Growing Morel Mushrooms

hey YouTube what's up so I've never made a video before I've never found something that I was particularly passionate enough about to make a video on but it turns out that morels here lately have just been something that I thoroughly enjoy I've been trying to grow them for about five years now on and off I started when I was still a junior in college it was like an independent study that I just kind of picked up on my own like a friend of a friend had been growing like the real deal shrooms and I just thought you know I hunted shrooms or I mean morel mushrooms with my dad when I was little and I just you know it's kind of like this childhood passion that I had and that's what it manifested off of so it was just a slight interest in it you know I thought I would I would try to grow them I knew it was really difficult and I knew there was it would be a lot of research but you know I was just something to tinker with so the first place I knew I had to look was towards the professionals I had never grown a mushroom in my life at that point I needed to understand the basics of indoor cultivation and I also needed to research the hell out of morel mushrooms because I had no idea how they grew and it turns out after researching them for five years plus that nobody else knows how the hell they grow either oh except a few people obviously but so the first few guys that I came across were Gary mills James Malachowski and Ronald over and most of you probably know who Gary Mills is he's like the king of mushrooms or morel mushrooms on the west coast and he knows so much about how they grow he developed a patent with James Malachowski while they were in school at Michigan State University they partnered with a company called neogan and they developed a patent together but that wouldn't have been possible if they hadn't met Ronald over he was from San Francisco and had apparently been reported as the first man at least recorded that had grown immoral in captivity sadly he was murdered in San Francisco before he could see the patent become a full-fledged thing and I wouldn't be surprised if that was a conspiracy to be honest with you I mean it could just be a freak accident but uh I mean you're dealing with like big profits here like this is a mushroom probably second to truffles so anyway Gary Mills became the first guy that I looked up to and trying to understand how morels grow and you know how my experiments should be laid out because he knew so much and so much was out there even though a lot of his secrets he kept to himself you know he still had to make a patent on it and that was my first step and really understanding how morel mushrooms and their cultivation works so i sat down you know I created word documents I even created a PowerPoint you know I created all these notes for myself and then I started planning out what sites to go to where I was going to get my supplies I ended up using a lot of information from shroom ology comm even though that's a pretty old site it's been around for a really long time and it was primarily used to grow psychedelic mushrooms but it turned out to be really helpful and just trying to understand the whole process in general I went there and then I got my supplies from a sport works calm I got my liquid cultures there and I also went to shrimp supply to get all of my growing supplies at home I always had jars around because we live in the country and we can think so a lot of this stuff I already had but I did need like bags I needed micropore tape you know just just little things here and there so I finally set up my first experiment using Gary Mills patents and then tweaking it to my advantage and adding some things that I liked that seemed like you know a better growing meeting medium or something that I could just really tweak and just work with and just make it my own experiment you know I didn't just want to follow his by-the-book and just be a copycat I just I really wanted to see if I could do it on my own but while following guidelines and I only tweaked minor things so here's the thing I got all the way to the fruiting stage there was fluffy white mycelium you know my grow box was just alive with the fungus like every time I opened it to get fresh air into it I mean it smelled like a forest full of mushrooms like it was just magical I just thought this is it you know I'm gonna wake up one morning and I'm gonna see pinning but I never did like at all actually at one point that mycelium started to grow downward it got so heavy but that's all I did it just it kept growing like it didn't stop there were no mushrooms at all though so that leads me to believe that Gary is just trying to keep the experiment to himself he's obviously he has a secret ingredient that he's not gonna tell anybody about and I don't blame him I mean you couldn't blame him there's big profits here but that was success for me to do it my first time around and to not make any mistakes I did have some jars that got contaminated but not having grown a mushroom before and doing it right the first time that's pretty admirable I think you know that made me feel like I really have what it takes to try to grow morels because for one morels are the type of mushroom that don't have really this innate resistance to bacteria they can easily get affected by molds or bacteria I mean it can