Mother Lode Tree

Back in the spring of 2008, I was building a house for a couple and they had a small woods behind it. I asked them if I could mushroom hunt it and they said I wouldn't find any because they had just went all through it and couldn't find a single one. So, after work one evening, me and my buddy went in there looking around and it wasn't looking too good at first. All of sudden I hear my buddy say, "holy cow, Matt! Get over here!" I walk over to where he is at and it looked like it was an old tractor lane cutting through the woods and it had knee high grass growing in it. Down in the grass there were gobs and gobs of yellow shrooms. Unfortunately, we were a couple days late on them because about 2/3 of them were rotted. We still ended up walking out of there with about 7-8 lbs of yellows! It was one of those times I will never forget

The mycelium lives on the roots of the living tree. When the tree dies the roots follow suit. Once the roots start dying the mycelium is no longer feeding and being happy, so it pops out a mushroom to spread the spores in hopes of finding more roots so it can go back to eating and being happy.

As far as the mycelium is concerned, mushrooms are a bad thing, but they are a good thing for us. The morel is essentially the wiener of the organism.

That's the quick and dirty version. I really suggest reading the book I've linked below. I consider myself a pretty good mushroom hunter, but I still learned a lot from reading the book.

www.amazon.com/Morels-Michael-Kuo/dp/0472030361

I've gotta get that book!