Mushrooms in your Lawn? Good!
Don’t worry, mushrooms are good! They indicate good soil health plus they help decompose wood bits, leaves, and debris to build better soil. Mushrooms are beneficial to your yard and trees – and are not harmful. If you don’t like the look of them, simply pluck them out when you see them. 🙂
Underground, below the mushrooms we see, are thread-like networks called hyphae which attach to plant roots, increasing the surface area of plant roots up to a thousand times. This expanded surface area helps trees, grass, vegetables and flowers to thrive through the access to more nutrients and water.
Despite being great for the soil, you may still want remove the mushrooms from your yard if you’re worried they could be harmful to children or pets. (On this note, never eat any mushroom unless you are an expert at identification, you don’t want to get sick! You can find some Mycologists in Denver as George suggests to help determine if they’re safe to eat.)
To remove mushrooms, simply pluck them out, or rake them and bury them into a compost pile. Be ready to see a new crop spring up where they sprouted before, as the underground hyphae will sprout new fruiting bodies in a day or so. Trying to “kill” mushrooms with fungicide or other chemicals is ineffective, because the fungus mycelium can be several feet below the soil surface – not to mention these types of chemicals can hurt the overall health of your soil.