You may or may not like them but regardless, mushrooms may be popping up in your yard.
"Growing in your yard, in your flower bed -- they are probably turning your wood chips into good, healthy dirt. Or, they could be partnering up in a symbiotic relationship with many kinds of trees," said Walt Sturgeon.
Sturgeon is a local mushroom expert. He says some trees actually need that give-and-take relationship.
"Without the mushrooms, your trees would not be healthy and might not even be there and vice versa. If you don't have the tree, you don't have the mushroom," he said.
Some mushrooms edible, others are very poisonous.
"There are many edible mushrooms that grow in people's yards. The key is identifying them and knowing which is which," Sturgeon said.
You can determine what's good and what's bad by researching online or picking up a book. Sturgeon says if you don't know what it is, don't eat it.
"Just keep the children away from them -- if you have toddlers or crawling kids that put things in their mouth -- and keep the dogs away because dogs will eat them too," he said.
Also, you can't just get rid of them by picking them.
"Well, you pick it and you're only picking the reproductive part. The actual organism is healthily growing underneath the ground and next year will produce more mushrooms and maybe two weeks later produce more mushrooms," Sturgeon said.
He put it this way: you're picking the apple and not hurting the tree.
"Under the ground, there's a large, cobwebby-like growth [that] is the actual organism, and that growth wraps itself around the root of a tree," Sturgeon said.
You can treat your yard with weed killer or fungicide but you need to be cautious.
"Mushrooms tend to absorb what's there so that's not a good thing," Sturgeon said.
