Are Fairy Bonnet Mushrooms Bad To Plant In Garden

The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Inky cap mushrooms in the garden

Young inky cap If you've got cute, little mushrooms popping out of your straw mulch, chances are you've grown inky caps. The aptly named inky cap mushrooms dissolve into a mass of black goo as they mature.

Inky cap goo

Inky cap mushrooms Scientists think that the life history of these mushrooms is a way of spreading their spores more efficiently, and recent evidence suggests that various unrelated mushrooms have come up with the same trick through convergent evolution. Older books lump them all into one "genus" --- Coprinus --- and I'm not enough of a mushroom expert to tell you which of the newly split off genera my species is actually a member of.

I'm also disappointed to discover that there doesn't seem to be much information out there about how inky caps fit into the garden ecosystem. The fungi are decomposers, working hard to break your straw down into compost, so I guess that makes them beneficial (unless you were hoping not to have to refresh the mulch this summer.) But I can't find any information on whether inky cap inoculated straw is beneficial or harmful to garden plants in any other way. Any ideas?

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.

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