“It’s all about the trees,” Weipert said. “They go to sleep with trees and they wake up with trees. They’re living off their roots and their whole purpose in life is to transport nutrients to that tree and get sugar from it. The morel is just a fruit and a reproductive organ.”
A combination of weather factors is critical to morels during their growing season.
“You have to have the 45 degree nights and the 70 degree days and you need moisture,” Weipert said. “It takes about 10 days for a morel to mature and they germinate when the ground temperature reaches 47-55 degrees and shut off when it reaches about 60 degrees.”
Areas that have been recently burned, trimmed or cleaned up are good places to start looking.
“Morels like ground disturbance,” Weipert said. “If they run bulldozers or plows they cut into that mycelium, and the morel has to repair that damage because it can’t do its job so it has to grow.”
Kansas’ mushroom opportunities get rave reviews from Weipert. Although he hunts private land he says there are plenty of mushrooms to be had on public lands, many of them associated with a reservoir.
Just the other day he and five friends picked nearly 80 pounds of the tasty fungus on a day trip. That might sound like a lot but it’s likely a drop in the bucket according to Weipert.
“The estimate is about 10 percent of the morels get harvested every year, and the other 90 percent never get seen by a human eye,” he said. “You’re not going to kill any populations of them.”
“Right now the hot spot is from Wichita to Lawrence and east of there,” Weipert said. “The Kansas River is usually a hot spot around cottonwoods and elm trees.”
The Kansas morel mushroom hunting season is still in full swing according to Weipert. He sees at least another couple of weeks of activity, despite the cold weather and snow.
“Cold spells don’t really hurt morels, as long as they don’t get super cold freezes for a long time,” Weipert said. “If it doesn’t last very long, it just puts them in the fridge for a few days, and they warm back up and grow.”
“Heat is the biggest killer of morels,” he said.
Weipert says many people are apprehensive about hunting morels because they’re not sure they can identify them correctly. After all, many species of mushrooms are poisonous. And Weipert throws out a word of caution, even about morels.
“The morel itself is a poisonous mushroom,” Weipert said. “If you eat it raw you’re going to get sick, and there’s no doubt about it. Morels have to be cooked.”
Weipert will pick about 11 different varieties of edible mushrooms and said the morel is about the easiest of all to identify, although there are 140 different species of morels.
“When you cut a morel in half (longitudinally), it should be hollow throughout,” Weipert said. “As long as you follow that you’ve got a morel.”
When Weipert is mushroom hunting, he carries a mesh or breathable bag of some sort.
“Plastic disintegrates your mushrooms, and they cook in plastic and they can’t breathe,” Weipert said. “Plastic is the morel’s enemy.”
Some mushroom varieties are more valuable than others. Many are used by chefs in restaurants all over the world. Morel mushrooms have plenty of value in the United States and prices vary dramatically.
“I’ve seen fresh morel mushrooms go for $180 a pound in Illinois at auction,” Weipert said. “They sell for $60 a pound in Michigan every year at a festival and people will come up and buy 10 pounds and not bat an eye.”
Weipert has four guys hunting mushrooms for him now, and he pays them $18 to $20 per pound of morels. He then resells them and makes money as well. online you can often find fresh morel mushrooms for anywhere from $20 to $50 a pound.
Despite the over-the-top popularity of morels in the Midwest, Weipert says numbers in this region pale in comparison to other locations.
“Twenty-five percent of the world’s morel production comes from the United States, and the majority of it comes from areas west of the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Northwest,” he said. “All of the states in (the Midwest) have no significant consequence of what goes on in the world.”
Mushroom hunting is truly a way of life for Weipert. So much so that he’s packing up and moving from Missouri to Montana to take advantage of their morel season.
“I’m going to go live out there, set up shop and pick some of the bigger burns,” he said. “You can hunt morels for four months out there.”
