Fungus!

Those of you that know me well know that I absolutely despise mushrooms. There are a lot of reasons why and my mom dates this back to when I was about 6 or 7 and I asked what mushrooms were. Mom always told me to go to the dictionary and/or encyclopedia to discover the answer for myself. Of course, the dictionary describes a mushroom as a fungus. Apparently, I swore that I wasn't ever going to eat fungus. Athlete's foot is a fungus and you don't see people licking between their toes for that! There have been many opportunities for me to try to change my mind over the years and my brother always dares me to eat one or two, usually around his birthday. This is successful for him in that he can pretty much dare me to do anything and I'll eventually do it; however, it's unsuccessful for me because the more I try them, the more I want to puke! Reasons? One, I can't stand the texture... Two, I really can't stand the smell. And every time I get brave enough to try one, it only reminds me how much I hate them. I have a brand new reason to hate them tonight.

We spent all of last summer landscaping our small backyard. It was

nothing but dirt and weeds before. This picture with Mojo sort of shows it after we put in some fence but before doing any real work to the yard. Now, imagine a tree against the fence on the far side of the yard. It's only a stump that you can't see in this picture. We also had a huge mound of dirt in the middle of the yard from having dug out a third of the yard in the area where I'm standing to take this picture. We had to dig that out to level it off and prepare it for a cement patio.

My brother came down for a week last June to visit and ended up helping dig out the stump. That was quite the project! He and Gil spent hours and hours for two solid days trying to dig around this thing and it finally came to pass that they couldn't. It was too big, too deep, and its roots ran under the cement base we have for the fence. We finally called a tree guy to come in with a machine to chop it up in its own hole. We got rid of most of the saw dust and then filled in dirt from the big mound in the middle of the yard.

My brother came back down for another week in August to help again while we were dealing with Gil's grandpa's cancer and subsequent passing. Shawn tilled and leveled out the dirt and sand, making it all nice and smooth and ready for sod. Gil and his uncle laid the sod in early September and we finally had grass! In the four years we'd had the house at that time, this was the first time there was grass in the backyard! As I stated above, we covered a third of the yard with cement pavers where we arranged the outdoor kennel as well as the bbq grill and our patio table and chairs.


So... now to the reason for my most recent reason to despise those little fungi... the spot in our brand new, beautifully sodded yard where the tree/stump used to be... yep, lots of little mushrooms all over that corner of the yard. I'm assuming they're growing because the chopped up remnants of the stump are rotting. I had to go out tonight and handpick each of them out of the ground, trying to preserve as much grass as possible, before Gil could spray fungus retardant all over. I really pray that it works because spending an hour digging those things with their foul smell... I should've had a gas mask on or something! Ugh!


(BTW, I'm new to this blogging thing and posting these pictures made me about frustrated out of my mind. Stella, if you have any pointers, please tell me, because y'all will be lucky if I ever try to post pictures again! I couldn't get them to align within the text where I wanted them.)