Soil at 50 degrees is the minimum for morel mushrooms. Each year about this time, every week I take the soil temp in the woods where they grow; this first time got 54 degrees. But really we can't expect them at this latitude (39N) so early in spring. If you were a morel, would you want to stand in wet 54-degree mud and stay there? Would you even poke your head out if there's still a chance that a freeze might shrivel your delicate tissues? Granted, it's very rich mud, quite satisfactory, but if I were a morel at this time of year there wouldn't be enough sun to coax me out.
So when the rain temporarily ceased, I (who am not a morel) went searching in the universe for other signs of spring, edible and not, and, dog my cats, I found some. The daffodil is not in my yard.
Plenty of brand-new Turkey Tail mushrooms and those brown Japanese wood-ears were growing on downed trees.
I and my neighbor Terri vote that spring should last all year. Yourself?
They're on the cliff edge facing the road and grow nowhere else on the property. Have to sidle out onto the cliff top, very carefully, because it's sandstone and eroding. If I'm going there I thought I might as well clip enough for two, because they are too fragrant not to share. And because every one of our Moms had some lilac something. Because we see them for only a week per year.
So I wrapped them in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and delivered lilac branches to Sherri. And while we chatted I admired her two raised garden boxes, one with lettuce growing, and several kale plants with small tender leaves. I love to eat kale, but my yard is unfenced, and when I was allowed to plant them, bunnies ate them down to a nub before I could. Sherri invited me to just clip the kale plants and take them, to make room to plant summer vegetables. So I scored some baby kale! I call that a fair trade!
Have you ever seen a more open and innocent face? Miss May 10 might be a buttercup except it's too early in the year for buttercups, and it doesn't form a cup. In fact, it is a Common Cinquefoil, Latin Potentilla simplex. It was positively identified as such via the sawtoothed leaves.
