The HOA did its annual drive by and told everyone to clear out our weeds. There is a little strip of land between my driveway and the next one over, about a foot or two wide. The neighbor was doing his weeds so he did that area too and put down some mulch. A few days ago, there was a cluster of four mushrooms, about 3-4 inches high. Before I could do anything, they were gone, but now the entire strip is erupting in hundreds of mushrooms. One day we just see them breaking the surface and the next they are several inches high.
The neighbor got the mulch at Home Depot and used it on his yard also, but there are no mushrooms there. My question is how to treat this. Do we have to scrape up all the mulch and replace it with new? It there a way to kill mushrooms without ruining the soil for other plants? Anybody want some free mushrooms? (This is a joke. Please do not eat random mushrooms unless you are an expert or you really want a liver transplant).
Mushrooms do seem to like mulch. Add rain and instant fruiting fungi bodies.
A quick google seems to indicate that the mulch mushrooms are usually the sort that like slightly acidic soils, which things like decaying wood chips promote. So… change the pH. 1 tablespoon of baking soda to 1 gallon of water, spray liberally over the affected areas. Voila - the soil pH goes up and it’s much less 'shroom friendly. That ratio of baking soda to water seems a pretty common one in on-line guides.
I’d start with that, what with being cheap and more or less non-toxic.
Also, rake your mulch. Turning it over reduces pockets of moisture that promote fungal growth of all sorts.
I’m guessing you could spray down any new mulch added over time baking soda while you’re putting it down to help prevent new outbursts.
If your mushrooms look like this, please harvest, package and ship them to me. I will pay for shipping. Or if you’re in reasonable driving distance I will personally drive over and remove them for you.
The Spring after a giant elm tree died in our yard we had literally hundreds of morels. The following Spring, dozens. Then a couple, then none. Those were a couple tasty Springs while they lasted.
I’ve grown mushrooms, both culinary and psychedelic. They need ann extremely specific microclimate as far as humidity, temperature, sunlight, etc. You’ve just hit the goldmine.
Most of the mushrooms I see growing in mulch are Armillaria species; the mycelium came in on wood products. Or sometimes inky caps – I see those in my composting manure piles. Mushrooms are the ephemeral fruiting bodies of otherwise invisible underground fungi . If you just ignore them they’ll go away.
As was stated above, don’t eat them. Very few wild mushrooms are actually poisonous – the genus Amanita probably accounts for almost all the deaths, but gastrointestinal upset is not uncommon.
Whenever I rinse out my trash bin, the wheeled one that goes to the curb, on my front lawn, a few days later the area of grass the rinse water flowed through erupts with tightly-clustered mushrooms. I am not exactly sure what part of our trash harbors all the mushroom spores. Anyway, they dont seem to harm the grass, and I just shovel them into the green waste bin, but it seems odd.
The mycelium is under the grass, not in the rinse water. It just needs a little more moisture to fruit. A mushroom is like the fruit of a tree you can’t see. The mycelium grows from spores, and the mushroom is the spore-making body of the mycelium the way an apple is the way an apple tree makes more apples.
That makes sense based on how I understand how mycelium works, but the lawn is watered regularly, and only the area of the bin rinse water grows the mushrooms. I’ve tested it by rinsing in another area and mushrooms grew there, too. Once they are removed, they dont come back, either.
Mushrooms are cool, I would try to find out which species they belong to and just watch what happens. Mushrooms usually do not life very long, but they fulfill a vital role in nature.
Concerning morels, I believe I have read somewhere that their fruiting bodies are best triggered by fire, so burning some twigs of the elm tree on the right spot might do the trick: it seems burning can release nutrients quickly. As usual, the internet is full of suggestions. I think I will try some, just for the fun.
We had something called “artillery fungus” growing in the mulch in front of our house a couple of years ago. Skinny little mushrooms a couple of inches long and apparently they shoot their spores a fair distance, which leads to spots on the siding of the house. We raked all that mulch out and this spring we put cedar mulch down. Hoping that makes a difference. If I see anything popping up I’ll have to try the baking soda/water spray.
(My wife just reminded me that the problem mulch didn’t come from Home Depot, it was put down by the guy who did our landscaping, which means he’s probably got piles of mulch sitting around that he’s not going through fast enough.)
A guy who knows about mushrooms told me to shake the morels at the ground after harvesting them to get spores on the ground.
Another tip I’ve heard is to cut them near the ground instead of pulling them fully out to encourage more growth.
But, if they don’t have the proper feeding conditions no amount of spore dispersal will help. As I mentioned in my previous post, we got hundreds of morels in our yard after a giant elm died. Also after an apple tree died in our front yard and we had it removed, a nice ring of a couple dozen morels appeared around where the tree had been the next Spring.
So they seem to thrive on the roots of certain kinds of recently dead trees. I’ve sometimes wondered if I buried some logs of elm or applewood in prime spots the previous Fall, if it might encourage morels come Spring.
And they are delicate enough that just knocking them over will have them gone (dried up/decomposed) in 24 hours or so. A swipe with a rake or broom and they’re gone.
We mushroom hunt occasionally and yet I’ve never found a morel. My nephew sent me a picture of some beautiful morels he found, but he wouldn’t tell me the location!
We keep a calendar of when/where we found mushrooms. One particular spot always has a flush of chanterelles. We only take what we will eat that day.
They’re tough to spot in the wild, especially at first. Once you spot one it gets a little easier because your brain gets trained to notice them more easily after that. Mrs. solost is a better morel spotter than me. I constantly get a little endorphin hit of excitement for a split second thinking I found one, but then…crap, it’s just another damn pine cone on the ground!
Word of caution for anyone morel hunting: though morels are one of the easiest mushrooms to ID, beware the false morel— it looks like a stunted, deformed morel and is various levels of toxic. On the local news a few years ago a guy picked and ate some false morels and landed in the hospital with jaundice. I think he was fine, didn’t have permanent liver damage, but a scary close call. The way you can tell them apart for sure is to cut one in half- false morels have a fibrous interior, while real morels are completely hollow inside- they look like a cast rubber mold.