There are Mushrooms Everywhere on My New Lawn

There are Mushrooms Everywhere in the New Lawn

Posted on June 29th, 2009 in Lawn and Garden

Well I woke to quite a surprise this morning! Mushrooms everywhere in the new lawn. Bryn had mentioned he mowed a bunch down when he mowed on Saturday but I didn’t think a lot about it. He didn’t mention that it was like this. Wow! I guess some things get lost in the verbiage 😀

I like to imagine little people moved into my lawn overnight and made little mushroom homes, you can see some of them are clustered like little mushroom palaces, and then just some stand alone mushroom homes here and there. I hope they watch out for the giant man eating spiders which infest the woods nearby and don’t get flooded out when it rains! Perhaps I need to find more exciting hobbies…

I thought this was pretty bizarre that the mushrooms had only grown where we put down the new topsoil to fill in some low spots before we re-seeded the area. I called the topsoil company and the guy there said that it was pretty common with their soil since they don’t treat the soil with any chemicals. He said it’s due mostly to all of the moisture and rain we’ve been having lately and once we got a few hot days they’d pop off and die. He said you can mow the mushrooms down and the next day they’ll grow right back.

After doing some reading it seems like there are a few other ways to get rid of mushrooms. Some favorites are golf clubs, like a pitching wedge. Go out and get some golfing practice in! Alternately you can put lime in your soil, adjusting the PH to the proper levels or use chemicals. Personally they don’t bug me, and are a sign of nutritious soil for plants and lawns and little mushroom people to grow crops in. It’s only when they start to grow in a ring pattern that you may have a problem. This is called a Fairy Ring. Apparently the mushrooms grow on the outer edges of the Fairy Ring, so the circle gets larger and larger. When the fungus in the ground is this large it can start to steal nutrients from your lawn, instead of help it. No Fairy Ring in my lawn, so I’m doubly okay with it.

When I checked later this afternoon they had all been fried by the sun and not a thing was left standing!

I’m suspecting that these mushrooms will come back overnight again since the humidity is pretty high. It’s actually pretty cool that they can grow back so quickly! I’m going to try and get some photos tomorrow morning as well if they’ve come back. The mushrooms are a neat surprise I never expected, I tend to be finding that out a lot with my first experience in home ownership. Some of the home ownership surprises aren’t really that neat, like the ants, or the giant man eating spiders, and I’m sure other things I’ve yet to find. But yes, it’s a mix of good and bad. May life bring you all more mushrooms and less ants or spiders!

UPDATE: It’s been a couple of weeks and the weather has turned hotter, though we stil have thundestroms in the evening. The shrooms have mostly gone to the great mushroom heaven in the sky and we don’t see much of them. Give nature a chance, folks. Enjoy the mushrooms while they last, cause next week it’ll be a giant man eating spider…