just take them over even if the medium is fully colonized if you add it to a new medium that isn't sterilized it could potentially really harm the mycelium you know whereas like if you did an Ulster mushroom you'd have no problems it would still the would still produce it would fight the mold or the bacteria but morels really have this problem where they can't do that I decided to go back to the drawing board I needed a new plan on how to go about growing morels so you know I tweaked Gary Mills patent so much that it became my own I was no longer using rye grain at all there's no you longer using like a sawdust medium or peat moss I really did make it my own I researched morels until I was blue in the face so then I I got so fed up with trying to do it indoors that I thought why don't I just do it outdoors so I had this plan that I was going to when springtime came I was gonna go mushroom hunting and I was gonna find all the morels that I could especially the mature ones pick them take them home and make sport prints out of them as many sport prints as they could possibly make and I know that sounds kind of silly because why why didn't I just blend it up and you know make them RL bed out of those mushrooms well one I wanted to eat what I found because that's a lot of work and going up and down these hills where I live like that ain't easy and half the time you know it's it's not even on my property like I have to ask the owners of the land if I can go and you know it's just it's a lot of effort to do this and you have you really do have to have a passion for it or it's just not worth it so that's my first reason the second reason is I thought that I could monitor it better in the fall I feel like between when morels release their spores and when they hit the ground and they grow I feel like they don't have a whole lot of time to grow before summer hits and it's too hot for them to really mature I feel like they start growing again in the fall and then that's when the sclerotia really forms before winter because sclerotia really likes the cold like the colder it gets the more sclerotia that forms and in summer I just fell then mycelium slows down because it's too hot for it to really grow I don't I don't think it has any reason to make sclerotia because it's searching for nutrients it's searching for a way to make itself bigger you know mycelium just wants to be as big as it possibly can it's just trying to make itself this enormous mass and then it's going to send out the fruiting bodies which allow for you know you know more spores and the cycle to start over but that's its purpose is to get as big as it can before it finally decides to shoot out the fruiting bodies so anyway those are my two reasons for you know not blending the mushrooms up making a sports slurry out of that and just planning the bed in early spring so I made my bed two feet wide and about five to six feet long I didn't really measure it I didn't really care that much to measure it it's just an outdoor experiment I don't really you know there's it's not there's not this fine line that you have to have when you are experimenting that's that's why it's called an experiment I feel like people who just put in so much effort into the fine line details of it don't really get anywhere I mean half the discoveries that are made are made from mistakes like I don't really have an example for you but but I just know that you know discoveries really do come from mistakes like you're not meaning to go that direction but it happens and then you know you find something out about it that you never really expected but because that happened you made a discovery so anyway I prepared the bed after reading articles about how you know sclerotia obviously likes a non-nutritive medium and I also read about where people layer there are agar petri dishes so that they form more sclerotia before they actually cut up the agar and Transplant it into growing bags and like I don't know liquid cultures and all that so anyway I layered my bed that way I layered it nutritive intermediate layer and then non-nutritive topsoil and then obviously I cover it because it's going to get cold soon and you know I don't want to risk the mushrooms freezing they do like the cold they don't mind the cold I mean it can get the temperatures above about 30 and they'll be fine but after that you do want to insulate them it's it's really good if you have temperature fluctuations they can deal with that more so than like a study you know 30 to 40 degree weather they really do prefer 50 and 60 degrees that's like optimal fruiting is obviously at around 70 but just while they're growing it's around 50 that they really like that's the temperature that they prefer the most so if you can keep him covered they'll definitely continue to grow but after I finish layering my bed I had a sports slurry on for about I had a sports lorry on for about 48 to 72 hours and at that point I had actually been too busy to really manage my mushroom experiment and I worked overtime I took somebody else's shift you know money things and my sports Lurie had been aerating for much longer than it should have been it was actually over 72 hours and I was terrified that all the spores I had worked so hard for because like an idiot I hadn't half the spore prints that I had up into two different categories and done one