This week, an unwelcome sight is popping up in many lawns and flowerbeds. Luckily, it’s not that hard to deal with.
Q: I have a weird goopy mess growing in the mulch of my flowerbeds. It popped up overnight – it wasn’t there, and then it was! Also, I have some chunky, hard fungus growing in my lawn where I’d taken out a tree after that terrible freeze back in ’21. How do I make these things go away? Are they infecting my good plants?
A: Well, some good news, and a minor amount of bad news.
The slime mold in the mulch is harmless, and the harder fungi growing in the lawn from the decaying roots of that dead tree are as well. These molds and fungi are feeding entirely on decaying organic material in the soil, and aren’t harming a thing unless you’re particularly sensitive to mold or have allergies. They’re part of Nature’s clean-up crew, and are reproducing right now in the late winter and early spring weather. That being said, they’re not attractive.
The bad news – no, there’s no spray or treatment that would be useful to remove these, other than a flat bottomed shovel used to pick these things bodily up and throw them away.
And the slightly better news – the mold in the mulch is quite temporary. It’ll dry up and blow away, if you don’t get around to removing it. The harder fungi growing from the tree roots can be scraped up and tossed, but you’re likely to see more of it each year until the majority of the dead tree’s roots are broken down.
Basically – toss it if it’s convenient, ignore it if it isn’t, and that’s about it. It’ll stop showing up as the weather gets hotter and drier.