Should I worry about the mushrooms in my lawn? It was been very rainy this past month and my lawn has lots of mushrooms. Do you pull them out or leave them alone?
There’s nothing harmful about mushrooms in the lawn, and there is nothing much you could do about it even if that weren’t the case.
The mushrooms are only the fruiting body of a subterranean fungus. The fungus itself may weigh upwards of a tonne and occupy not just your lawn but the lawns of several of your neighbours. Chances are all the mushrooms in your yard and adjacent yards are the same ‘plant’. So as you can see pulling the mushrooms out will do squat, it is exactly like trying to kill a tree by plucking the flowers off. At best all it will achieve is to prevent the fungus from spreading outside of your neighbourhood.
The only real problem with mushrooms is that they can produce yellow lines in your lawn. The fungus tends to grow on a front and it lifts any available nutrients out of the soil and shunts them to that front, which is where the mushrooms are produces. As a result you will often get yellow areas behind the front and bright green areas at the front after the mushrooms die off. This won’t do any long term harm, but it can look ugly if you have a very well manicured lawn. It can also be easily fixed by the application of a light dose of urea to even things out again.
If you are realy desperate you can try flooding your lawn with copper sulfate and hope that you dose it right so that it shocks the fungus so it can’t fruit, but doesn’t harm your grass. That is more black art than science, so the odds of a good result are slim. You can also get organic fungicides, but those are pretty nasty substances and not recommended for the home gardener.
Be glad it’s just mushrooms in your lawn and not the rising water table flooding your basement.
And don’t eat the mushrooms, or let your kids or pets eat them.
I’ve done mushrooms on the lawn. It makes weeding seem so… cosmic.
So it sounds like pulling them out won’t hurt, and may slow down their migration across my yard…
As I said, pulling them out won’t do any harm. But it will no more slow its (not their, there is only one organism here) migration across your yard than pulling the flowers of a 100 year old oak tree will slow its progression into the sky. It’s a completely meaningless and futile gesture. At worst it will acheive nothing, at best it will lead to somewhat increased spread because the fungus will be devoting all its energy to spread and none at all to reproduction.
You need to relaise that you are simply seeing the tiny fruiting bodies of a massive subterranean organism. Removing those fruiting bodies can’t achieve much. If there was an oak tree covering your entire yard would you really think that removing the flowers would somehow slow down its growth? Yet that is exactly what you are proposing.
If you don’t pull them out before the little caps open you won’t have done any good at all. The spores will have already been released and the mushroom lifecycle will already be moving on. And that happens pretty quickly - overnight in fact.
While walking in the park, my wife used to enjoy kicking the various toadstools popping out of the grass. When we started getting 'shrooms in our lawn, I suggested that, perhaps she was tracking spores back from the park. Not stomping wild mushrooms seemed to help with controlling the lawn mushrooms.
I’m not doubting it’s possible, but in “midcoastal California” is this the typical case?
By my figuring, there are at least two psychedelic mushrooms native to that area, probably several more… Do those also grow huge underground networks, or are they mostly the result of spores from last year, landing in the right spot?
…sorry for the hijack…
dolphinboy, I take it you’re most worried about the lawn?
You can pick them without worrying about spreading more. Try to get them young though, and put them in a plastic bag to contain the spores. Otherwise you could potentially just spill brazillions of spores out all over the lawn, thus defeating the purpose.
Depends entirely on the environment and the species. That’s the only accurate answer. It would be surprising if the average fungus growing in a lawn didn’t occupy a space greater than 5 metres across, meaning that it will almost certainly be occupying parts of several different yards. This is most readily apparent if you ever get to see fairy rings in homogeneous environments where the exact size of the fungus itself is quite clear. Those are the sizes of the organism you’re probably dealing with
It’s a misleading question.
Just because the ‘plant’ resulted from a recently germinated spore does not mean that that the organism isn’t also a huge underground network. You need to appreciate how fast these things grow. In lab conditions it’s common to incubate these things for just a few hours because they grow so fast they will choke themselves to death. We’re talking a growth rate of centimetres/hour here. After a month of rain even under the most adverse conditions a single spore could have easily formed a colony with a radius of 5 metres. These things can reach those sorts of sizes within a matter of days.
Also the source of inoculation is commonly wind borne spores shed recently, not spores from last year. Remember these things are microscopic and can be readily collected from the jet stream. They have some difficulty crossing the equator but aside from that they can go anywhere they like within days.
Not really. As I pointed out above, all the evidence suggests that for most species the inoculation comes from wind borne spores and they can come from the next continent almost as easily as the next yard. We’re talking about microbial spores here. They are present everywhere, all the time. Short of hermetically sealing and heat sterilising your entire yard at least a few will arrive every single day. Spilling billions of spores over your yard will make little difference.
Basically if the conditions are right to allow the growth of a soil fungus then it will already be there.
