I finally got rid of the stinkhorn mushrooms in my flower beds, but it took a lot of work and a fair bit of time. If you aren’t familiar with stinkhorn mushrooms, consider yourself lucky. These nasty mushrooms are from the Phallaceae family of mushrooms and there are lots of different types of stinkhorn mushrooms, but they all have similar characteristics. Most appear very quickly, a good number of them look pretty phallic in nature and they multiply by secreting a foul-smelling chemical that does, as their name implies, stink. The variety of stinkhorns we had smelled a lot like dog feces in our front flower bed. The stink is important because it attracts lots of flies (just as dog poo would) and those flies land on the mushrooms, getting their feet covered in the ooze. When the flies land somewhere else they take with them some of the ooze as well as spores which can later grow more mushrooms. Our stinkhorn mushrooms first showed up in August of last year. I first tried to get rid of them by just putting on an old work glove and pulling them out of the ground, but the next day they were [...]
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