Mushrooms are not bad for plants. If that’s the information you’re looking for, congrats.
Mushrooms are largely a result of overwatering and warm temperatures. In order to survive, a mushroom needs water, nutrients, and warmth. Take away any single item and the mushrooms will die.
The mushroom that you see is also just the flower part of the fungus. Removing it doesn’t actually kill the fungus. Instead, that removes the mushroom’s ability to spread spores. The fungus is still beneath the surface doing what it does.
What Does a Mushroom do?
Where do you generally see mushrooms? They occur more frequently near organic matter that is decaying. That’s because mushrooms feed off of organic matter like tree stumps. They generally only feed off of dead plants and plants that are dying. If you see them growing on your tree, keep an eye on that tree.
Mushrooms need different nutrients than plants. For example, a tomato plant cannot break down and absorb a twig. However, a mushroom can. The mushroom breaks down that twig, absorbs the sugars, and releases the other nutrients into the soil. Plants don’t like sugars. They want nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. When a mushroom breaks down organic matter, they leave those nutrients and the plants get to absorb them. Hooray!
Getting Rid of Mushrooms
Some people say a healthy lawn won’t generate mushrooms, but that’s not entirely true. What is true is that if your lawn is the perfect conditions for grass to grow, mushrooms won’t stand a chance. However, good luck with that. Wherever there is warmth, moisture, and dead or decaying organic matter, mushrooms can grow. And they’ll keep growing until they run out of one of these things.
If the soil dries up, they will die off.
If the weather turns cold, bye bye fungus.
And, if the mushrooms run out of things to break down, they will cease to grow there.
Outdoors, my preference is to let them grow. They’ll provide the benefit to my plants, and then they’ll finish their job and disappear.
However, indoors is another story. I want to maintain a certain air quality indoors. Therefore, I try to remove as many mushrooms as I can from my plants. I don’t care as much about the fungus beneath the surface decomposing whatever it can, but I want to limit the number of spores in the air.
Keep in mind that there will always be some spores. That’s nature. The air we breathe is full of spores, bacteria, toxins, and other nasty stuff. What matters is that it is not above a certain unhealthy threshold.
Compost
Because of what mushrooms do, they’re one of the best things you can add to your compost bin. If you see these lovely creepy non-plants growing in your compost, congrats! Your compost will be done a little bit earlier now.
Personal Mushroom Experience
I wrote this article because I recently had a significant mushroom outbreak in my seed starters. Worried that maybe they would destroy my sprouts before they got strong enough to survive, I took to the internet. I was relieved when the first several articles told me I was fine. However, I also realized that maybe I should be more concerned with the spores than the actual fungus. That’s why I started removing the mushrooms themselves.
My problem likely would have taken care of itself rather quickly. I definitely over water my seed starters because I want to keep them moist and I’m not confident that the conditions in my garage wouldn’t dry them out too fast. But, the mushrooms formed largely because of all the mulch and organic debris found in the gardening mix I use. In a pure seed starter mix, you wouldn’t encounter any of that.
Since then, I’ve kept a watchful eye and never have more than 1-3 mushrooms each morning when I first check on my plants. My particular variety start as little reddish orange dots on the surface of the soil. Fortunately, I have less and less of these.
I have also gotten a lot more comfortable with the conditions in my garage. I use less water when bottom watering my plants now. This means that the roots get moisture, but the top of the soil where the spores would land does not get as wet.
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