I put up some lions mane totems a couple years ago. I just found a few modest growths on them. Hopefully they put on a better show this fall. They are a bit past prime.
We finally have the weather for mushrooms. My mushroom hunting friends said it is a boom year. Morels are all over the place. One guy found a patch of over 100 (he picked every one!). Late this year too. Walleye are hitting like crazy this year too!
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One of those Detroit River monster walleye is on my bucket list. Some fresh morels to go with it would be icing on the cake. Lots of morels in KS this year too, but I don’t hunt them anymore. Got tired of nursing poison ivy for a month and the amount of ticks around here is just unbelievable.
Ticks have become worse here, but not really bad. Biggest walleye I caught was 11 pounds 3 ounces. I don’t react to poison ivy, I don’t hunt mushrooms either, although many of my friends do, so I get some every year.
I found morels growing in my yard…i’m in the city. I’ve seen them a few times over the past 10 y ears but this is the most i’ve found (i don’t care for them much). It must be a crazy good year. Too bad that usually causes prices to plummet.
After i had Lyme’s disease a few years ago i try to stay out of the woods in the spring. Those deer ticks are so tiny in the spring that its almost impossible to find them. Ticks can also carry other goodies other then lyme…so you can end up with a whole host of ailments.
Side note. My mom was at a funeral for a cousin of hers a few months back and she said they mentioned they thought he had lyme for a long time (he had some sort of heart failure)… the dude was only around 70.
Yeah that sucks for sure! Here we don’t have the bacteria in the area. The disease have never been contracted in my county or the surrounding counties. Farther up north is some, but not here. We do have ticks, but none carry the bacteria, at least not yet.
Also none of the other diseases have ever been found here either. I spoke to my doctor about it, and also my Vet, both agreed, not an issue here. The Vet had a chart of areas of known infection, very informative. Ten years ago even seeing ticks here was rare. Now I get one, or my dog about once every 3 years. The dog is protected, I have only ever seen one on my dog about 9 years ago. My current dog has never had any. Funny I just treated him today with his monthly poisons. About an hour ago. Cleaned his ears too Nails cut are next. Heart worm is heavy around here, so my dog is always treated. Reminds me to put mosquito dunks in my rain barrels.
We have all kinds of edible mushrooms that grow here, some are huge clusters. It’s a great place for mushroom hunters.
Morels were in our yard about 2 weeks ago, maybe longer. I saw a large chicken-of-the-woods today. They are usually a late summer or fall crop.
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I’ve wanted to establish Morels in my yard for the past few years. (I’m also in SE Mi)
One side of my house is pretty shady and when I first moved in I had a ton of wood chips delivered. I ended up putting all those I couldn’t immediately use into that side yard and the soil there is at least 4 inches of decomposed chips (10 years old)
Did you establish the morels or just luck out?
Scott
That’s a question I can’t really answer. I never found morels on this property until this year. Two years ago, I made about 7 buckets of morel slurry and spread them near dead ash, apple trees, and elms. The morels came up near these areas, but on the edge of brush piles I burned over winter. I am not yet a believer in the slurry method, but I have less doubt now. Burn patches are a known morel hotspot. I did have morels appear near old apple trees where I applied the slurry. There were no burn piles in this area.
King Stropharia AKA wine caps are very easy to establish in wood chips. You would want some relatively fresh hardwoods chips, though. I’ll go take a picture, I’ve got a couple fruiting now.
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i’ve got a great source for fresh wood chips. My town has a communal wood chip pile that residents can take what they would like. I also have a big silver maple that will likely be taken down this summer, so fresh chips shouldn’t be an issue.
How are the wine caps for eating?
Scott
They are good. I would rate hen of the woods and chicken of the woods as excellent. Wine caps are a little more bland. They make up for it in production, though. I established a bed and can now spread it anywhere by scooping up some chips (aggressively colonized by mycelium) and putting it in other wood chip areas. I get so many that I let most rot. They dry and store nicely. Use them like button mushrooms or portabello.
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Sparty - I tried lion’s mane totems several years ago and produced some small shrooms. The big surprise was finding a softball-sized lion’s mane on a dying red oak in my back woods last fall. I wondered if my totem efforts ended up inoculating my back woods -?.
-fsh
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If you want huge walleyes go up to Green Bay, WI (Fox River) in early spring. It’s combat fishing at its finest. At time i think you can walk across the river without touching water. Most of the guys i know that have fished there have caught their biggest walleyes out of that river.
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I would say the Fox near Green Bay is one of the best bets for trophy walleye. You can get them from shoreline pretty easy there, too…if you time the run right. There are a number of rivers and lakes attached to Lake Michigan that will give you a trophy. The Detroit river is hard to beat for numbers and a decent shot at a trophy, though. It’s much more beautiful there than most people realize.
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The St Clair River has lot’s of walleyes, the river has been full of fishermen all year. We had an exceptionally long season although you can catch them all year there, they tend to run in the spring but some stay all year. The salmon are there too. Some good perch fishing too, better in Canada, but I do fine in the river. Last weekend was cool as we had some war ships pass through the river. Well I think it was a Destroyer? And some support boats.
I have to get the app about ships passing through the river so I have more advance warning for photos.
Are the stalks fibrous? The look that way. Some day I will try start a patch again. I tried once but no luck, no fruiting anyway.
The stalks are not very fibrous, especially when young. I’ve found that if the weather is warm, bugs find them quickly. Establishing a bed with a bag of spawn is pretty easy. You’ve got to add a good mound of new wood chips each year if you want to keep them going. They are voracious. I dropped a work glove in the chips one year. I found it completely engulfed by mycelium.
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Maybe we’ll have to make a walleye/scion exchange trip sometime. There is something very special about Lake St. Clair and the river delta. Sometimes it looks like the Bahamas. And it is one of the world’s best spots for walleye, smallmouth, sturgeon, salmon, perch…and probably the best spot in the world for Muskie.
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