I admit these are not scientific tests, but you can understand my skepticism. Mike said he once owned an apple orchard that contained many morels and protected them from other pickers. Over the course of a decade he often watched common morels mature through the various stages. He said color and size are the poorest indicators of morel species and stages. Color is variable with some common morels never having much of a grey tone and other specimens never losing all their grey.
Size depends totally on the weather and fertility.
Some small specimens pass through their immature stages under the leaf litter where they cannot be observed. He noted that pits of common morels are squeezed together when they are in the small, grey stage but progressively expand and open up as they mature. Recycling My family has always enjoyed your publication, but when I retired, storage limitations were forcing me to part with my 34-plus years of magazines, all in excellent condition. I thought you would like to know how I recycled them. I checked with the library, but they didn't need them.