Did the morel spore slurry work?

So a few years back I wrote this article about how we were going to attempt to propagate morels via the spore slurry technique. If you want to learn about our spore slurry recipe go here(Morel Propagation Experiment). It’s been a good while so I thought it was high time to share our lessons learned, successes, and failures.

Morel Spore Slurry Success!

We attempted our morel propagation experiment in a bed that was growing blueberries. Over the years we determined that the location wasn’t a good fit for the blueberry plants. As I went to transplant the lone survivor early this spring I found the roots and soil heavily colonized by mycelium! While there is no glory at to know for sure if this particular bit of fungi was indeed morels I believe it is highly probable. I’m going to go ahead and mark that down as a success!

Morel Propagation Failure….

As you may have picked up in the preceding paragraph we’re just not sure if our propagation experiment took hold. At this point we’ve yet to harvest an actual morel from this little patch so…morel propagation failure!!

Lessons Learned…

So there were a couple pretty good lessons that I came away with in our little experiment. Number one observation is that our site selection was less than ideal. The bed we tested this out on was close to the house and easily observable, but really sunny and prone to drying out early in the season just when morels are starting to fruit around here. We definitely need to choose our lives cation better next time….oh well that’s what experiments are for right?!? If you’re not learning what’s the point! The next observation I made was that blueberries may not be the best match for the morel spore slurry technique that we used. Our recipe uses wood ash as part of the activation/inoculation process. It didn’t occur to me at the time but wood ash is highly alkaline… blueberries like a highly acidic soil. Not a good combination! It took a solid season for the blueberry bushes to get back to normal and we had to add a good bit of amendments to get there. I don’t know why but for some reason that just didn’t click for me while I was running our little morel propagation experiment!

Any how it looks like the spore slurry may have taken hold.and this little patch may still prove productive at some point. I think the morel spore slurry recipe and technique that we outlined in the original article is a good one, I just failed in the execution in a couple different places! We’re going to give it a go again this year this time with a little more thoughtful preparation in our site selection! We’ll keep you guys updated and until we manage to unlock the secrets of morel propagation with spore slurry there’s always wild harvesting in the woods!!

Good hunting, and be sure to post any of your morel spore slurry successes, tips, tricks, ideas, or suggestions here!!!!