How to Make Morel Slurry

Using Morel Liquid Culture to Grow Morel Mushrooms on Your Property

If you need to wait more than 2-3 months to start your mushrooms, just keep your mushroom culture in the fridge – it will be fine for a minimum of 12 months!

If you’re a mushroom enthusiast, you probably know how difficult it can be to grow certain types of mushrooms at home. Morel mushrooms are one such variety that can be challenging to cultivate. They’ve evaded commercial growing for years and many people will tell you they’re impossible to grow. However, with the right techniques and a bit of patience, and maybe a pinch of good fortune, you can successfully grow morel mushrooms on your property.

Traditionally morel slurry is made with fresh or dried morel mushrooms; these are instructions for making a slurry using liquid mushroom culture. Liquid culture is made of live mushroom tissue suspended in a nutrient broth, and is an awesome tool for growing many varieties of mushrooms.

A Recipe for Morel Slurry

To make morel slurry, you’ll need the following ingredients:

• 1 Syringe of Morel Liquid Mushroom Culture
• Water
• Molasses or Honey (a tablespoon or two will do)
• A large jar
• A big bucket
• Ashes (a cup or so is good, it’s optional but HIGHLY recommended and more likely to make this whole experiment work out for you.)

Start your Morel Slurry:

Boil however much water will fill your jar and add your molasses or honey and let it cool to lukewarm, then pour it into the jar. Add the full syringe of Morel Liquid Culture. Stir well with a clean spoon.

When that’s all set and your slurry is in the jar, you’ll want to cover it with a very clean piece of cloth or paper napkin (if you use a piece of cloth, you can throw it in the water when it’s boiling to sterilize it, pull it out before you add whatever sweet stuff you’re using) and use a rubber band to hold it on the jar. This just makes it so that your slurry can breathe without much of anything landing in it. Let it sit and steep overnight.

The next morning, or afternoon, or whenever you get to it – Pour the contents of the jar into your clean bucket. Add your scoop of ashes. Fill the bucket up with water (lukewarm is good but cold is ok, just not hot as hot water will kill your morel culture). Put the bucket somewhere safe where small children won’t fall into it/mess with it, put the lid on loosely and leave it overnight again. Voila! You now have Morel Slurry! Continue to the next page to set up your morel patch outdoors.

Growing Morel Mushrooms

Now that you have morel slurry, you can use it to grow morel mushrooms on your property. Follow these steps to get started:

Choose a location

Morel mushrooms are usually found around the edges of wooded areas, especially near trees like oak and pine, but they like elm, ash, and aspen too. They are most often found in areas that have been burned, like from forest fires. So even if you don’t live in a forestry area, if you’re able to recreate this sort of environment, like making a shady spot with woodchips and ash you’ll have a higher chance of success at growing your morels.

If you’ve got the good luck to be near a forest, I’d run around with my bucket of slurry and put it all over the place. Anyway, all you have to do is pour some of your slurry into each area that you’d like to have morels grow in and leave them alone for a few years. Focus on shady areas that are rarely disturbed or walked on.

It usually takes 3-5 years for this to work. You might get lucky after a year and see a few pop up. There’s a chance you might never see any. But if you’re patient, you’re likely to reap the rewards in a few years. It’s more likely to work in climates that have a winter season, as it’s actually the cold snap at the end of the year that shocks them into growing each spring.

Morel mushrooms prefer woody areas that have been burned rather than soil. Adding a bit of ash to the blend as recommended in the instructions and even sprinkling a bit more ash on the ground where you’ll pour the slurry can help recreate this type of environment and increase your chances of success.

Be patient

Morel mushrooms can take a long time to grow, so be patient while nature does its thing.

Don’t be fussing over them. Cover the area where you’d like them to grow with your Morel Slurry, and then LEAVE IT ALONE! They don’t need help.

Avoid using pesticides or herbicides

Most mushrooms including morel mushrooms (and honestly all of the other living things including humans) are not going to thrive in a spot where there are a lot of chemicals (or salt, if you’re putting them near somewhere where you salt sidewalks/your driveway in the winter – mushrooms HATE salt when they’re growing, save it for when you’re cooking your mushrooms!). Put them far enough from any surfaces that get salted that the runoff when things melt doesn’t land on your mushroom growing zone, and that applies no matter what kind of mushrooms you’re growing.

Seasoned morel mushroom hunters will tell you that there’s wisdom in leaving a few morels growing when you’re harvesting the others, that way the ones you leave can spread more spores and yield a better harvest the following year.

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