Each autumn, my lawn vanishes beneath a blanket of white. The change seems to come overnight. One day the yard is green; the next, it's the color of snow. What gives? It's only October. Perhaps a freak blizzard blew in. Alas, the white stuff that covers my yard doesn't fall from the sky. It rises up from the soil.
It's not snow that lies on the lawn. It's mushrooms.
Come fall, my yard spawns hundreds of wild mushrooms, in all shapes and sizes. There are Laurel mushrooms and Hardy ones; mushrooms that grow singly and in gangs; mushrooms with tiny parasol-like caps and large ones that, in a rainstorm, would shelter the Brady Bunch.
There are mushrooms with flat tops or fluted ones; mushrooms with straight stems and others that slouch. The undersides of mushroom caps are different, too. Some resemble a sea sponge, while others look like the air filter in my pickup.
How many types of mushroom do I see? Half a dozen in the back yard alone, where you can't walk without stepping on the darn things. Mushrooms are slick as ice. I slip on them often while toting firewood. Mostly I land on the mushroom, and a log lands on my head. It's an effective, if somewhat painful, way to get rid of this lowly fungus.
Yes, mushrooms are fungi, sprouting out of shady lawns and stumps and wherever one finds plant debris. Mushrooms help decompose the stuff. These ancient recyclers of plant waste have been revered by gourmets for thousands of years.
I could coexist with a handful of wild mushrooms, providing they stayed out of my way. There's something magical about these stars of children's books and movie classics. I keep waiting for them to "come to life" and prance around the place, as they did in the film "Fantasia."
Trouble is, the darn things won't stop coming. Spurred by moist, shady conditions in our yard, mushrooms are fast taking over the lawn, which has become a fungus factory.
The mushrooms arrived, I suspect, with the first load of horse manure I trucked into the garden 19 years ago. Mushrooms really dig dung; it's a favorite growing medium of commercial mushroom growers.
Give them an inch and mushrooms take a mile. Colonies of mushrooms have been known to spread over nearly 40 acres in the course of hundreds of years. They spring up in the cool, wet days of autumn, quickly filling the lawn with fungal villages. Within days, whole patches of turf turn white, giving the place a peculiar pastoral look. My yard's appearance is best described as part Currier & Ives, part salad bar.
I don't eat these wild mushrooms. Some may be poisonous, and I can't tell one mushroom from another. I doubt if I could discern between good mushrooms, like the shaggymanes, and evil ones, like the Deadly Ringed Cone Heads. Though I believe I could probably spot a mushroom as aptly named as the Vomited Scrambled Egg Fungus.
However, given the price of gourmet mushrooms, I've considered cultivating them in the garden, or atop several stumps that are still in our yard.
Raising mushrooms outdoors is not difficult, says Paul Stamets, author of "Growing Gourmet & Medicinal Mushrooms" (Ten Speed Press). Rotting stumps of birch, ash, elm and other hardwoods make excellent mushroom beds when drilled with holes and plugged with mushroom spawn, the "seed" sold by commercial growers. One stump can easily produce a pound of white-capped goodies a year.
Mushrooms can also be cultivated in garden plots. All one needs is a thick layer of moist mulch (a mix of wood chips and sawdust) on which to sow the spawn. Grow mushrooms in areas that are shielded from the midday sun by trees, shrubs or even broadleaf plants. Mushrooms thrive beneath the shady foliage of zucchini plants, and never vie with the veggies for nutrients.
Stamets also suggests raising mushrooms on the edges of wood-chipped walkways that many gardeners build in their flower and vegetable beds.
There's a thought. But for now, I must cope with the mushroom blizzard covering my lawn.
There is good news and bad news on this front.
The bad news is that mushrooms do not stick together when rolled into "snowballs." I've never seen Frosty the Fungusman.
The good news? Better mushrooms than snow. At least they don't cover the the driveway.