Saturday, June 6, 2009

It must be the season of the MUSHROOM

There they are, the hideous things. From where I am typing at our dining table, I can see them, the nasty vile abominations! I am talking about mushrooms...or maybe toadstools. Anyway, the variety that I see before me don't take the form of a pretty little red topped, white spotted fairy chair dotted here and there*. Nooooo, we are talking about bunches, clusters of nicotine coloured bulbous growths that protrude and bulge out of the earth. Ten, twenty FORTY of them. There is something hemorrhoidish about them, like piles from the bumcheeks of mother earth.

As I said, I am looking at (or watching??) them now from the safety of indoors. There is one bunch of about eight or ten which has captured my attention. I know when I go out there to investigate, these will turn out to be the tip of the iceberg - to pick an obvious metaphor. This particular batch has appeared at the top of a hill of loose dirt which means this 'hill' is actually twenty more of the buggers in disguise.

By the way these, very literally, grow overnight which just adds so much more to the reasons why these horrors of nature gross me out so much. It makes me think that if I was to stay up overnight with a torch, I would actually see them grow. This and the proliferation. I only cleared the yard yesterday and I can see at least four different clusters around today.

What can be done? Nothing much, apparently. We removed a large tree when we moved in and apparently they are springing from the root which was left. To get rid of the toadstools, we would have to dig up the yard and get rid of the root. From my google study session and talking to a neighbourhood horticulturist friend, I've learnt that the toadstools are actually a sign of good things happening to our soil as they (or the underground mycellium which they grow from) break down the tree root. So we only have about fifty or so years to go, yay!

*I'm talking purely aesthetics here. I'm aware that I have probably just described the most poisonous variety of toadstool.