Even though this morning temp is 6 above,by May 10,11 the Morel's start in my woods.Last year was too dry,a less than 300,year before good moisture almost 700,some years it's really down to less than a 100,but not very often,best year was well over 1200....Hope this year will be decent 300 to 500,have a good day and save your money like stated above.

I know guys that used to count mushrooms by the gallon. One of those old timers said they've cleaned thousands and thousands of mushrooms at their camp picnic table over the years and years of hunting. His take was that if you could grow morels where you wanted to that they should be growing all around that picnic table and they never found one there. AND... that was at a camp, in the forest, where they were found... you'd think conditions would be pretty good there.

I have the same thing in my woods, dead rotting elms. I have never seen any Morels growing in or around them. The few I was lucky enough to find were growing out in the open on the edge of my lawn.

Maybe one or two dead elms in our woods. Mostly all Cottonwood. Almost everywhere I’ve found them have been in Cottonwood timber.



I think you’d have to move that table around the woods and clean shrooms on it in different spots to know for sure. We find them in certain spots, and never in other spots in our woods. Nothing I can see is different, but the shrooms definitely notice a difference.

Around a fresh Cottonwood blow down can be a crazy good spot, especially by the root ball. I commonly find them around where I cut down a cottonwood for fire wood also but not as many as a wind fall tree. Mostly likely because of the lack of root ball ripped out and maybe removing the wood doesn’t help them either.

The thing I don't like about the tree things is that everyone seems to say a different tree. You say cottonwood for example. And I am sure that you find mushrooms around cottonwoods. Then there is another group of guys that say sycamore. Then another group of guys say Ash... then the ash guys wont even target say cottonwoods at all and say they are the worst... Its a crazy hobby. lol.

Now that all the ash trees died off in Michigan the people that used to go there on mushroom hunting trips say that they are far and few in between now.

There are different kinds of morels, some may prefer different type soils in different parts of the country. Even here they start finding them in good numbers along the Platte River a couple weeks before we do along the Elkhorn River and they are only 20 miles or less apart where I’m at. Both primarily Cottonwood covered banks. Guys in the hills away from rivers find big ones around more hard wood type woods.