This is my first year to try straw bales. I am using barley bales and started by watering them every day as suggested in this thread. I then added nitrogen fertilizer.
A small area on one of the bales is sprouting mushrooms out of a dark spot in the hay. I pulled the shrooms out but more came back. I know that micro organisms and other unseen stuff is good for soil so my question is whether I should remove the dark spot from which the mushrooms are growing or leave it?
Will the fungi growing there be good for my tomatoes and peppers or bad for them?
Thanks in advance !
Mushrooms sprouting in my bales. Good or Bad? Keep or not?
The shrooms are a good thing. Leave em be or pull em out if you don't like looking at them.
Mike
I just let the mushrooms stay where they are. The sun dries them up.
Hi.
Thanks for the replies.
I have no problem with the mushrooms being there except for the possibility that they might be poisonous to my dogs who will eat almost anything. So, it's not the shrooms themselves that bother me.
I am worried that the place where they are growing in the bale harbors something that is harmful to tomatoes or peppers which I want to plant in that spot --- which is what prompted the question about whether the 'spot' should be removed before planting the veggies.
Also, the mushrooms are not the short round capped white ones, they are small with gray stems and darker gray kinda shriveled heads and I've never seen this variety before. I wish they were morels !
I know! Wish I could find a use for those funky little black mushrooms- it's funny how they abound in some bales and not in others. But they don't hurt anything.
"I am worried that the place where they are growing in the bale harbors something that is harmful to tomatoes or peppers which I want to plant in that spot --- which is what prompted the question about whether the 'spot' should be removed before planting the veggies."
I don't really have the answers...but I think those spots are the "good part". They are decomposing. and getting ready to grow your veggies for you.
At least, that's my story...
Personally, I'd smush them right into the bale. Keep puttin' the goodies in the bale, help with decomposition, assist with the release and transport of nutrients and all those fancy-pants scientific things. =)
Think of them as a "public transportation system" for the elements that make up "nutrients." The mushrooms are in the same semi-saintly category as worms! Definite keeper. =)
:) K