The beginning of November I noticed something strange in my raised garden bed. At first, I thought perhaps it was an odd leaf blown in or a dried pod carried in by a bird or squirrel. But I had never seen anything quite like it. I cautiously touched it. The outer petal like structures felt rubbery. When I touched the center portion of the object, a puff of a dark smoke-like substance came out of the top.
At this point I had some suspicions, but I pulled out my phone and took a picture for my plant identification app. It told me I was seeing a mushroom, one of the Geastrum species, known asEarthstars. These mushrooms act asdecomposers on the forest floor, breaking down materials and returning those nutrients to the ecosystem. When it's time to reproduce, it forms star like fruiting bodies. The smoke like material when I touched the structure was actually hundreds of spores being shot out to spread and make more fungi.
But why was I seeing this now, when I had never seen them in my garden before? I have a few theories. For the last several years I have been bringing bags of leaves from my mom's residence at Paradise Valley Estates. They have an incredible mixture of trees there. I had been mulching my raised beds with leaves each winter. In the spring I would just mix in more compost or planting soil and plant into that.
I think I was essentially creating conditions very similar to a forest floor at least one that contained deciduous trees. We had also had some very warm temperatures in September and had gotten some moisture. I suspect this all led to the perfect growing conditions for the reproduction stage of the fungus.