Spring Times Two: Babies and Wildflowers

The old adage in northern Minnesota when it comes to seasons is that we don’t really have seasons. Rather, we get “winter, mud season, and a week of summer.” But really, it seems we have two sorts of springs up here in the Northwoods. The first spring comes with a trickle of water, a nub of pussywillow, when the snow begins to recede. With a chilly promise of green and growth, the first spring ushers in the dreaded mud season when the outside world become a mess of muck and dead grass.

Then, a month or two later, the second spring materializes. When things are actually green. When wildflowers start to peep out from the forest’s floor.

Gradually, we’ve been entering into that lovely second spring when it starts to seem like summer might really be coming after all. The strawberry and blueberry plants have been flowering for a couple weeks. I know people have been seeing violets up here for a while now, but I didn’t stumble across my first one of the year until Andy and I were out punting about for morel mushrooms on Sunday.

(No morel luck: not even false ones. Despite getting a bit of moisture last week, things remain pretty crispy out in the woods and on Sunday, I crunched my way through what was last year a very fruitful field of blueberries.)

If you spy a blooming violet, chances are your gaze will fall on a clump of wood anemones. These equally miniature spring wildflowers (violets and anemones are probably only about 4 inches above the ground) are out in full force. I love finding wildflowers and pointing them out to others, but goodness “anemone” is a hard word to say. I always feel like I’m trapped in Finding Nemo when I yell out to Andy that I found “an anemonemone. Amnemonemomne.”

As we drove home from the ill-fated morel hunt, we spotted a yearling moose beside the road. That must mean that Mama Moose has had this spring’s baby (or babies – they seem prone to twins.) When the new babies arrive, the yearling moose who have been hanging out with Mom all winter get the boot so Mom can devote her time to her infant(s). Oh, the joys of being an older sibling.

With this second spring promising summer, Andy’s been busy getting the gardens all set for the summer planting.

It’s looking really good.

Meanwhile, I’ve done a second seed planting inside to hopefully make up for all the seeds that didn’t sprout the first go-around. I’ve always had a soft spot for Four O’Clock flowers, so of course everything else I planted sprouted while the peat pots with the Four O’Clock seeds have just sat there and rudely sprouted a couple strands of grass and nothing else. We’ll just give that a second try, shall we.

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The Morel Mystery or Marooned by Mushrooms in Minnesota?

In the early part of last summer, Andy and I spent a bit of time poking around in the woods, searching for the elusive morel mushrooms. I was researching an article about fire regeneration, so it made sense to take a gander for the mushrooms while I was out snapping pictures of forest regrowth. Morels are reportedly known to pop up in burnt areas in the two – three year window after a forest fire.

Today marks the three-year anniversary of the Ham Lake Wildfire’s start, which burnt approximately 75,000 acres. In some ways, it hard to believe the traumatic spring of 2007 is three years past. But the forest itself has rebounded beautifully and that means that magical window for morels may be closing. If there were ever morels out there to begin with . . . .

That’s where the debate comes in.

Morels are definitely to be found in the southern reaches of Minnesota. Andy and I talked to some fellow morel mushroom hunters yesterday and they said morels were popping up all over the place in Indiana last week. The old timers swear they used to find morels up here. I believe “trash bags” was used as a unit of measurement. But the old timers are also stingy on details and they’re not saying where exactly they found enough morels to fill trash bags.

Last year Andy and I searched and searched. We looked in places where people had hinted at finding morels in the past. We look on high ground, we look on low ground. We look under burnt logs, around tree trunks. All we ever came across were false morels.

These brain-resembling mushrooms are fun to come across (and as amateur mushroom hunters, whenever we stumbled upon some we would assure each other that “we must be on the right track”) but the mushrooms aren’t good eating. I don’t think they’re poisonous, per se, but I also don’t think you’d feel really great if you sautéed them up in garlic butter and tossed them in pasta. Andy maintains that the only place he’s ever seen morels was at Pike’s Place Market in Seattle, where they sold for about $40 per pound.

So the hunt continues.

We set out on Sunday afternoon and found some bitty false morels.

We also found a ton of flowering blueberry bushes. That’s the beautiful of searching for something elusive: you never know what extraordinary thing you might find instead.

We did some good news on the morel front over the last 24 hours though.

Rain!

Mushrooms are known to spring up after a rainfall so there could be some morels lurking out in the newly hydrated forest right now.

Now the trick is to find time to hunt for them. I spent the better part of the day in the car, driving around to interviews. The upside is that I got some great material for a couple projects I’m working on. However, I’m far too road weary for any great mushroom quest. Perhaps I’ll settle for a nice cup of tea.

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