You chase them out the door, and they come in through the window. This has to serve as my inexact metaphor for chasing rats and mice out of your walls, and the next day discovering hideous toadstools flourishing in your back yard.
Let me pause. I've pointed out that my horror of rats, and to a lesser degree mice, has no logical basis. Pet rats, in fact, such as are owned in great quantity by my nephew, are cuddly and affectionate and reputedly as intelligent as dogs. (But not, I suspect, as intelligent as cats.) Toadstools -- which is really just a pejorative term for mushrooms, supposedly mushrooms that are harmful but in reality a pejorative applied to mushrooms that have, subjectively, an "ick" factor -- are similar.
I eat mushrooms on my pizza. As a kid, I loved mushrooms in my mom's meat loaf. Cream of mushroom soup? Sure. Small, button mushrooms, like small furry mice, are cute.
But enough of apologizing for my distaste. The fungi (to be linguistically neutral) in my back yard -- whether poisonous or merely visually obnoxious -- are, in my opinion, toadstools. They are huge and ugly (rat-like, to continue my analogy). And I regard them with horror. And they proliferate, just as do their animal cousins in the family rodentia.
I took a photo of the prime offender, and posted it on Facebook, a couple of days ago. I announced that I had seven toadstools in my yard, of which this was the granddaddy. The next day, I discovered I had twice that number, many now in a diffeent area of the yard. Today, I began extermination procedures, plucking them up with my bare hands, dropping them into a bag, and depositing them in my yard waste bin. (They are solid and meaty, fortunately, not the pustules of all that's impure, about to burst upon my hands, as they at first appeared.)
What are these things? Well, they are the final (or perhaps penultimate) stage of mushroom development, the stage analogous to a dandelion when it gets all fuzzy and prepares to send its seeds parachuting into the air. However, the mushroom sends forth spores, not seeds. Same essential effect, from my point of view. What are the stages of a mushroom's life, you ask? I shall answer.
Remember, the test is tomorrow, so study hard.
All you need to know -- or rather, all I need to know -- is that the mushroom fruits that I plucked from my yard today were merely the more successful of the fruits that were produced by a fungus that apparently permeates invisibly a wide portion of my backyard, especially those portions that are rich in moss. Which at the moment, means much of my yard.
The little buggers will keep popping up, and I'll keep hacking them down. Sooner or later, the fungus will give up and slink off to more salubrious backyards. Or, more realistically, you'll find me blogging about research I've done on how one eliminates mushroom fungi from his lawn, when harvesting the fruit seems only to encourage it to greater efforts.
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