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This morning, my mother called me out to show me this… thing growing in her garden. It’s about 4" long, and about an inch thick at its widest point. The brown ring towards the tip is mud or some sort of other brown organic matter–it’s wet, and smears with a stick.
My guess is that it’s a fungus of some sort, but I’m curious about exactly what it is.
Possibly related–she was planting stuff last night, and found a few small roundish things in another bit of the garden. They were stone or egg colored, and breaking them revealed an orange inside of a shade quite similar to this odd spike’s outer surface.