and the spore slurry and did the other like maybe later on some other time or in the spring or something like that I did them all at once and I was terrified that they had gotten waterlogged but you know all I could do was hope for the best hope that they weren't waterlogged you know I came home at about 1:00 a.m. you know finished prepping my bed it was about 2 or 3 a.m. and I finally got them in the ground Oh was that the most wonderful relief I've ever had to put them in the ground finally and just hope for the best I had fed my spore slurry I fed it about two tablespoons of raw honey and two tablespoons of and I don't know how many gallons I had in it it was probably around four or five gallons it was definitely a five-gallon bucket but I'm pretty sure I had four gallons of water in it within about a week and a half my bed was actually growing I I couldn't believe it like I would move the leaves and I'd see little spots of mycelium it was very wispy you know they were very tiny patches but I knew it would get more and more like the longer it grew so you know all I could do was wait you know it's really tempting they look at the bed every day but I knew you know mushrooms don't really like to be disturbed so I kind of had to leave it alone and I took a lot of willpower to leave it alone but I would look at it here and there maybe twice a week once a week if I could really keep myself from looking at it it would be once a week so I plan on the bed on nine 22:17 and it's definitely been almost two months since then I probably only have like two more weeks to go before it's been two months I do think that I planted it a little late in the season but where I am for whatever reason it stays so hot in August it doesn't start to cool off until like mid September I should have definitely got them in the ground around the beginning or mid of September but I just had so much going on and I wasn't even sure if I was going to do the experiment it just kind of it came to me all at once and I just decided you know this is my best chance to do this so I might as well I knew I couldn't use the spore prints indoors because I'm not a super fancy mushroom grower I don't have a laminar flow hood I know I could make one but I just feel like it would be a waste of money for me I'm trying to save all the money that I can and my experiments come cheap to me so I just grabbed what I can here and there and just work with that the spores are the only thing that is extremely valuable and sometimes I really do have to chuck out a pretty penny to get them but luckily I made my own and I use them all in this bed so preying on that bed to do well already the mycelium has just fluffed up so much like I have some pictures here of the leaves where you can see the mycelium strands on it like it had rain that day that I took the pictures but you can just see how fluffy it is like it's not it's not your typical mycelium and it's still wispy it still has a lot of space in between them strands but that's how morel mycelium is it's not like this big clump of fluff it's not like an oyster mushroom it's just that's how it is that's how it looks and then you know it'll band together and form those little screwy Rochelle nodes or sometimes it will just form the little lumps on the strands itself and it'll be really tiny sclerotia but every once in a while for whatever reason this the mycelium strands will band together and form a massive sclerotia I don't know why that is I wish I could understand that process more it'd be nice to partner with like a microbiologist who maybe knew more than I did you know about everything that I researched and can tell me a bit more about how this process works but from what I understand is like nobody understands it like it's still something that science is trying to figure out or at least mycologists or so anyway another thing that I noticed between looking at the bed was that the soil that I provided whatever roots I had dug up the mycelium definitely tried to attach itself to those roots there for a little while anyway we got there was a point at which the temperatures got down in the mid 30s and the mycelium that had been growing on those roots actually died back like it didn't die off it's still growing but it died back into the bed like it's too cold for it to fully colonize those roots but whatever roots I did dug dig up they they wanted to attach themselves to that so that was definitely a sign for me that maybe the strain that I have made sport prints out of maybe symbiotic I'm not sure but you know it's just it's an experiment just gotta see where it goes you never know what's gonna happen another thing that I found was that the sclerotia started forming along the rim of the bed especially when it started to get colder like some nights we're definitely much colder than others and then it would warm back up you know how the season changes it's not just cold all of a sudden and just it stays cold it'll be cold for a while and then I'll get warm again then I would get cold again well when I started to get colder the sclerotia started to form around the side of the bed and it was small there were small little nodes but I mean it was it was so obvious like they were tiny but they were there I mean they were pronounced you could see a bunch of them yeah yeah every time I bent down it smelled like the earth