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 did), with bright colors and a feathery appearance, but in a few days it can really resemble dog vomit … [Read more...]
What is that smell? Stinkhorn mushrooms in the garden.
If you step outside one day to find a powerful stink in your freshly-laid mulch or new plants, 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 smell. These fungi smell so bad because they use flies and other insects to transport their spores to other locations. The smell attracts the insect which lands on the fruiting body and then when it lands somewhere … [Read more...]
What should I do with all of the leaves in my yard?
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 the end of the day we collected them and dumped them in the huge compost pile in the back of the … [Read more...]