This spring's wet weather has brought with it all kinds of headaches, but one of them, fortunately, was brand new to me. I've discovered myself in recent weeks to be visited by vast quantities of an odd and ugly infestation called "slime mold," also affectionately known as "dog vomit fungus."
This post is for anyone who isn't eating lunch, who has found patches of this junk in the garden and who is at a loss as to what to do about it. I tried scraping, watering, spraying with fungicide -- all bad ideas, as it turned out. So I'm passing on what I finally learned after being given a misdiagnosis and bad advice at the local nursery and turning, in desperation, to the internet. (What did we ever do without it?)
This extremely unattractive stuff seems to grow primarily on garden mulch and rotten logs. It isn't really a mold or a fungus but some sort of single-celled organism, and it loves moisture. It usually begins as a startlingly brilliant yellow patch that quickly clouds over and bubbles up and begins to resemble its nickname. At that point, there are two things you don't want to do -- poke a stick in it or spray it with anything. Trust me on this. The result, quite simply, is the release of a thick cloud of tiny brown spores that seem to find their way into your nose and throat and ears even through a fine respirator filter. Nasty stuff, right?
Well, as it turns out, not really. It's hideous, yes. But it apparently does no damage to plants or mulch. It goes away by itself in a few days, although it's likely to pop up again somewhere else. By disturbing it, you'll likely just spread it further. If you're extremely careful, you can lift up the mulch you find it on, wrap it up and throw it away, but I would't advise it. It's much too easy to release the spores that way. You can, however, just cover it up with more mulch, very gently, which will hide it from view until it dissipates.
On an even lighter note, this rather entertaining webpage claims that slime mold was, in fact, the inspiration for the movie, "The Blob." Hmmm. Think I'll have to check with Meryl on that one. It does sort of remind me, though, of one of my favorite X-Files eps.
Yeah, well, enough of that. We now return you to our regularly scheduled blog.
