?

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Senor_Hongos said:

Thank you for that incredibly detailed and wonderfully educational post.

I certainly wish the ultimate luck on your tek. It would be nice if someone else had a little success.

I've seen pictures of old timers fruiting morels in erlenmeyer flasks, but I never did pursue how they did it. I've tried several methods, indoors and out, even getting decent-sized sclerotia, but I was never able to produce fruit.

Thanks again and good luck.

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LOL, dude I'm not a pump or a faucet and you won't get water from me.

Luck? Dude I came across these results I have that are certain, just this year. In March.
Luck? No my friend, it is faith. The dictionary definition.

"It would be nice if someone else had a little success"

The Lump ( 1/4 inch )

The lump is absolutely solid, a solid mass. Not a fuzzy thing of loose hyphae.
Where it is attached to the agar, right at that circumference, its like the formation of morel stem bases.
That trunk pattern of growth.
Like this:



Underneath the lump



But I bet you'd rather have something like this


http://store.freshmorels.com/shopimages/sections/thumbnails/baby%20morel.jpg

So what do you want me to do? Feed you the mushroom now? Put a bib on you and feed you?
"It would be nice if someone else had a little success"
Actually I do, and not even in the environment or conditions I haved described.
My agar nutrients ran out and it started to fruit, but since I don't plan on trying to get it to fruit completely because 1) no setup for air flow and cool temps, I'll just work on things when its cooler.
its up to mid 80s right now, and air conditioning and electricity isn't cheap. remember? the screw ball arabs want to puke some BS that they can't supply us with more oil, yet they secretly are rubbing elbows with the communists. They are fools.

Senor_Hongos said:

Thank you for that incredibly detailed and wonderfully educational post.

I certainly wish the ultimate luck on your tek. It would be nice if someone else had a little success.

I've seen pictures of old timers fruiting morels in erlenmeyer flasks, but I never did pursue how they did it. I've tried several methods, indoors and out, even getting decent-sized sclerotia, but I was never able to produce fruit.

Thanks again and good luck.

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Senor_Hongos said:

  Wow, very impressive!

The sclerotia I grew were nickle-sized in rye berries in mason jars that I used for innoculating a bed which never fruited as far as I know.  My guess was too little rain or incorrect fruiting parameters.  This was over six years ago and I didn't take any notes.  I am pretty sure, not positive, that I grew them from the clone.

Weird things happen in the lab though.  (NOT implying anything about morels)  One time I grew hyphal knots of Amanita virosa in a petri dish.  I called Paul Stamets about it, but never pursued it.  I did take pictures of those though.  They are stored on analog video tape.

That's too funny about having little success with shiitake or oyster and that much success with morels!

I don't give a damn if you can't grow cubes, as long as you get a method for growing morels in artifical conditions.  Fame, money and fortune (and I get to tell people, "Hey, I talked to that guy when he was doing it!").

Faith, luck, persistance, hard work, call it what you will, I hope you really make it.

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Senor_Hongos said:

No sense looking back and regreting.  I'd say you have a far above average knowledge of morels.  Some of us are interested in many types of fungus.  I prefer gilled mushrooms over most other types with the exception of morels.

I worked with a research group on the artificial cultivation of morels in the mid-eighties myself, but we never really went anywhere.  Contamination literally ate us alive and we just gave up.  Then Neogen got the patent and that was that.

I often wonder what is the missing factor or factors and why no one else can seem to grow them.

Polypores, I just don't care anything for them, even the edibles.

It takes a special person to pursue and pursue and pursue something with a laser beam like focus.  Somehow I suspect that is the critical key to unlocking the secret of artificial morel cultivation.

I'm selfish; I'll admit it.  I really want someone to "crack the code" so I can get cheaper and easier morels!  I just love to eat them.

Crack the code, AcidHorse.  Someone has to and it might as well be YOU!  LOL 

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grxht said:

I got a google alert that my name came up, alerting me to this rather sore spot here, so allow me to set the record a little bit less crooked at least.

In answer to the perfectly rational query "who the hell is George Robert Trager?" I am this person you cast aspersions towards.

I can tell you how my name got mixed up in all of this and you can then at least know the story.  I don't really care where you go from there, because your mind is already made up.

A little history here:

Way back when, back in the 80's at some point, I saw an ad for a mushroom cultivation class taught by FRED STEVENS at the San Francisco Mycological Society.  Well, being young and impressionable, I thought to myself that it would be a great idea to learn a new skill. After all, I'd been enjoying eating mushrooms of various kinds for years and years, but the ones I really enjoyed were more expensive...so why not learn how to grow some choice edibles?

I took Fred's class and found that, in part due to my training in microbiology, it was fairly easy stuff.  Fred was generous with advice and protocols and he was happy to share spores and mycelia.  So in short order, we progressed from Oysters and Shiitakes to the more exotic stuff, such as Agaricus and "others" that required "casing" to fruit.  It was easy and fun, and before long I'd converted the living room of my rented slum apartment in Oakland into a small grow room and had a half dozen species under cultivation.  Towards the end of the class, Fred passed around a mimeographed protocol for Morel cultivation and a small soda bottle of Morchella mycelium.  He claimed it worked if you got it right.  I took it home and dug into the protocol.

After some messing around, I eventually was able to reproduce what FRED STEVENS claimed to have done.  I got some small morels, about a half dozen little itty bitty ascocarps and declared success.  In the end, I decided that it was really too much work and the yield really sucked.  So that was about the end of that.