Wow, centimeters a day?! :eek: how do they grow so damn fast? And how exactly do they grow so fast they choke themselves to death?
I never realized how interesting mushrooms were.
No, centimetres and hour. 
Under ideal conditions. Almost any hyphal fungus will manage centimetres a day even under adverse conditions.
A simple body plan and a ‘make hay while the sun shines’ life strategy.
Fungi are essentially clonal colonial microbes. They aren’t truly multicellular. The body consists of little more than lengths of identical single cells strung together like railway cars. It’s a very simple organisation with heaps of redundancy that requires little planning so they can grow as fast as possible without needing to worry about cancer or the need to coordinate growth between parts. That’s something that no true multicellular life form can hope to emulate because we need to make sure that the parts fit together. If a plant has stems that grow much faster then the leaves or an animals has lung cells that multiply 100 times faster than anything else that’s a problem. For fungi all cellular replication is beneficial because it produces more clones to feed the colony. Even if the fastest growing cell lines aren’t perfect clones that’s not a cancer, it’s a beneficial mutation that can be immediately exploited.
The other point is that these organisms have a disposable outlook. They grow like hell when the conditions are right, exhaust their own environment and then die, releasing billions of spores. With that sort of strategy there’s no penalty for rapid growth.
A Petri dish or nutrient tube has a finite space and a finite amount of nutrition available. After a period of time the organism will have flooded the environment with toxins or used up all the food and have started to starve. That’s problem if your identification method depends on viewing processes only found in active cells.
It’s also a problem when the stressed organism tries to produce a 6 inch tall by 4 inch wide fruiting body in a 4 inch wide and 1 inch tall Petri dish. Blows the lid right off and makes a mess of the incubator. The problem is there’s just not that mushroom inside.
I’m sure you’re right, “all the evidence” notwithstanding.
But I still maintain that given a new mushroom growth within the space of one yard, you’d probably end up with more mushrooms if you dumped all the spores all over yard, versus arresting them prematurely.
And I doubt that very much. It relies on an assumption that the quantity of spores in the air is below saturation level and that there are no other organisms of the same species already in the lawn. I know of no evidence to support either assumption.
What you are suggesting is identical to claiming that since a female locust can produce thousands of eggs I will reduce a locust plague if I kill just one female in a swarm. You are talking about removing one source of reproduction when there are billions of others.
I can’t imagine how that could possibly have any effect.
Now wasn’t that fungus?
Actually, my reasoning merely questions the air-to-spore ratio you have asserted but have yet to cite.
Perhaps if you would point out where I even mentioned an air to spore ratio, much less a specific one, then I might have something to work with.
Do these not imply a ratio?
Can you define “saturation level” for a SPORE? It’s basically competing with dust, right?
Yes. They imply a ratio >0.
Again, I’m sorry, but a cite on that “Caesar’s last breath” scenario is still welcome…
Even if you could prove there was at least one Fungus Getyoufuckedupus spore in every single cubic foot of air on the planet, that would not negate the power one healthy and successful mushroom in a nutrient rich environment, dumping a 100 billion spores all over the the same excellent medium it came from, right?
No.
Once again, you are saying that somehow in a locust plague there is some ratio between the number of locusts and the amount of environment locusts can fill. That’s not the case. “Sufficient” is not a ratio.
I can’t see how.
I can prove that in a locust swarm there is at least one locust for every square metre of land area, that doesn’t mean that dumping another gravid female bearing a thousand eggs will have any effect at all on how many locusts will exist in a weeks time. In fact quite the opposite. If the environment is already saturated adding more reproductive potential won’t have any effect.
Do you genuinely not see what I am getting at? If you have a house that already contains a thousand roaches and a 10 million roach eggs, then do you think that simply killing one gravid female will have any measurable effect at all on how many roaches will be there next month?
Same scenario. When the environment is saturated it’s saturated. And when it’s saturated by sources aside from the one you can control then whatever you do won’t make any difference. There will still be more individuals than there are resources to support.
Your suggestion depends on colonisation in soil fungus being primarily carried out by spores shed by nearby individuals, with spores shed by individuals 100 miles away or the next continent over playing a lesser role. The evidence suggests otherwise. As far as I know there is no evidence that soil fungi are found in genetically similar clusters. That suggests that spores form nearby fruiting bodies are no more likely to colonise an area than spores produces miles or thousands of miles away. And as such removing those nearby fruiting bodies won’t have any discernible effect.
Of course if you do have any evidence that soil fungi occur in genetically similar clusters, indicating that nearby fruiting bodies are more likely to colonise an area I’d love to see it.
It’s a compelling argument, but I still need a few cites…
…by your rules (last time we tangled - the “no animal can jump higher than 3 feet” thing), they all have to be .edu cites and oh yeah published in peer reviewed journals to qualify.
For what exactly? A ratio that nobody but you can see?