it didn't smell like mold and I saw strands coming out from those nodes so I know that it wasn't mold it was definitely sclerotia that was forming around the sides of the bed but it started to rain here within the next week and that sclerosis started to dissipate I'm not sure if it just like from all the rain that we got dirt on the leaves had washed off and covered the sclerotia I'm not sure if that happened or if like some of the rain had splashed dirt up on this quotient I just kind of dissipated but it does seem like the sclerotia kind of dissipates or just vanishes when it rains I'm not really sure why that is I'm not sure if it's dying I'm not sure if it's a turning back into mycelium and growing more because it's wetter but I have noticed that if if the bed dries out there's more sclerotia and if it gets colder there's more sclerotia so those are two things that I have really learned from this experiment so far about sclerotia and its formation is that I likes cold and I like dry he likes dry areas but I know the morel mushroom in general does not like dry areas it obviously likes to be pretty wet it likes around 50 to 70% soil soil precipitation or soil it likes around 50 to 70% water in the soil so he definitely likes to be pretty wet and it is prone to dehydration like it doesn't like it like that'll definitely kill the mushroom but if the mycelium has a good hold in the ground it'll just turn in a sclerotia and it'll stay there until conditions are right again for it to grow upon finding all of the morels that I had worked so hard to get making sport prints out of them was really difficult when you find them they are just just a ball of water like what you are looking at is like 10% of matter and the rest is literally water like you could say the same for us I'm sure if you try to dry out a human we dribble up until like this little I don't even know like a ball like the size of a basketball or something we just dry up but that's kind of how morels are we just they dry up you know and if you don't allow them to dry up when you make a spore print they'll rot so that was my mistake a while back that like when I had first started doing it the end of my junior year and that spring was my senior year I had went mushroom hunting around the area where I went to college at and I had found mushrooms and I was going to make sport prints out of him but I brought him back and I put them in a container without like any air holes in it or anything for it to really let it just dry out you know and they rotted they smelled horrible I've never seen you know how like people say a rotten potatoes smells like nothing they've ever smelled before will you better smell a rotten morel because that's oh my god it's worse than a dead deer on the side of the road that's how bad it is like or a skunk it's worse than that it's so bad but I was really disappointed in myself I thought this is like I can't I can't do this like I can't mess this up again I really got to pay more attention to it I can't just leave it there and just let it go and that's kind of why I'm like so obsessed with looking at them orell bad too like I just want to make sure everything's going well I know I'm supposed to leave the mycelium alone but you know if something doesn't seem right I feel like I can do something to fix it at this point I feel like I know enough about it to where I'm not gonna damage it I'm actually gonna help it so so instead of doing what I did the first time putting them in an airtight container without any holes to let any air out and just just let them die hydrate on their own just without any air currents so that the spores don't fly everywhere you know you you just want them to be able to dehydrate without letting the spores escape that's all you're trying to do when when I look at videos on YouTube I just see people with like oyster mushrooms that put them under cups or put them under jars and I'm like how does that like just I know oyster mushrooms they have a lot of water in them but why don't they rot you know I mean they must drop a lot of spores within like a 24 hour period to where you don't have to let them die hydrate but with morels like you get more spores if you let them die hydrate like just let me tell you that right now like I'll put that out there for you all to know like that's how you do it you know just put it in an air an airtight container but stab holes in it and you know make sure you lay down foil before you lay them in there and don't wash them off do not wash the mushrooms just shake off the dirt I mean if you're gonna use these spores you might wanna if you're gonna use them for indoor stuff you might want to consult somebody who does mushrooms on the regular who you know really knows what they're doing when it comes to cultivating mushrooms but for me you know this is just for an outdoor experiment if you want to get morel mushroom spores for an outdoor experiment this is how you go about it you just get a piece of foil put it in an airtight airtight container lay shake off the dirt on the mushrooms lay the mushrooms down inside the airtight containers space them out evenly put the lid on close it up and stab holes in it I mean make the holes big enough so that the air can escape you want the morels water content to just evaporate out of it so that's what I did and I ended up not using an