Unlike plants, fungi lack chlorophyll and can't make their own food. They have to have a food source to live. Did you ever turn over mulch in your landscape and find it clumping together with white webby stuff that smelled like a mushroom? That white stuff is the body of a fungus, called mycelium. The mycelium secretes enzymes that digest the organic mulch and allows the fungus to live and eventually reproduce.
One of the ways fungi reproduce is through spores. You can think about spores as similar to tiny seeds. The spores are produced in a variety of structures called "fruiting bodies" and we use these structures to help us identify what fungus is present. Some fruiting bodies are very simple, others are quite complex. A mushroom is a fruiting body, and the spores are produced on the gills on the underside of the cap. Some mushrooms have tiny pores instead of gills and the spores are produced in these tiny pores.
The are thousands and thousands of different kinds of fungi, and they vary in preferences for where they grow and what what time of year they make their fruiting bodies. What is happening right now is that many of the fungi that are able to live in landscape mulch are making their fruiting bodies. The picture above shows a fruiting body called a stink horn. It is one example of a fungus that likes landscape mulch. They smell badly, so they are not the most pleasant thing to have near your patio.
Home gardeners often ask how to stop fungi from making their fruiting bodies in landscape mulch. There are no safe or legal chemical products available to use. What you can do is simply remove the fruiting bodies every morning with a shovel and dispose of them. Some fungi are poisonous, so you should be very careful that children or pets do not eat these fruiting bodies. The fungus will continue to form the fruiting bodies for a period of time, but it will not go on forever. Eventually the food source will become exhausted, and/or the environmental conditions will change and the fungus will stop making them.
If you add new mulch every year, you might be encouraging the fungus to continue to grow and produce fruiting bodies year after year. As long as no one tries to eat the fruiting bodies, they are pretty harmless and are just part of the natural cycle of decay. The decompostion of your mulch also releases nutrients that help your landscape plants. So, maybe you don't need to do anything about the fungi that are growing in your landscape mulch.
For more information follow this link:
I have something growing in my flower garden . I have it covered with red mulch. It comes out of the ground as a white mushroom type growth. It has a black top and if you pull it out of the ground it has a egg at the bottom. It looks like a turtle egg kind of rubbery. it is filled with liquid and under the egg is something that looks like a sponge.
what is this and how do I stop it? or is it good for the mulch?
I bought mulch from lowe's 2 yrs ago, also we put up a new aluminum porch the spores have black all over the new porch. Nothing I could do I even contacted the manufacturer. Its also over the side of my navojo white house. But I heard from other people they have the same problem.
soyou are saying that the black fungus in my
mulch is ok? when it gets hot will it dry up? or should i remove it.