#FungiFriday: when mushrooms grow in your house

Fungi Friday 5th February 2021

Get ready for bad mushroom photography. But first I wanted to link to this interesting Mushroom Hour podcast with Learn Your Land, that I listened to this week. Some very thought-provoking ideas around landscape conservation, belonging in the landscape and our own impact as individuals. Here’s an example of one of the Learn Your Land YouTube videos:

Back to the bad fungi photography.

In December, I was sitting at my desk, working from home, when I turned around and saw a mushroom growing behind me. This was quite unexpected. The mushroom was growing from the soil of a houseplant on a cabinet behind me.

The plant itself had spent the summer outdoors, so I expect the spores of the fungus have landed on the soil while outside. You can see that the stipe (or stem) has split, probably due to rapid growth and the heat coming from the nearby radiator.

Here is that same mushroom possibly a couple of hours earlier. It moved incredibly quickly through its fruiting stages.

That wasn’t to be the end of it. The following day I noticed more shrooms appearing at the edge of the pot.

This shroom family also moved fast. I think they’re a species in the very big brittlestem or Psathyrella family.

Didn’t I promise you the pics would be bad?

It’s probably not great having mushrooms growing in your house, and I fully expect a barrage of comments about how my house is going to fall down now from builders. All in all, however, I was quite pleased with the tropical scene on those dark midwinter nights.

Thanks for reading.

More mushrooms