17-11-2002, 11:39 PM
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Getting road of Mushrooms/Toadstools
Begin , se
quote...
For Gods sake what is up with you guys? I came here for a sensible answer
to a sensible question. I have a sense of humour, but you people are just
pillocks . . .
Well as to the sensibleness or otherwise of the question. You will
likely get a flippant answer to many questions asked here. I know I
have.
As to the fungi. Where is it growing? What does it look like?
Is it on the bark of living trees or on dead branches. Is it on the
ground beneath trees (light woodland). Is it occasional classic shaped
toadstools coming up in the lawn? Is it in the form of a ring? Is it
coming up in flowerbeds? Have you been using a manure fertiliser in the
beds? Is the garden exceptionally damp at the moment or is it a damp
garden in general?
I have toadstools coming up all over the raised bed I built in the
summer. Oddly enough though they are a form that is frequently seen on
manure heaps. Although I dug as deep as possible to get the well rotted
stuff out of the muck heap, fungal spores obviously survived in
sufficient numbers.
Earlier in the year I had a bunch of shrooms that love wetland pastures.
This was when my neighbour's pond sprung a leak and rather than repair
it she continually topped it up leaving us with a claylike fen. Some
tining, sharpsand and maybe she's patched it and I haven't seen them for
a while.
Fungal spores tend to be very small, light and airborne, although many
will drop from the plant as it comes up within a few inches of it,
especially if there is no breeze.
To deal with ground based ones, the spores will be dropped by the fungus
in the early hours of the morning as the cap opens so you can't get out
there and stop them dropping spores. That wouldn't be a help anyway as
many of the particles in the air are fungal spores so they're going to
land in from elsewhere. You need to change the conditions so that they
aren't what the fungus likes. Remove the deadwood that it is growing on,
improve the drainage for a wetland one. Where they are coming up in my
border I ignore them. Any manure that hasn't been broken down by now
will be gone by next year and the conditions won't be there for them
then.
If you are concerned about toxicity and small children then education of
the children if they're old enough for it will help, get yourself a book
on fungi and veer to the cautious side of it. Most fungi don't poison
you and most of the ones that do taste foul (isn't it odd how the human
body has developed a dislike for the taste of that which poisons).
The responses people have given so far are out of a lack of concern over
something that is not perceived as a problem because it isn't normally a
problem. We had a 'fairy ring' in the lawn at my parent's house when I
was small you can't do anything about that because changing the
conditions to disuade the fungus that creates those would mean changing
them to a point that the grass would find intolerable, I knew at a small
age that I shouldn't eat those little brown toadstools and I didn't (I
didn't want to evict the fairies from their homes). Those things aren't
good eating, but they aren't even going to cause an upset tummy unless
you eat a couple of rings worth.
You have a piece of nature in the garden that you didn't put there. Find
out what you have before you condemn it out of hand and try to eradicate
it.
Warwick -- sticking up for mushrooms since 2002
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