Lawn Fungus… again…

Every year at this time our front yard erupts with one or two huge brown fungus (mushrooms? toadstools? I don’t know, just fungus…).

These strange giants grow amazingly quickly and are eagerly chewed on by unseen critters. Even more quickly than they grow they collapse into a puddle of slime filled with wigglers hatched from eggs left by those who feasted.

I have done posts about them in the past, including one a few weeks ago when I wondered what one of them would look like if it managed to remain unmolested by the egg layers.

Well, this time we ended up with four of them growing in different parts of the front lawn (lawn is a term I use very, very loosely). They all went through the normal grow-be chewed-turn to slime life cycle and that seemed to be that.

Then, a few days after the last one turned to goo another one popped its head up, then another.

Fungus, unchewed.

Because all the critters whose munching and egg laying destroyed the other ones had already done their deeds and departed the two new ones managed to grow happily and unmolested to full size!

It was amazing to see them grow without being ruined and, as I suspected, they were a quite nice, although plain, brown fungus.

There was nothing special about them other than their spectacular size.

(The Lego man who modelled for me last time was roped in again to stand on top of one of them to show you how nicely it had grown.)

Shrivelled, but still mushroomy.

One of the two grew quite large and then instead of turning to goo like the rest have in the past it just shrunk.

Over a few days it went from a large brown mushroomy thing (of a similar size to the one above) to a small, blackened mushroom shape on the grass. –>

There it has remained for a week, a shrivelled reminder of its former glory.

The other though, (the one the Lego man was standing on) has gone on to reach an amazing size!

It was already quite large, then we had a few days of rain. Like a sponge, it seemed to suck up all the water and grow even more massive.

Like a spongy dinner plate. Don’t think I would want to eat off it though.

I went out today and took these photos to share with you as I thought it couldn’t go on growing for too much longer without swelling so much it would just fall to pieces.

Rain is forecast for tonight…. 😀

Big, big fungus….