airtight container I actually used foil to cover a casserole dish I had put foil down inside the casserole dish I you know shook off any dirt I didn't wash the mushrooms I just put them in the casserole dish and I put the foil around the dish and poked holes in it and I poked enough holes so that I could evaporate and there wasn't gonna be any rotting and because it was a clear casserole dish I could see inside of it you know I could see if there was any signs of rotting or anything like that and I could get to it before I let it spoil and I just ruined all my hard work again you know I just I knew I had to prevent that from happening again but anyway it worked you know I got I got four big nice sport prints and I mean they dropped tons of spores like it was like this beautiful beige tan collar and when I picked the mushrooms up there were all these little cells from it yeah I mean you could just see where it had just dropped tons of spores I had found them at the right time they were at the end of their life cycle and they were releasing all of those spores I had I had got there just in time you know I felt so lucky so grateful that I had found that you know that I had done it you know I finally successfully made spore prints from wild mushrooms morel mushrooms of all things and I was really proud of myself but I don't have any pictures for you sadly because I never thought I would document this I never thought I'd make a video on it but here recently I just figured you know why not share what I've learned why not give this to the world you know so you can either believe me or not believe me I don't really care but I will update you all in the spring [Music] I know a lot of youtubers don't ever get around to updating people so they just assumed that there was never any success or you know maybe there's a pin comment and ii beneath the video in the comment section where they say you're you know they got one morale or just didn't work out or they're gonna try it again next year or something like that but half the time I just never get back to you you know but I'm definitely I'm either gonna make a video or a pin a comment so you all know how it went and if it is successful definitely expect an insane video on it just I will be so excited if it actually works out you know here's the whole thing but I'm not gonna be too hopeful you know I mean I've had so many failures so far so I can't really trust myself but anyway I will keep you all updated and when spring 2017 rolls around April and May is when they pop up around here I will definitely let you know so stay tuned thanks for watching something that's really interesting is a CEM BN and is a sketch of one or Sichuan China I don't know I don't know how to pronounce things but anyway they figured out how to grow morels commercially here recently I think I was in either 2015 or 2016 is when they really got big with it and they went public they have so many acres of morels like you have no idea it's in the thousands that they are growing these and they actually have partnered with other farmers I don't know what goes into those partnerships but they have been training about ten to twenty people to grow morels the way that they have figured out how and I guess it's kind of like a limited liability company sort of thing or they get commissioned with it or something I'm not really sure how that works but they're definitely profiting from it and it's definitely secret thing I'm sure you have to sign a lot of documents to really be able to do this with the company but they figured it out that's for sure I'm sure if they ever spilled the beans to anybody else they'd get in some deep deep crap I read an article here not too long ago that the way that they grow them it has to deal with their reaction to the moss that's in the ground I'm not sure if that's true sometimes when I find articles I don't really know what to believe when I read them I kind of just leave it open to criticism you know but they definitely it definitely said something about its reaction to the moss in the springtime so one thing that I've noticed about moss is that it contains a bacterial population all its own depending on the moss species and then it also puts nitrogen into the soil and snow puts nitrogen into the soil and you know after a big snowfall morels will come up I can't really speak for burn site morels because I don't live in the Midwest I don't deal with those kinds the kinds I find or I mean they're in the springtime there's not a lot of them they grow in certain areas besides certain trees and I mean just they're kind of here and there and everywhere and just just and sometimes they're in places you don't even I suspect you know like they'll surprise you sometimes but that's the joy of finding them that's what makes it such a great hobby for me and I really do enjoy it I don't really find it to be a burden you know because I just do this in my spare time I'm just experimenting you know I'm an amateur I'm a millennial amateur I don't know what I'm doing but I'm having fun with it and I feel like that's all that matters

Channel: The Molly Moocher

Views: 285,664

Keywords: morels, mushrooms, sclerotia, cultivation, morelcultivation, growingmorels, shrooms, mycelium, morelmushrooms

Id: MYHfKubo7B4

Length: 30min 39sec (1839 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2017