Campbell Vaughn: What’s that stench? Stinkhorns

Just in time for the Halloween season, we are seeing some gross things popping up all over town, and they’ve been making my phone ring for the past two weeks. These disgusting monsters rise out of the ground and smell comparable to the Walking Dead.

My friend Lindsey sent me a text asking me what to do about these stinky orange things that have invaded her yard. I explained that the stinkhorns have arrived! Their nauseating smell is enough to make one gag.

Stinkhorns, with their rancid stench, are a type of mushroom from the Phallaceae family. When the nights are a little cooler, the soil is moist with decaying material such as roots and heavy wood mulch, these nasty fungi arise in the landscape.

Stinkhorns occur naturally and are spread by spores. How these spores are spread is right in line with some of the ghouls that Oct. 31 represents.

As the mushrooms form, they are coated with a slime that smells as though every dog in the neighborhood has visited your flower bed three minutes before you step out into the yard. The nasty smell attracts flies, and when the pesky insects land on the oozy mushroom, the spores for the fungi attach to their feet and are off to be spread into nature. Sounds like an Alfred Hitchcock kind of pollination without pretty flowers and multicolored butterflies, doesn’t it?

If you can get past the smell, stinkhorn mushrooms are pretty cool to see. Varying in colors from bright orange to red, white, beige or olive, these mushrooms come in unique shapes as well. Some resemble an octopus or a webbed-like hollowed mushroom, or a horn, or even some shapes that might have every seventh-grader in the world giggling.

Some of the varieties for the stinkhorns are quite clever as well with Halloween-themed names like dead man’s fingers and lizard’s claw. There are also some names for these mushrooms that are not appropriate for this weekly column.

When these mushrooms develop, the immature fungi appear as an egg-shaped mass and then mature rapidly. By rapid, that means growing four to six inches an hour and generating enough force to break through asphalt. Leave to go to the grocery store and come back and you are like, “Wow! What is that disgusting stench coming from that orange-looking ground octopus?”

Getting rid of the stinkhorns is a simple matter of getting a shovel and scooping them up into a bag and into the trash can. If you can tolerate the smell, these mushrooms will go away in a couple of weeks or so.

If they are in the shrub beds, covering them up with more mulch will just make more of them, so don’t think you can get away with that trick! Using pine and cypress mulch instead of regular hardwood mulch can help prevent stinkhorns because old pine and cypress don’t decay as quickly, and decay is something that feeds fungi.

Decaying matter will steal available nitrogen, so a little extra supplemental boost of 12-0-0 can be somewhat effective in preventing stinkhorns. This trick has worked with some success for me over the years, but make sure to localize the nitrogen to the affected areas because we are trying to slow plant growth down this time of year, not speed it up.

If you live near Lindsey and you smell something stinking in her yard, I promise she is a great mom and bathes her kids. She is just dealing with a little seasonal landscape fungus. And for next Halloween, we will talk about another gross fungi topic, dog vomit slime mold. That one is really gross.

Reach Campbell Vaughn, the UGA Agriculture and Natural Resource agent for Richmond County, by e-mailing augusta@uga.edu.