SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Sales of specialty mushrooms have soared in recent years, think shiitake or oyster. Well, why not one name for B. J. Leiderman, who writes our theme music? But one mushroom has proven very hard to cultivate, the morel. It only grows wild for a few weeks in spring. Here is Harvest Public Media's Kate Grumke on an effort to grow morels year-round.
KATE GRUMKE, BYLINE: It always feels like spring in the grow room at Mushrooms Naturally, an urban mushroom farm outside of St. Louis, Missouri.
J T GELINEAU: So lots of light, fresh air and humidity, which basically recreates their ideal time of year for all of the varieties that we grow.
GRUMKE: Owner J.T. Gelineau shows off shelves with logs covered in mushrooms that will soon be for sale. For the past few decades, specialty farms like his have become a growing trend.
GELINEAU: We have maitake or hen-of-the-woods mushrooms.
(SOUNDBITE OF CRUNCHING)
GELINEAU: And then we have our king oyster mushrooms. We've got some shiitake mushrooms.
GRUMKE: What he doesn't have is the morel, one of the most iconic mushrooms, with a complex, earthy and buttery flavor. They're also lucrative. They can sell for anywhere from $20 to $60 a pound.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER FLOWING)
GRUMKE: To get one, you mostly have to forage. On this day, Gelineau heads into a wooded area behind his farm, crosses a small creek and ducks under honeysuckle as he looks for the stemmed mushrooms that have a pitted, pointed cap. Morels are only around for a few weeks. There are also a lot of lookalikes out here, walnut shells and limestone rocks, even leaves.
GELINEAU: All of these things initially have that kind of honeycomb appearance that, if they're the right color, will really catch your eye.
GRUMKE: Eventually, he finds what he's looking for.
GELINEAU: Oh, here's one. (Laughter) See? Now look at this, this is the smallest one I've found yet.
GRUMKE: A tiny morel mushroom the size of Gelineau's thumbnail.
CONNOR YOUNGERMAN: Morels are a mysterious and romantic and strange mushroom.
GRUMKE: That's Connor Youngerman, a specialist with the Cornell University Small Farms Program. He says that North America's wild morels have a life cycle that has proven tricky to replicate in a farm setting, but some are still trying. Wisconsin-based Field & Forest Products sells mushroom spawn and supplies to farmers and home growers. Lindsey Bender is the research director for the company. She says for about the past five years, it's been selling morel spawn. But Bender says there's no guarantee customers will be successful.
LINDSEY BENDER: We still call it a bag of hope in that we can guarantee that it's good spawn that you're receiving. But, you know, the mystery of actually getting that to produce and successfully produce is still the challenge.
GRUMKE: But it's not impossible. In China, farmers are successfully growing large amounts of black morels. And a Michigan state-led study found farmers could reliably grow morels in the United States. But the problem was profit. For a variety of reasons, they couldn't grow enough to make money. Even if Midwesterners could reliably farm the mushroom, many foragers would still head out to the woods. Nebraskan Tersh Kepler has been hunting morels for almost 60 years. He doesn't want to see the mushroom grown commercially.
TERSH KEPLER: I honestly don't think they're ever going to figure that one out, at least hopefully not in my lifetime. It's an adult Easter egg hunt, is what it's like.
GRUMKE: And for Kepler and others, foraging for morels is a tradition they don't want to ever change.
For NPR News, I'm Kate Grumke in O'Fallon, Missouri.
(SOUNDBITE OF BEN FRIES AND THE FISHERMEN THREE'S "SKY VILLAGE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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