Mushrooms in Your Lawn?
Posted by Wilson Kanaday on Mon, Jul 19, 2010
Frequently, customers call us because they have mushrooms in 
their lawns, and they think that we can get rid of them. As David Fischer, mycology expert extraordinaire says: “You can’t get rid of lawn mushrooms without getting rid of the lawn.”
I say: “Got mushrooms? Good for you!”
Mushrooms are actually the fruit of beneficial fungi that are always present in your lawn. These fungi help with the breakdown of organic matter which makes nutrients available to your grass. This fruit that is known as a mushroom only appears when weather conditions are just right – damp, rainy, cloudy, humid conditions. So if we have a stretch of rainy weather, and we don’t see the sun for awhile, you can bet you’ll be seeing some mushrooms.
Mushrooms release tiny spores that blow around until they land in another good spot, where they germinate and send out long, tiny filaments calls hyphae. The hyphae decompose fallen leaves, sticks and other detritus occurring in nature. One hypha is too tiny to see with the naked eye, but digging in the soil, you might see a bundle of them, a thread-like mass called mycelium (like mycology – the study of fungi.)
After it has matured sufficiently, which could take years, the mycelium produces the fruit. So, enjoy these little wonders of nature, because you won’t see them very often.
If you are concerned about small children or pets eating them, just pick them and throw them away. NEVER assume a mushroom is not poisonous, because even experts can be fooled sometimes!
If you’d like to learn more about mushrooms, or just want to look at the neat pictures (over 1,000) of numerous varieties, visit David Fischer’s fabulous
American Mushrooms website