Mushrooms are the fleshy, spore-bearing body of fungi that few people want growing on their lawns, mostly for aesthetic reasons. Alien-looking mushroom caps popping up sporadically through grass make a yard look less cohesive, even though their presence doesn’t mean there is something wrong with your lawn.
The sunny side of having mushrooms grow in your yard is that it indicates that your lawn is full of organic material that growing things like. According to Organo Lawn, the bad news is that the presence of mushrooms indicates that you have decaying wood on your lawn or a drainage problem. It’s not a backyard apocalypse, but it’s something you’ll want to take care of if you find mushrooms unsightly.
Garden experts at Organo Lawn and Scotts lay out what conditions are necessary for mushrooms to pop up in a yard and what you can do to keep your lawn relatively fungus-free.
What Makes Mushrooms Appear?
According to Scotts, mushrooms often pop up like desert flowers after a steady rain when certain conditions occur. Whether they sprout up in the shade under a tree or right in the middle of your grass, mushrooms mostly appear in yards with the presence of rotting wood nearby.
Perhaps there is an old tree stump, aging wooden fence, fallen branches, or decaying roots of a long-gone tree in a shaded area that got moist after rain. It’s the perfect mixture to bring forth mushrooms from the soil.
How To Prevent Mushroom Growth
Fungi are essential for breaking down organic matter and occur everywhere in soil, but mushrooms — the reproductive, visible parts of fungi — need specific conditions to bloom and do not like direct sunlight. Trim back or thin out branches in a shaded area where mushrooms are growing to allow more mushroom-zapping sunlight to reach the lawn.
According to Scotts, soil becomes compacted when your lawn has standing water for a long period of time after rain or watering. If you have a lot of thatch in your yard (more than half an inch), this is an ideal mushroom-making carpet of organic material if it doesn’t dry out. Dethatching and aerating your lawn will improve drainage and discourage mushroom growth.
If you have an old tree stump in your yard, it is surrounded by dead roots that may or may not be visible. Remove the stump to prevent mushrooms from growing on the dead wood.
Cleaning up after your dog will also deter mushroom growth. Perhaps you think Rover’s droppings are fertilizing your yard, or you just can’t be bothered to pick up after your pooch, but aging dog doo-doo is like ringing a dinner bell for mushrooms. If you don’t like pigeons, you wouldn’t throw bread crumbs in your yard, right? Same idea with mushrooms and dog dung.
Although there are yard fungicides on the market, Organo Lawn discourages their use because fungi are necessary for a healthy environment and lawn. Using a fungicide could disrupt the delicate balance in the soil and make matters worse. A better solution is to take the preventative steps listed above to minimize the growth of unwanted mushrooms in your yard. No need to bring out the big guns and resort to chemical warfare — mushrooms tend to disappear as quickly as they emerge.