In Search of Spring

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?

Why Is This So Important?

My neighbor Terri saw me coming out of the woods carrying a trowel and a thermometer and said, "Looking for mushrooms?" Darn, she has me pegged, but all I was doing was checking the soil temperature because it's April, morel mushroom month, and those highly desirable -- some say the most desirable edible 'shrooms -- morels will be coming up, but only when the soil temperature reaches 50 degrees. Morels on this property are few because the soil is thin and alkaline; still, there had been a couple, and I'd gone to their vicinity and let them know I'm biding my time. Sort of.

Because it's too much math to calculate soil temp otherwise, I bought a sturdy thermometer, troweled out a slot in the forest floor, buried it for five minutes and then read it. Soil has now reached about 54 degrees. That is borderline; what we need for morels is a deluge of rain and then a swift and persistent warmup into about 70 degrees air temps. And wait a week. My mushroom-fiend city-dweller friend is so frenzied that it is April he had already emailed asking is today the day? I found in the woods today no fresh fungi of any kind. I did, however, see ankle-high leafy plants called "wake robins" (often called trillium) coming up, and spring beauties, and Dutchman's breeches, but it's Goldenseal (mayapples) that are linked with the presence of morels, because  mayapples indicate the earth they're growing in is fertile enough for morels to grow. But the mushrooms are not there yet. 

P.S. As I approached the woods I saw a fox.