These little blighters keep popping up all over the Smallest Smallholding. They appear literally overnight in small clusters, peeping up through the grass. It seems that two days of non-stop rain coupled with the relative humidity have given them the perfect conditions to thrive.
Whilst I don’t really object to having them about the place, I am a bit concerned whether they could cause trouble for the hens. The girls spend all day roaming around freely, and are free to peck at will. So for me this means a certain degree of managing the environment that they’re in - such as keeping grass in check and removing any poisonous plants such as foxgloves.
We haven’t been able to identify any these three types of mushroom, so don’t know whether they’ll be poisonous to us or the hens. For now, on the mornings that I get up to let the hens out after sunrise, Rich has me trawling around picking the mushrooms out of the grass, just in case.
If you’ve any idea what these are, I’d be really handy to know more…
June 5th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
I’d love to know too, we have the small brown ones at school and the kids keep fiddling with them!
June 6th, 2008 at 6:46 am
They’re definitely not edible, Lucy, but I don’t think they’re likely to hurt the hens… I’ve never seen a chicken tackle a mushroom. If you dug horse manure into your plot, you probably imported the spores that way. I have a rich crop of toadstools from the particularly noisome and glutinous horse shit I used in the autumn!