In Sunday’s newspaper the columnist for the gubmint’s Master Gardener program (slogan: “No vegetable problem than can’t be solved with a chemical spray”) answers this question:
Why are there so many mushrooms on lawns around town?”
While the nice lady explains about fungus in three quick sentences, she senses that the reader surely does not want the yard emotionally upset with nongreen matter. Or maybe the rest of the letter, detailing disgust with foreign bodies in the lawn, has been edited away and tossed in the mulch pile.
The nice lady notes that children might eat mushrooms, which can be poisonous. Hey kid, don’t eat the fescue, either. Mainly she calls toadstools unsightly and focuses on their eradication.
Yard owners should go back inside and watch the game. Mushrooms go away in a couple of days, which goes unmentioned. Fungi in the yard have a charm, part of which is their temporariness. The nice lady advises rakes and lawnmowers, but, if you must destroy, the toe of your shoe is more time-efficient if you include clean-up and trekking to the shed. Otherwise, napalm is all-purpose if you want uniformity. -30-
