Breaking Down

This is a good time for seeking out wood rot fungus. There are many varieties. Found on dead wood, they have the capacity to break down cellulose in the wood mostly via enzymes which they secrete. Some, like Honey Fungus, can attack living trees and are dreaded by keen gardeners. But in general they have a vital role in the natural world. A wet fallen branch or log is where we're most likely to find them.

This has been a good year for fungi and those we usually seek out in late summer and autumn have been easy to find. It's refreshing that it's not necessary to be an expert identifier to enjoy them, if you're not looking for edibles that is. Only the most specialised mycologists can cope with the majority of those found in the UK.

I've remarked before that local employees within the Sheffield Moors Partnership have been known to try to defend their absurd anti-tree/pro-sheep management of the 'inby land' here because, as they claim, the sheep and cow droppings help to produce a great variety of fungi and this is why that land is SSSI. The argument is nonsense. You don't need cow and sheep defecation to encourage mushrooms. I'm not the only one to have a lawn that is even now covered in fungi of various kinds

There are different fungi at the moment to those found a few weeks earlier. There's a specially dense group of Herald of Winter and several others. I walked along SWT's sheep enclosure the other day. After travelling some 20 times an equivalent length to my lawn I gave up looking for mushrooms. To give SSSI status at least partly for the fungi you might expect there to be thousands. But there were plenty of sheep droppings, all down to excellent management.

Needless to say no sheep or cows have ever been known to graze or defecate on my lawn.

The story told by SWT that you need sheep crap for fungi only breaks down even further any trust we can have in the managers here.

I'm still waiting for NE to write proposing to make my back garden a SSSI - and offer to pay me Higher Level Stewardship. There's certainly no earthly reason for wasting public money on Blacka's sheep dump.