How Do I Get Rid of Mushrooms in my Garden?

[nes]

I'm going to repeat my post as I was NOT joking! I have mushrooms popping up ALL over my vegetable garden, how do I get ride of them?

I've been knocking them down and squishing them up, but I'm worried thats just going to spread the seeds around. I'm too concerned about what they might be to pick them by hand (I'm pregnant); I don't want to spray anything (organic veggie garden) yet I'm still very concerned my son is going to pick some and eat them.

Any suggestions?

(I'm assuming no one took me seriously before because there is a possibility they are magic mushrooms)

[cynthia_h]

I must have missed your other post; I was away over the weekend.

If you're using raised beds, you're probably experiencing what I did last year when I first established my Square Foot Garden beds.

These skinny, 2- to 4-inch tall mushrooms which were almost all stalk and very little "top" kept coming up. They grew incredibly quickly: when I made myself leave them for even 1 day, they just flew up in height. I pulled them and threw them into my compost bin.

I pulled some out, including their roots, and put them into a plastic bag. I drove to my local, (usually...) knowledgeable nursery and asked the classic question: "What is this?!" The staff member said, "I can't identify the exact species, but it means your soil has lots of organic matter."

I said, "It had better have 'lots of organic matter'! I just built that soil out of compost, peat, and vermiculite! So, is this mushroom toxic? Can I leave it in place? Should I remove them as soon as I see them, or what???"

Her opinion was that they could be left to themselves, as they die within a day or so in sunlight. So I quit going crazy about them and they *did* die quickly.

However, I do not have small children or outdoor cats to explore such growths. My dogs just lay on the driveway "supervising" me whenever I work outside.

Someone here at THG posted a picture a few months ago of the exact type of mushrooms I experienced last year. If you need to, I could probably hunt it down tonight.

And now, in my second year of SFG, even though I renewed the compost component of my raised beds' soil, I have had no mushrooms. Guess it was just a one-time thing. Thank heavens....

Cynthia H.
Sunset Zone 17, USDA Zone 9

[nes]

Thanks cynth

Sounds like my mushrooms are very similar - however we did have a few of these in our lawn last year & they don't die out in a few days. They grow right out in the sunshine between the plants as well.

[img]https://i654.photobucket.com/albums/uu269/knitness/mushroom.jpg[/img]

I did lay down a bed of 1 year old horse manure at the beginning of the year - so that is quite possibly where they are a coming from. I like that suggestion better then psilocybin sneaking in from the cow field!!

I'm just really worried about the little guy, he loves being in the garden & sampling everything he can get him hands on. I've got him occupied with bean for right now which seems to keep him from eating dirt and possibly the mushrooms.

[cynthia_h]

No, yours look quite different from the ones that plagued me.

Can your little guy play outside in a playpen? That would keep him safe from the mushrooms, but he could still watch you and feel good about seeing Mommy.

No idea about psilocybin (sp?) mushrooms; no idea what they look like or where they grow. All I know is that I *never never never* eat mushrooms that I've picked out of anywhere except a box at the produce market. Living is sometimes very difficult, but it's preferable to the alternative....

Cynthia

[nes]

The playpen would be a good idea, except my son is my son He's 14 months & a wild man!! There is no hope of containing him. I'm going to discuss updating the vegetable garden fencing (from two twine strings ) with hubby to keep him out - but I'm still not sure that will be enough, he's very determined. For now I think I'm going to have to keep the gardening for nap time and just keep him distracted out in the rest of the backyard.

More & more mushrooms are popping up all the time, I don't know much about psilocybin either but I asked some horse-pals and thats what they seem to think it is, plus it's supposed to grow in cow fields, which we back on to. The best suggestion was to call in some hippies to pick it for me

There must be some way to kill mushrooms

[rainbowgardener]

You can just rake them out of your lawn and garden... the stems are pretty fragile, so not hard to break. Mushrooms are fungi so anything fungicidal will work. An organic fungicide Helpful Gardener has been promoting is a 1:10 mixture of milk (with active lactobacillus) : water. If that doesn't get it, you can step up the concentration anywhere up to 50:50. Liquid detergent in water will kill them, but it will also kill your veggies so be careful with it.

