we get some interesting mushrooms that i have maybe
-ahem- seen before.
they come up when we add cow manure compost and tea to amend our garden beds.
yeah. i know what they are, but i’m not gonna try any to be sure.
mushrooms in the garden bed is OK. mushrooms in the floorboards, under the telly… not so good.
Haha, agreed
And yeah, I think I know what you mean. There’s a difference between knowing and betting-my-life-or-liver knowing
Welcoming the neighbours
I have no real knowledge of such things but is it possible those were the fruiting bodies of a dry rot infestation?
I eat a lot of wild plants, but the only wild mushroom I eat is giant puffball, as nothing else looks like an oblong volleyball. I’ve read to many stories of misidentification leading to liver/kidney failure to be nonchalant about mushrooms.
More fungus among us:
To this day if you are very quiet, you can hear the thump-thump, thump-thump of the Tell-Tale Heart, that seems to be coming from beneath the floorboards.
I recognize this fungus! It looks like Serpula lacrymans or a close relative. Serpula is common in northern Europe, and really throughout colder bits of the northern hemisphere. It’s famous for, well, eating houses. As someone else on the thread pointed out, it causes dry rot–it has a talent for moving water from outside a house (through structures called “rhizomorphs”) inside to use as it eats up the wood in your house. Its population structure, and how it moved from living in forests in the wild to colonizing people’s houses, is an active topic of research.
For more information, the S. lacrymans Wikipedia page is a good entry. You can also check out some of the research being done on this fungus, for example, this paper comparing forest and house populations.
The tenants in this story were in no danger, unless they’re allergic to the fungus. The landlords, however, were hosed, in that, if S. lacrymans is making mushrooms, it will have already caused extensive damage to all of the wood in the building. I guess, that being said, there would be danger to the tenants because of the possibility of falling through floorboards.
(I should also point out that the tenants had no part in this if the mushrooms were visible when they moved in, or even well after. It takes a very long time for damage to get this bad, and any blame on the tenants would be shady landlording.)
Welcome back!
A friend of mine found mushrooms growing in the carpet under their bed one time. Turned out that a few months before she moved in, the bathroom in the upstairs flat had overflowed and water had run down the walls into the lower flat. They had repainted the walls so it wasn’t obvious but I guess just dried out the carpet rather than cleaning it properly.
She didn’t stay long in that flat.
As someone who’s spent all his adult life renting, it’s disturbing how many nightmares/dreams I’ve had that revolve around apartment problems. Like dreams where the roof leaks, building is collapsing, or I find an unlocked door that leads to someone elses apartment. Its very unsettling. This mushroom thing feels very familiar.
Any important and practical knowledge gained on this thread stems from you, and you’ve quite nicely capped things off. Thx!
The letting agency will try and charge them back rent for having three people in the flat.
(We had mushrooms growing in our rented house once, which is how we discovered a slow leak from the room above. It was this)
Yup. If it is Serpula lacrymans that house needs… a little work. Or to be razed.
