…is that my Googling led me to this site! I'm a part-time gardener in that we live/work in London but then retreat to Suffolk at weekends, not so very far away from Fiona & Danny. Which is perhaps why our garden suffers from with similar problems (honey fungus & gooseberry sawfly being two). I spend 90% of my gardening energy on 10% of my garden: yep, that's the fruit & vegetable areas. This year I'm thinking the other 90% ought to get a little more tlc, and the discovery of honey fungus makes that all the more important.
We discovered the honey fungus over Easter, while we were digging in compost (which swiftly turned into digging out/excavating the contaminated area). The consequent discovery of this website was a real treat : thank you Fiona for providing such solace at such a nightmare-in-the-garden time!
Angie
Hi there Toffeeapple & thanks for your welcome. I thought I had just clicked on the smiley (a thumbs up, to be precise) and it looked fine when I went to post it... Think I'll go back to the test forum and practice...! Thanks for offering to edit my post and replace the tekky text with something more meaningful, that would be great (will now click on a smiley face and hope for the best)
Welcome from nigel & jade the more the merry-er .
PS mind the E-prod lol
angiemay said:
(will now click on a smiley face and hope for the best)
Hi Angie welcome to the madhouse errr I mean forum. You seem to have got the smileys to work now anyway Hope you manage to get rid of the honey fungus soon
Hello Angie and welcome.
Are you sure it was Honey Fungus? All old compost heaps get fungus in them, that's one of the things that helps rot them down and it can make quite large lumps of white/grey matter in a big rotting heap,not harmful at all to the compost, quite the reverse in fact...Honey Fungus isn't as common as the publicity it gets would suggest- check on the RHS website for a description and photos. Honey fungus grows on and around shrubs/small trees rather than in compost heaps- the white stuff in compost is fungus, but NOT honey fungus....under the soil Honey Fungus has distinctive 'bootlace' like black roots that spread it around from shrub to shrub, the white bits of it are under the bark on affected plants.
Kateuk makes things at http://www.etsy.com/shop/finkstuff and sometimes she does this too http://www54paintings.blogspot.com/ and also this http://finkstuff.weebly.com/
Thanks for all your welcomes, I'm very pleased to be joining you all!
Kate, thanks for your honey fungus advice. Unfortunately I think we do have the real mccoy. I'd been a bit of an ostrich when it came to working out why there was an increasingly strong smell of mushrooms in the soil... Where it appears to be rife is a south-facing bed where we had removed a number of eucalyptus shrubs two years ago. When digging the soil this spring we found that the remaining eucalyptus's roots (together with the mint & parsley's) were covered in the white fungus and there was a lot of fungal fibrous bits in the soil, which I think were the roots that we hadn't managed to remove previously. It was a well-cultivated bed (we grew potatoes in it last year) and that has helped the fungus to spread. In the other bed where it appears to be, we had removed a sapling sycamore as best we could six years ago- but knew there were roots extending under the growing shrubs, fence etc. It's a heavy clay soil bed that we've not really cultivated as it's well populated with shrubs, but I was aware of an increasing mushroomy smell. After excavating a little last weekend I discovered that it's well & truly got its claws into the roots of the ceanothus and another large variegated shrub. Unfortunately it's got more scope to spread, as across the path from that bed I had a leylandii hedge removed last year and there are many roots left that go under the path and the lawn. I treated them with roundout stump remover, but I gather leylandii are particularly susceptible... I'd left that newly-created bed empty, as I wanted to monitor it (having suspected that honey fungus was possibly already present, I'd emailed the RHS for advice on what to plant as I wanted a lavender hedge and they basically said sounds like you've already got honey fungus, so don't plant lavender...).
The challenge now is containing it to those two beds and protecting the other parts of the garden... Have got some fish pond liner to form a barrier to the 'bootlaces' and am gemming up on plants that are more resistant (that said, eucalyptus wasn't on the RHS list of susceptibles). Am also doing the wood ash 'tonic' from another blog that fiona mentions on her honey fungus post (though I suspect, unlike humans, honey fungus isn't susceptible to the placebo affect!)
Has been fabulous gardening weather though (wish I were there now..)!
Oh dear! That's honey fungus all right, if it is killing shrubs.......no easy answers apart from barriers,getting as much out as possible and trying planting things that are more resistant and keeping fingers crossed....but, as you say, the sun shineth.....
Kateuk makes things at http://www.etsy.com/shop/finkstuff and sometimes she does this too http://www54paintings.blogspot.com/ and also this http://finkstuff.weebly.com/
fungus, are on the increase, wheat is being affected bad too.
Arrh but without the fungus in our environment we would be knee deep in unrotted vegetable matter - or even worse
Indeedy- no beer without yeast either- and without other teeny weeny little bacteria we wouldn't be alive in the first place....
Kateuk makes things at http://www.etsy.com/shop/finkstuff and sometimes she does this too http://www54paintings.blogspot.com/ and also this http://finkstuff.weebly.com/
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