Forecast is looking IMPECCABLE for North Texas over the coming days. A few warm days to get things started, then it cools way down and stays that way through mid-month, with several chances for rain. I hate predicting good or bad years, because there's a lot more to it than JUST the spring temps and rainfall...but high early spring temps and low rainfall will absolutely kill our season in Texas, so the spring weather forecast IS behaving for us. Good luck, everyone, and be safe! Copperheads will be lurking. Wild sows will have piglets to protect. Poison ivy and ticks will soon be out in force.
For you newbies, the trees in Texas to identify are juniper (commonly but erroneously called "mountain cedar" and super easy to identify), elms (they are among the first to send out greenery in the canopy and have a distinctive, graceful, vase-like shape to their branching trunks and bark that is easy to identify, and if they're not leafing already, it's too early in your area), cottonwood (the biggest trees around, usually, with chunky bark), and ash (have distinctive, deep X or diamond patterns to their bark). Hilltops will typically fruit first, as their soil warms first. Valley bottoms, and thick juniper stands that keep the ground shaded for longer will fruit later in the season.
Pick your way through the forest, looking carefully at the ground for a disruptive pattern. I like to look "across" the forest floor, rather than "straight down" at it, even getting down on my hands and knees and looking horizontally toward the horizon. The low-angle light of morning and evening can make them glow like lanterns. You may have to walk miles and miles before you find your first one, but when you do, stop and look around carefully...often they grow in troops. Look up at the trees in the immediate area, and take note of what the ground looks like...the leaf litter, undergrowth, etc. Notice which direction the slope is facing or how the sun is falling on the ground. All of that is a "pattern" that can help you locate other mushrooms in similar areas around that same time. (The pattern will change, however, as the season progresses...new trees and orientations will take over as early spots finish.) Stressed-out trees in the process of dying can produce bumper crops, but if you spend all your time looking for dying trees, you'll miss the more scattered morels that are hiding under healthy trees. Not EVERY target species of a dying tree produces morels, just as not every living target species tree hosts them.
But the SINGLE most important thing to do is to walk, walk, walk. And walk the same areas over and over again, throughout the season. Don't spread your effort across too many different areas, or you'll miss the window when that particular area fruits. It's better to get to know a handful of areas and their patterns, than to bounce from place to place across March, looking fruitlessly. (You'll be in that spot too early or too late, and you'll have missed the morels that fruit there while you're looking somewhere else.)
If it's a good season (and you'll know it is by the reports of findings here), you'll find them if you focus on a few areas and visit them often and look thoroughly. 10 miles of hiking in one area is better than 1 mile in 10 areas, in my opinion.
And also...stop frequently for a closer look. I think I've located morels more often while peeing than at any other time, because I've stopped and I'm looking more carefully. More seasoned foragers may prefer to cover lots of ground quickly until they locate one, and then stop and study the pattern. But beginners tend to be better served by moving slowly but steadily, looking carefully, and stopping often to look closer.
GOOD LUCK!!!
For you newbies, the trees in Texas to identify are juniper (commonly but erroneously called "mountain cedar" and super easy to identify), elms (they are among the first to send out greenery in the canopy and have a distinctive, graceful, vase-like shape to their branching trunks and bark that is easy to identify, and if they're not leafing already, it's too early in your area), cottonwood (the biggest trees around, usually, with chunky bark), and ash (have distinctive, deep X or diamond patterns to their bark). Hilltops will typically fruit first, as their soil warms first. Valley bottoms, and thick juniper stands that keep the ground shaded for longer will fruit later in the season.
Pick your way through the forest, looking carefully at the ground for a disruptive pattern. I like to look "across" the forest floor, rather than "straight down" at it, even getting down on my hands and knees and looking horizontally toward the horizon. The low-angle light of morning and evening can make them glow like lanterns. You may have to walk miles and miles before you find your first one, but when you do, stop and look around carefully...often they grow in troops. Look up at the trees in the immediate area, and take note of what the ground looks like...the leaf litter, undergrowth, etc. Notice which direction the slope is facing or how the sun is falling on the ground. All of that is a "pattern" that can help you locate other mushrooms in similar areas around that same time. (The pattern will change, however, as the season progresses...new trees and orientations will take over as early spots finish.) Stressed-out trees in the process of dying can produce bumper crops, but if you spend all your time looking for dying trees, you'll miss the more scattered morels that are hiding under healthy trees. Not EVERY target species of a dying tree produces morels, just as not every living target species tree hosts them.
But the SINGLE most important thing to do is to walk, walk, walk. And walk the same areas over and over again, throughout the season. Don't spread your effort across too many different areas, or you'll miss the window when that particular area fruits. It's better to get to know a handful of areas and their patterns, than to bounce from place to place across March, looking fruitlessly. (You'll be in that spot too early or too late, and you'll have missed the morels that fruit there while you're looking somewhere else.)
If it's a good season (and you'll know it is by the reports of findings here), you'll find them if you focus on a few areas and visit them often and look thoroughly. 10 miles of hiking in one area is better than 1 mile in 10 areas, in my opinion.
And also...stop frequently for a closer look. I think I've located morels more often while peeing than at any other time, because I've stopped and I'm looking more carefully. More seasoned foragers may prefer to cover lots of ground quickly until they locate one, and then stop and study the pattern. But beginners tend to be better served by moving slowly but steadily, looking carefully, and stopping often to look closer.
GOOD LUCK!!!
