Page 19 2025 Spring Home and Garden LINCOLN DAILY NEWS April 2025 The good news is that it is not impossible to cultivate morels and grow them in a specific location of your choosing. Hard, absolutely, but not impossible. According to self-acclaimed mushroom expert “Mrs. Mushroom,” It can take years to cultivate an outdoor mushroom patch and equally as long to create an indoor environment that will successfully sprout these sprouts. So, before you begin the process ask yourself if you are committed to the long wait in order to reap the short reward. You can purchase morel spawn/spores but you can also harvest the spores from the mushrooms you hunt in the wild and create what is called a spore slurry. Mrs. Mushroom offers this recipe: “Start with some clean, non-chlorinated water in a food-safe container. “Add a pinch of salt and about a tablespoon of molasses to the water and stir. You don’t need much of each. The salt is to inhibit bacterial growth; the molasses is to provide sugars for germinating spores. “Add mushrooms and let the mixture sit covered for 1 to 2 days in a temperate place. Any longer than that and you risk bacterial contamination. “After you strain and remove the mushrooms you’ll have a liquid with millions of spores!” She also notes that the mushrooms should be mature when plucked from the earth, and should not be dried out when starting the slurry. You can then spread the slurry in the appropriately prepared “bed” in your yard, seed a new “secret location” in a wooded area, or you can grow them inside in the appropriate environment. Creating that seed bed or appropriate environment is perhaps the most important part of the process because like out in the wild, morels like to grow in certain locations and conditions. Outdoors, the bed should be started in the summer or fall. Mushrooms need winter to sprout in the spring, so allowing the planted spores or slurry to “over-winter” is going to be the best scenario. Mushrooms require a “high fiber” diet so prepare the bed using sand and plenty of organic matter such as gypsum and peat moss. These will “lighten” the soil and mimic decay which is important. Then, to continue the “mimic” add ashes from burned wood. Mushrooms tend to flourish in areas where there have been forest fires, so this is an important part of the process. Additionally, you can add specific wood ashes, and also wood chips from trees that seem to be target Continued --
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