Has anyone grown morels indoors? I have a couple friends who absolutely love morels and every year go into the woods for hours searching for them.

One has been a friend for over 30 years and her husband loves them as much as she does.

I want to try a grow kit with a morel spore injection syringe and hand them a pile of them in the off season just to see the looks on their faces. How resistant to "growth in captivity" are they and is it even worth trying?

Have the Arfcom mycologists any wisdom to share?

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Disclaimer: I have no personal experience and have not looked into it in-depth.

From my understanding, morels can be grown but they are one of the harder to grow mushroom species. You're going to have to commit to it and likely procure some special equipment.

OTOH, some species like Shitake you just inoculate a log and they won't stop growing...

Ditto. Coming off a pretty good spring this year where I could gather several good-sized morels each morning for almost a week straight right from the scrub wood edge along my own backyard, and have an amazing morel omelet each morning for that week, I am definitely hooked!

Go for a walk and look around. Gonna be much easier than trying to grow them. I have a friend that is a damn good Gardener that has tried multiple times with limited success. Mother Nature will hook ya up -

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I've introduced the yellow morel to my property via wild spore.  It has only taken to two tulip poplar trees and doesn't produce much nor every year.  I've had better luck introducing chanterelles to my oaks.  You'd have to have a species of morel that isn't mycorrihzal and it just sounds like PIA to get all the parameters just right when even mother nature fails at this.

i have a back ground in advanced shroomology by total accident. my dad started a japanese shiitake gourmet mushroom growing operation to sell at our roadside farm market when i was about 8 or 9 years old. late 1980s.

we were extremely successful at it and they were pretty much sold out constantly at market along the main route for 15 or so years until the whole structure rotted away. at which point my mom didnt want a new structure built behind our house because she said they attracted too many cock roaches. mom ran the market and did extremely well so it was the end of an era for gourmet shittakes on the farm.

heres how it went the day my dad told me we were building a mushroom operation...

dad, me and an uncle dragged logs home and chopped them to size with chain saw to install a large black mesh drip net made out of some type of durable nylon type stuff. it provided shade for shrooms and dripped water perfectly like a rain forest.

next we dragged out long tree logs with tractor of a certain half rotten type that still had all the bark on them but were yet kinda soft and spongy inside. my dad said the wood was specially picked to have bark and make the shrooms grow. key point here. the wood was favored greatly by the shiitake type mushrooms according to what my dad learned somewhere.

next we cut the logs and stacked them like lincoln logs in square structures about 4 foot square each.

next we drilled holes all over the rotten logs with cordless drills and auger tips about half inch or 5/8ths wide and maybe 2 or 3 inches deep, sorry cant remember depth but it was like 30 years ago. im going to guess it wasnt 1 inch deep but probably more like 2 and a 1/2'' deep and more like 5/8 wide on each hole drilled. holes were all pointed outside so that we could later harvest the shrooms easily without a real mess on our hands.

next we went along with these little white foam plugs my dad bought somewhere and dropped in a thumbnail sized chunk of mushroom in each hole and squirted i think 2 or 3 drops of water in each hole before capping it with the white plugs before moving on to the next to repeat the same until all 2000 or whatever were eventually installed.

at some point either before or after all that was seeded in my dad dragged home an old water tank from a near by farm and cut the top off to soak each log until dark black totally rotten.

once the mushrooms started growing they took off like crazy and they got way out of hand as far as size. we had the biggest mushrooms ive ever seen. some we had to slice into sections to fit into quart baskets. krogers now sells this exact type but they are super small compared to what we sold by the little green strawberry basket shaped quarts.

these shrooms had very little taste when raw but when fried in golden dipt batter in the 1980s in our home kitchen ill never forget it. those things were absolutely addictive. i couldnt stop eating em. makes me hungry just thinking about it. i may have to run to krogers after writing this.

i just remembered a part of the build list i left out you guys will need if you attempt this. we put hay bales the small sized ones not the 6 footers all the way around the structure about 4 foot high to block the sun from drying everything out. the drip net was roughly 6 foot high so the sun light rain and wind came in at the top sides plenty but not by too much. probably about a 2 foot gap at most. the hay bales rotted away and constantly needed replaced.

In for info.

I've been growing lions mane for a couple of years now. From what I've read, morels are tough to get to grow indoors.

The way I understand it is that what they’ve discovered is that the mycelium need to freeze. You can grow morels but if the winter is not cold enough and the mycelium don’t freeze they won’t grow that year or until they do freeze. You can buy the mycelium online

True,  but relevant for a lot of other species too.  Morels are just weird, we don't know how to grow them well.  The Chinese grow a species that doesn't need tree roots, most here do and will fail in a lab environment.

I’d be interested in knowing what the perfect conditions would be for growing some. It sounds like a fun project to develop an incubator that would freeze at the right time.

Probably already been attempted. But not by someone who knows nothing about it. A clean slate approach is sometimes best.

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Good general info:  https://www.mushroom-appreciation.com/growing-morels.html

I take the wash water from morels and mix with wood ash,(macro nutrients) rust (iron) molasses (energy) and a pinch of salt( counters most bacteria) and plate on finger jello (perfect media for moisture: oxygen) in a cool environment.  It's super easy to see morchella grow from this, but getting  a fruiting body is a whole other challenge.

Watch Clarkson's Farm, season 3, episode 6.

I’ve been playing around with growing mushrooms for a while and have done tons of research on the subject.

First of all, the “kits” where you just inject a spore syringe into an “all in one” bag  are notorious for being unreliable and prone to contamination.

If you really want to successfully grow mushrooms you will need to do some serious research and invest in some equipment and supplies.

Second, Morels appear to be exceedingly difficult to cultivate either indoors or out. From what I have read you will have practically zero chance of success.