Saturday, October 19, 2013

Nest o'shrooms

I found this cluster of mushrooms growing in my yard today. It had just sprung up, as they do, in a section of what we call "badger damage" - one of the many holes dug by the motherlovin' raccoons as they search for grubs around the roots of plants in late summer. (I'm glad I'm not a raccoon.) I put some sort of kill-o-zap powder on the lawn to stop the grubs developing and prevent the kind of damage we had last year, but it didn't occur to me to put it around the shrubbery and the raccoons are handily digging up all the bare areas. All in all, it's probably doing the garden some good.

The earth in that area was topped-up a few months ago with commercial compost, but none of it has grown a mushroom anywhere else in the yard. I assume the mechanical damage of the little vermin's claws is similar to 'casing' commercial mushrooms, where you break up the mycelium and give it a bit of fresh substrate to induce pin (baby mushroom) formation.



I don't know what it is, so I'm not going to eat it. At least one moth larva appears to be tackling it with gusto but that doesn't mean it's non-poisonous.

I once grew oyster mushrooms and blogged about it a couple of years ago. I didn't eat them either. Nasty things, fungi.

1 comment:

Bruv said...

Hi Sis

I hate to tell you, but I saw some identical shapes in Alien and things didn't turn out too well. I don't know if I told you, but I read Alien before seeing the film, when we lived in Bahrain and with my fading memory I could only remember parts of the story and when it came to the bit with the gyrating and exploding stomach I suddenly remembered what was about to happen and suggested to Chris, who was sat next to me 8 months pregnant with David, that she might want to close her eyes for the next 60 seconds, but I was too late with blood and guts everywhere - I mean on the film, not Chris, but she has never let me forget it.

Bruv

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