I haven't tried it, but I'm betting the boiling water treatment that kills weeds would also kill mushrooms. Mushrooms don't like artificial fertilizer, so if you want to get some of the "blue goo" fertilizer, that would probably get rid of them, while pepping up your veggies (in a chemical sort of way -- I don't usually use artificial fertilizers). Also aerating helps. The mushrooms grow where it is dark, organically fertile, moist, with less air circulation. So just aerating your soil would help... Let us know what you try and what (if anything) works

[cynthia_h]

How long have they been popping up? Do they seem to spread, or just pop up on their own? (In other words, are they developing a root mass, or are these individuals popping up?) Do they die on their own?

Maybe there's a Mycological Society near you whose members could help out. In the '90s, I was acquainted with the local chapter's president through a totally unrelated community activity, and he said that sometimes his chapter would "pick out" an area they were alerted to. I don't know whether any other chapters offer this service.

Good luck with the fence and the toddler!

Cynthia

[nes]

I knocked back all the mushrooms in the vegetable garden so I'll go hunting through the grass tomorrow with the milk mixture and see if that works! If it doesn't I'll have to try something else.

I was using old straw as mulch between my rows but I pulled that all back in the last two days (as it seems to be helping the mushrooms BIG time) and raked up the soil a little around the veggies - hopefully that will also help.

The mushrooms seem to come up both in small clusters and individually . I noticed a new different kind this evening between the lettuce. It's more flat & lighter in colour, so I seem to be creating quite the have for mushrooms! Too bad I don't like them or I'd try to grow some buttons

I talked to hubby about the fence, but he was cutting the lawn last night and said there are mushrooms EVERYWHERE so there is no point in upping the fence (except to keep the little man from stealing my plants...). We're just going to have to watch him really carefully until we get these under control.

Thanks for the help guys - I was on the verge of pulling my hair out!!

[snowleopard394]

I collect wild mushrooms for food sometimes, and for what it's worth, from your picture it doesn't look like anything deadly poisonous. How big are these mushrooms?

Can you post a picture of the other mushrooms that are popping up?

There's not a lot you can do unless you want to soak the ground in fungicide... which doesn't seem like a very child-friendly solution either. The problem is, by killing the mushrooms you're just destroying the "fruit" of the fungus. The organism is still happy and healthy under the soil.

I'd say as long as they're not deadly poisonous, they are no more dangerous than the plants that you're probably growing in your veggie garden. For example, tomato leaves are poisonous...

[nes]

The other ones are VERY similar, slightly wider tops, much lighter in colour (tan), about the same size & shape though. Unfortunately I knocked them all down before I bothered to get a photo, if they grow back I'll get one.

Is there something I should do at the end of the growing season to reduce my fungo-friendliness? I was planning on add more manure & soil to build up the bed, the putting the garden to sleep under some straw - but now I'm thinking I'm going to quadruple my fungus load if I do that .

[Gary350]

There is no ring around the stem and the gills are not white so it is not a deathcap mushroom.

https://www.anbg.gov.au/fungi/deathcap.html

magic mushrooms love to grow in cow manure. When the weather gets right around here you can pick a bushel basket of magic mushrooms in a farmer cow pasture in about 15 minutes. I am so afraid of mushrooms I have never eaten a magic mushroom.

I would not worry about the mushrooms. I have done a lot of research on mushrooms and they are basically harmless unless you eat them. If you eat a Deathcap mushroom you die.

[cynthia_h]

I'd avoid the straw. It's probably the source (I read your other post and saw the statement about straw mulch) of a lot of this problem.

I suspect, in my case last year, that it was one of the purchased composts (grape pomace? "organic blend"?). I used my own compost this year and there have been NO mushrooms. My roses are mulched with wood chips free from my little town/city; no mushrooms there, either--not last year and not this year.

So let's hope this is just a first-year thing and/or maybe a consequence of the straw, esp. if it was damp before you got it.

Cynthia

[snowleopard394]

If you add more manure, it would be less likely to produce mushrooms if it's well-composted, I would think. But there's not a lot you can do to 100% ensure that there will be no mushrooms. If you are really desperate to not have mushrooms, you could try sterilizing anything that you add to the garden (by cooking it), but that would be a pain.

As I pointed out before, even if you don't have the mushrooms, there are things that a child can get sick from by eating random things from the outdoors. Tomato and potato foliage come to mind, in a veggie garden. And then who knows about any weeds that may be growing. So even if you do get rid of your mushrooms, you will not be able to let your baby eat whatever he can find.

