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Friday, January 4, 2013

Another spore mystery

I found a knobby fungus attached to a branch I'd pruned from a native tree. I took the hard, brown, nutty thing inside and sat it on top of the bookshelf along with the other odd things I find as I go about my business.
Several weeks later (this morning) I went to move it, in order to make room for my china white elephant, when I noticed drifts of fine, black 'powder' all over and around the knob. Lots of black powder in fact, looking like carbon. I'm guessing the fungi has spored. I was instructed to 'get that thing out of the house!' and so the photo doesn't show the sporing thing in situ but held between my thumb and forefinger, outside.
Can anyone throw some light on this phenomenon?
Here are the two significant images.




3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Isn't that normal behaviour for those woody fungi?

I had some bracket fungi growing in the bathroom for a while. I was too impressed to do anything about it but also appreciate the need to take spores outside asap ;-)

robertguyton said...

Brackets, eh?

I took the sooty stuff outside, as suggested. Surely they wouldn't establish inside of a house?

Slightly concerned now...

Anonymous said...

I think shrooms will grow in pretty much any woody thing given the right conditions. In my case, it was some fairly old ply wood around a bathroom window, so wood, moisture, and possibly the nature of ply (layers as opposed to solid wood might be easier for the mycelium).

People grow oyster and shiitake shrooms by drilling holes in logs and innoculating them. I'm sure you could get the same effect in a laundry or bathroom door frame ;-p

Just kidding. How's the fungi in your food forest? Interesting to consider at what stage the timber eating fungi appear. I'm guessing it will be a while before you have any trees dying of old age. And that you remove the timber and use it rather than letting it rot? Was the knobby fungus from a tree you had planted, or a much older one?