Mycophobia?! I can't believe it has a name...

I have a fear of fungus. There, I've said it. As a gardener a fear of fungus is fraught with issues.

I can't say exactly where my fear came from. One incident I remember all too clearly from my childhood is that back on the farm each year around this time, my aunts, uncles, cousins and my Nan and Pop would come over and we'd pack some food for a barbecue and all head out to Stone Henge. That was the name of a particularly rocky paddock, one that was so covered in rocks and boulders it never got cropped. The upshot to this is that mushrooms were free to grow. So we'd take buckets and small knives and set off in different directions picking mushrooms. It was always a wonderfully fun day... I liked to stay within sight of my Nan and then just bend down and pretend I was picking loads of mushrooms. She was oddly competitive. And didn't like the idea of someone picking more 'shrooms than her. She was much the same about fishing, but that's another story! At lunchtime, an old plough disk on a circle of rocks became our barbecue and we lit a fire and cooked up a storm.

Anyway, one year I happened across a mound of mushrooms, ran over and went to pick them, but as I turned them over, it was a pile of toadstools, white underneath instead of mushroom pink. Worse than that, they were crawling with maggots. And I had just touched them. I have goosebumps all over me just typing this, I'm not joking.

Needless to say I never ate any of the mushrooms we picked. Nan got all of those, so I don't know why she was so worried that I'd pick more than her!

My fungus experiences weren't just limited to the annual mushroom harvest. Each year when Dad was out ploughing the paddocks, he'd come home with some mushroom specimens... enough to make the hair stand on the back of your neck. They were HUGE. The size of a large dinner plate (there, I've got goosebumps again). Mum would put them aside for us to look at when we got home from school. Sometimes we'd put them on a dinner plate and take them to school for show and tell. Mum would get out a big sheet of clean, white paper and we'd rest the giant mushroom on it overnight, then by the morning, it would leave its imprint on the paper. Gross. Spores.

My husband and friends once forced me to go to a whole fungus exhibition while travelling in Bormio. I wasn't very thrilled. They seemed to think my goosebumps were as fun to look at as the fungus itself.

Anyway, now as a gardener I'm convinced fungus is haunting me. I have discovered fungi so diverse and creepy and fascinating it astounds me... and gives me the heebie jeebies. Just this week I discovered these two horrendous outbreaks:

 

The one on the left looks like dog vomit. It may actually be dog vomit fungus. Yes, that is a real thing. One day it just appears like a froth. Then I made the mistake of watering it. As the outside crust disintegrated and the water hit the inside, it exploded into a dust cloud of black spores. That is the stuff of nightmares.

The one on the right are the field mushrooms of my youth. Here they have entirely lifted up a layer of mulch like some beast bursting out of the ground. Tell me that's not creepy!

Once, I even emailled an expert at the Department of Agriculture about various fungi in my garden. I didn't know whether to pull them out, whether they are good for the soil or harmful to me, especially when one started climbing my spinach plants. That's the one below top left:

 

 

The one on the bottom left looked like an egg... before it exploded into the monstrosities on the right. The expert said not to worry about any of them, just don't eat it. Even he didn't know what the one was that climbed my plant, though.

Down at our dog park, there are giant "fairy rings" of mushrooms and the lawn is always greener, more healthy and faster growing in those rings, so it must be good for the soil. As the fungus mycelium grows in the soil, it must make the nutients more easily available to plant roots.

I once read that the biggest living organism on our planet was a mycelium, the white hair-like roots of a fungus that grow underground, it covers an entire forest floor in Canada. I can tell you I won't be travelling there any time soon!