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GentlewoodFarms
April 2, 2018

~ Magical Things ~

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The wonder of my little 20 acres never ceases to amaze me.

It's Easter Sunday and finding these is definitely better than finding Easter eggs. These are Morels - totally edible and fantastically good, and available ONLY for those who are willing to go hunt them down and find them during a very particular time of the year. And trust me when I say, it's definitely a hunt.

They're picky. They only grow in a specific set of circumstances, and they don't come up every year. It has to be the right level of moisture, temperature, sunlight, nutrition in the soil. Last year, I found two. This year, there are over two dozen.

These are the first of the year, and the conditions of the past week have been really close to perfect for them, so I was hoping to see a lot more by the end of this week. But it's supposed to freeze here on Tuesday, so I went ahead and harvested them Sunday afternoon. If I hadn't, there wouldn't have been ANY to eat. The happy thing is that I managed to find over 40 of them. The sad thing is that they were mostly pretty small - the one in the front on the left is a little bigger than the palm of my hand.

It's always an annual debate. Do I take what I can find and call it good? Do I leave them to spawn, and hope that next year I don't have to work as hard to find them? Or do I take half and hope the little ones survive the cold and grow big enough to spawn?

I'm pretty conservation minded, so I always leave a FEW to spawn. My rule of thumb is to leave one for every two I pick regardless of how many that puts in my mesh bag. Last year there weren't enough to harvest and regenerate so I didn't pick any of them. That took incredible willpower because once you taste them, floured and fried up in butter ~ once a year, I can afford to be Paula Dean and fry in butter ~ you'll wish there was a way to find them on the grocery shelves.

I've thought about building a mushroom bed and trying to cultivate it with inoculated spores, but morels are SO particular about where they grow that it would be more likely that I'd just end up spending a bunch of money and get no mushrooms anyway. So I spend every spring watching the redbuds, checking the daytime and night time temperatures, and taking long wandering walks in the woods behind the creek with my eyes on the ground and my heart full of hope. Seeing the first one every year is as exciting as a newborn baby.

My mom has been talking about the morels for the past two years. She was as disappointed as I was last year when the season wasn't cooperative, so I asked Tom how he felt about driving over to her house to cook and share them with her. He was all for it. And there were enough to share with my sister and brother-in-law so the five of us had an impromptu get-together at my mom's, ate mushrooms, and listened to Becky's tales of her most recent trip to Japan. It was a fun evening.

People who have a patch of reliable Morels don't EVER reveal it, and I THINK I've left this photo pretty free of any identifying landmarks, although it won't really matter, because they never come up in QUITE the same place two years in a row. Next year, I'll be back to hunting them down all over again, with thoughts of hot, fried delicacies waiting only for those who are willing to touch Mother Earth's face and trust Father Time's pocket watch.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

I'm still digging through my AGC March kit, although I've rolled over my three unfinished pages to April. I have to say that when I saw this mushroom paper - Fairie Dust paper Graphic45 - I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it, but I wasn't sure if there was going to be a photograph or not. I'm so happy to say that this spring was cooperative! I had cut the papers using last month's Monthly Sketch #1, but of course, the morels had their own thing to say about that and refused to live by my timeline. So April 1 it is.

Turning it in to this month's challenge list
~* ~ Foodie
~ * ~ Artistic (large title)
~ * ~ Visual Triangle
~ * ~ Music Inspiration
~ * ~ Sticker (all the little mushroom embellies are stickers, put on black cardstock and dressed up with ribbon and bling)


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