How do mushrooms grow?

Mushroom

Mushrooms often seem to appear as if by magic in a meadow after a rainy summer day.

The most familiar kinds look like little umbrellas.  Others may resemble bells, funnels, or pieces of coral.

Mushrooms belong to a group of plants called fungi.  There have neither flowers nor seeds.  New plants start from tiny cells called spores.

The spores are carried by the wind to new places in which to grow.  When a spore lands in a grassy meadow, it grows into a web of white threads.  The mushroom spawn lies inactive in the ground.  Then on a warm, damp day the mushrooms pop up for their brief appearance.

Growing at the top of tiny stalks, they come through the ground looking like small buttons.

They grow quickly into full-size mushrooms.  Their job is to scatter the spores which grow on the many thin ridges, called gills, underneath the mushroom.

Photo courtesy:  altopower

Why does moss grow on the north side of a tree?

Moss

Moss likes to grow on the side of the tree that’s shady.

One way you can sometimes tell which direction is north in a forest is to see on which side of the trees moss is growing.  Mosses are most often found growing where it is moist and shady.  That’s why moss on trees usually grows on the side that gets little or no sunshine—the north side.

A green carpeting of moss is nearly always to be found growing on damp soil in woodlands and along streams.

It is often found growing on rocks, cracks in cement walks, on damp fences and old logs.  In the hot sun, some mosses curl their leaves and look brown and dead, but showers and cooler weather make them fresh and green again.

Most are really thousands of tiny moss plants growing so closed together that they are tangled into one matted clump.

They do not have flowers or seeds like most plants.

Moss plants produce tiny specks of plant matter called spores which serve as seeds.  Many spores are scattered by the wind, and grow wherever it is damp enough.

Photo courtesy:  calflora

Where does mold come from?

 

Tiny Molds

Mold is really a patch of tiny plants.  Tiny molds “seeds” called spores are carried away by currents of air.  When they land on a material they can use as food, the spores grow into new mold plants.

If you leave a piece of damp bread in the kitchen, in a few days it will be enclosed with a fuzzy bluish – or greenish-gray – patch of mold.  Mold comes from tiny specks in the air, called spores, the “seeds” of the mold.  It is really a tiny, simple plant which belongs to the fungi group.  If you look with a microscope, you will see a tangle of threadlike growth.  The thread serve much the same purpose as roots.

Small rods tapped with little dark knobs grow upward from the threads.  The knobs contain the spores.  When the spores are ripe they burst from the knobs and are carried away by air currents. 

When a spore lands on material that it can use as good, the spore grows into a new mold plant.  Mold cannot make their own food as green plants do.  They must live on food made by  other plants or animals.

photo courtesy:  thearlingtondirt