How big are these mushrooms that you're finding?

[nes]

Yes, there has been talk of muzzling the boy but we decided children's services wouldn't look to kindly . Thankfully he's busy eating beans right now so he's forgone the usual clumps of dirt, which was how I was concerned he was going to get a mushroom.

They are between 3-4" tall at what I assume is full grown, maybe 1-2.5" across. Gary thanks for those pictures, they aren't death-caps but I have seen those before (not here), good to know!

I'm off mushroom hunting, I'll let you guys know how it goes!

[lilypotter]

I was going to say 'stop over watering' before I saw the details. Mushrooms are not harmful. I usually crush them under my feet. The fungus on the tree is a bit more tricky, but I would scrape that off also before they get large.

[nes]

[img]https://i654.photobucket.com/albums/uu269/knitness/DSC00602.jpg[/img]

That's right - that's a third type of mushroom!! I don't know what I'm doing but mushroom growers must be jealous!

I did find a few hold outs and tried a 4:1 milk mixture on them - would beer also work? We'll see if that keeps them at bay.

Water may actually be part of the issue, I keep forgetting we've had a very wet spring (last year was so much worse!), maybe as it dries up over the summer the mushrooms will stop coming up.

[The Helpful Gardener]

I'm with Lily; we freak about mushrooms the same way we freak about bacteria. Despite the fact that 95% are harmless and almost half are edible, there is a tendency to panic, especially where young inquiring palates are concerned. Understandable, but like the Hithchikers Guide To The Galaxy says, [url=https://www.mushroomexpert.com/yard.html]"Don't Panic!"[/url]

These are fruiting bodies from fungal nets running throughout the soil; tips of the iceberg really. Most are beneficial to soil structure and provide food sourcing and the best way to break down carbon heavy detritus (bacteria just can't). Your horse bedding addition IS the likely culprit, but straw mushrooms are almost all edibles, so not so bad...

Here's a [url=https://www.fungi.ca/mushrooms.htm]Canadian mycology[/url]source that might be able to help ID your finds, or tell you who can.

You might try dusting with corn starch. There is a fungus that feed on mushrooms called [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoderma]trichoderma[/url] tha LOVES corn and ramps up populations fast when fed with it (I guarantee you have SOME trichoderma in your soil, just not enough yet). You can even [url=https://greenmethods.com/site/products/disease-ctrls/#rm]buy the stuff[/url]... also note the Streptomyces strain; these would help replace the existing fungal net you have naturally with beneficial fungii you don't need to worry about, and actually improve your soil. Copper soap fungicides are also organically excepted for the most part; I use them, but sparingly as I don't want to kill my beneficials...

HG

[nes]

Cornstarch? that sounds like a good option, I'll go sprinkle some around and see if that helps.

I'll try a deep breath first .

[The Helpful Gardener]

There you go...

Just did the radio show with my friends Len and Lisa. Len was a pathologist for a mushroom farm and said trichoderma was the bane of his existence growing mushrooms, addding that it isn't a matter of total eradication, as some fungal spores will always be present, it's a matter of dominance; who do we select to be the dominant strain? Corn will help select for trichoderma, one of the most prevalent and cosmopolitan fungii in the world... It's one of the few good uses I have for any corn that's not on the cob, that and the corn gluten as fertilizer and weed supressor...

HG

[IreneNJ]

Just wanted to say thanks for the information. I just put up new planters after moving into a new house and used half organic soil. I've just been scraping all those mushrooms off each morning so hopefully after a winter, next spring planting time, they will stop growing. They are growing out of the wood rough planters also.

[Fraoncloich]

I have recently solved this problem. The mushrooms popping up in my vegie garden were tall and white. I simply planted my old tea bags in and around the vegies. The tannin helps deter them. Haven't seen anymore since! Hope this helps someone with the same problem!

[Mr green]

The mushrooms are your friends, very beneficial for your soil and plants. Let them beautiful, mysterious fungi grow. Most of them are not toxic, and the ones that are wont hurt you buy touching them, you need to actually feed on them.

[jal_ut]

Quote: "I've been knocking them down and squishing them up,"

That works!

The mushrooms grow on the dead organic matter in your soil. They are not like regular plants with roots taking nutrients from the soil. They are nothing to worry about.