A few years later, while trolling around on USENET (anyone remember that?) I stumbled across a mycology newsgroup (alt.sci.mycology or something like that) and somewhere along the line ended up in a brief back and forth with someone who was interested in morel cultivation.  Long story short, I mentioned that FRED STEVENS had given me a protocol and offered to pass it along.  The mimeo was in pretty bad shape, but I scanned it in and OCR'd it, cleaned it up a bit for readability, and passed it on essentially verbatim to the USENET group.  My message had a preface that I was just the messenger and that if anyone cared where it came from, FRED STEVENS was your guy.

Now I suppose one can pick nits over whether USENET is more public domain than a classroom, especially back in the late 80's, when very few people actually went "there," though information, like your post, seems to last forever, whereas class materials don't last quite as long on paper.  I don't recall any disclosure in the class that this was privileged or proprietary information.  The patent had already been filed at that point, so the information was already in the public domain.  People are, by nature lazy, and tend to want to jump to conclusions, so I'm going to guess that when the newsgroup posting got passed around, my name stuck and everyone forgot FRED STEVENS.

I hope that clears it up, at least for you.  I'm not about to go on some paranoid campaign to track down every website that has propagated this minor falsehood, so this will have to do.

I agree that the method has some flaws, which if a competent mycologist cared to address could be easily remedied.  As originally reported, it did work (for me anyhow), but as I said, not spectacularly, your success may vary.  For me, I have found that picking them myself in the wild, or buying them in the store is equally rewarding, and a lot less time consuming.

Good luck in the rest of your life.  Peace.

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Bias?

WTH are you trying to refute?

I was describing my location.

I wasn't asserting or describing the only type of location, there are many.

Of course I know morels can grow on steep hillsides, I found one at and on the Natural Bridge trail in Daniel Boone State Forest.

I can't guarantee you'll find a lot on the steep hillsides but they don't seem to like to grow on them that much.

But they will and do grow profusely on gentle slopes. And yellows love to grow on the spine of the slope.

And the flora down there in Kentucky is different than the flora up here in SW Ohio and in Michigan.

There's a gradient change in flora as you get way past Lexington on up to Florence. For instance the white trillium with the stalk that supports the flower is down in Kentucky but we don't have that plant up here.


Sap:
If you want to believe its the sudden uptake of sugars or sap that's fine, its your choice.
But I rarely find sap oozing out of the roots. I personally believe in the legumes like parathesia had mentioned before and not trees.
How do you know that it is not a particular bacteria associated with the trees? or plants?

Horticulture said:

Have you considered that there's a certain bias as to where you find morels in the wild?  I happened to get lucky this spring, and chance upon a particular section of forest on my farm rich with both black and yellow morels (in total my 2 friends and I collected over a wet pound in 30-40 minutes of looking).  The first one I found was on a trail, near the edge of the forest like you said.  Image below:



The next morning I got 2 of my friends to wander the forest with me, and continue looking.  At first we cruised the edges, like where we found the first one, but we didn't find any more like this.  When we started venturing further inward, we began to find more.  The thing is, for every one that we found, I'm convinced that we passed up many more. 

We seemed to find a lot when we moved up hillsides.  I have a couple theories as to why that is.
-They are easier to spot on hillsides because as you walk up, you are looking at the ground.
-Legitimately morels prefer hillsides, perhaps because they get good water circulation.  (i.e. morels like good drainage, but dislike stagnant water).
-Deer do not eat morels on steep hillsides, because they cannot balance as well.

The largest collection of morels we found (8 black within about a ten foot radius) was at the very top of a steep hillside, overlooking a drainage gully below.  They were deep within some dense brush a fallen limb had made, which seemed to support with my deer theory. 

I'm convinced that they gravitate toward wild cherry trees.  My friend was less convinced, and felt that cherry trees (having distinct black bark), just afforded me an excuse to look harder, and that they were scattered fairly evenly throughout.

The setting of this forest matches the profile of the Maple-Basswood mesic forest, except Maple, wild cherry, and tulip trees seemed to be the dominant flora (also many wildflowers). 

If I had to take a wild guess what triggered fruiting, I would say its the sudden flux of sugars/nutrients that occurs when sap begins to mobilize in the spring. 

But back to the original point to my musings, when you collect morels in the wild, you're competing against a lot of factors that may have nothing to do with where they actually grow.  For one thing, your ability to find them is linked only to your ability to see them.  There's a lot of bias that comes from that, particularly considering how much harder they are to spot against leaf litter.  You're also competing against deer (or at least in my area), which have a lot more time to look for them, and are a lot better at sniffing them out.  We found a lot of chewed off bases, where deer (or some other animal) had beat us to the punch.  The areas deer and other animals can access may create a lot of bias in that regard. I think it's also probably useful to go with other people who haven't collected before, since there's a tendency to get stuck in a search routine (like me and seeking out wild cherries).  Anyway, I hope this adds to your collective morel knowledge base. 

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Obviously you didn't see my photos



http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/9479734/page/2/fpart/25/vc/1

I have no problems finding morels. I find them before everyone else and I know they are up before everyone else.

Cherry trees suck. Go to a White Ash forest. Trust me.
Also, Stay away from Walnut and Hickory its a waste of time.
Even the people in Michigan say "ash trees".
So it stands to figure there is some sort of association with black morels and those trees. Plus the soil must be loamy regardless of what type of forest it is.
Yellow morels will also happen to be there as well, in addition to half-frees and Disciotis venosa.

Quote:

I wish I had snagged more pictures the second day, but we didn't bring the camera back.  To finish, here's a close up of the first one in hand:


Happy hunting.  And good luck in your attempts to grow.

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