One of my hobbies is collecting mushrooms. Which makes me wonder why some of my favourites are not available in the shops. Why are the very best mushrooms like chantarelles, morels and various boleti not cultivated for consumers? Is it not possible to grow these in a non wild environment?
Maybe some of the kinds you don’t see in stores are used as drugs? I don’t know
AFAIK, No efficient way to cultivate these species has been found yet.
However, here, you can buy them at markets. But they’ve been collected, not cultivated. They’re also sold in preserves, though I never bought them.
None of the species the OP mentionned can be used as drug.
There are several patents describing how to cultivate morels: 4,594,809(1986),4,757,640(1988),4,866,878(1989).
According to this site the patented procedures are of limited utility:
Chanterelles and members of the genus Boletus are, like many mushrooms, mycorrhizal. It is probably impossible to grow them without their host plants ( various trees mostly ) and even then it is very difficult to predict what kind of crop they will produce from year to year, which makes them unattractive investments.
It is the saprophytic mushrooms that are more potentially cultivatable. Morels are weird in that they may actually be facultatively mycorrhizal/saprophytic. Whatever the issue, it has been difficult to come up with a winning cultivation scheme as squink noted.
- Tamerlane
On a slight tangent, here is a picture of a morel I picked earlier this year.
It was about 6" tall! It grew, along with several others, in my rose garden. I had bought and layed down some wood chips around the roses and I guess the morel spore germinated or whatever the word is. I am hoping for a repeat nest year!