Garden Experiments
For the love of gardening and wildlife habitat
If you step outside one day to find a powerful stink in your freshly-laid mulch or new plants and you don't have a dog, a stinkhorn mushroom might be to blame. This unobtrusive fungi can pop up in wood chips, grass, or soil and they produce a very strong odor. Just like their name implies, stinkhorns produce a stink not unlike fresh …
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So you are walking around your yard one day and see a spot of bright yellow in your mulch. What in the world is that? It's a slime mold! This mold is Fuligo septica the vomit slime mold and it shows up in warm, humid conditions and spreads across the top of the material - usually wood mulch. It starts out rather beautiful (at least this one …
Continue Reading about Yellow Slime Mold – The Dog Vomit Fungus
It’s fall and the leaves are coming down. So what do you do with them? Well, the choices are easy: compost them, chop them up in place, use them as mulch, or bag them up and have them hauled away. When we were kids, we put fall leaves to good use. We spent hours raking them into maze patterns that we would chase each other through. Of course, at …
Continue Reading about What should I do with all of the leaves in my yard?
