Accidentally grew morels?

Not sure where they came from or what they've been feeding off. The previous owners of my property built some raised beds along a slope with a boardwalk in between. At the edge of the boardwalk, a couple mushrooms that I'm pretty sure are morels (unless there are other mushrooms that look similar?) just popped up.

I know they like growing on dying root systems. There's tarp under the boardwalk, and tarp on the section of slope beside it, and the morels just came through in the little gap between the two sheets of tarp. I haven't cut any trees nearby, and the plants in my raised beds that died in the winter like tomatillos and eggplants shouldn't have such big root systems that they'd reach as far as where the morels popped up (the trunks of those plants were probably 4-6 ft away).

Maybe it was from a bed of reeds I was trying to smother? I put tarp over them last spring to try to get rid of them since their root system is so dense I can't dig them out. Their root system was about 3ft from where the fruiting bodies popped up. I don't see any others near the edge of the tarped over reeds though (that reed bed was about 8x30ft).

What a nice lucky find ...

I hope you do have morels! Here is Mushroom Appreciation's guide to morel and the poisonous false morel.

Good luck!

Some people have all the luck!

I hope your patch is long lived and fruitful.

Timothy Norton wrote:Some people have all the luck!

I hope your patch is long lived and fruitful.

Another one popped up about 8ft away. It grew out of the mulch that I was using to weigh down the fabric that I was using to smother the reeds, and also stash to the side because I wound up getting more mulch than I needed for the rest of my garden. My best theory is that they're colonizing the dying root system of the reed bed, which was pretty big, about 8x30ft, and very dense (more root than soil in the top 4-6"), so I could potentially get lots of morels? Pretty impressive that it managed to grow through the fabric tarp and 12" of mulch.

They do seem to be morels (hollow on the inside).

Those are most definitely morels, but if they are growing directly adjacent to pressure treated wood such as CCA (chromated copper arsenate), there could be a contamination problem since mushrooms can bioaccumulate heavy metals such as arsenic. I advise caution.