honey fungus
Christine Eyre
Posts: 2
What can I do about an area of garden that once had a tree infected by honey fungus? The tree has long since been cut down, but nothing grows there. Is the honey fungus still in the soil and what can I put there that will stand any chance of survival. To add to complications the site is at the bottom of a slope on clay soil and is partially shady. I need to sort out this hole in my boundary with something that will grow, screen and hopefully look pretty. Any ideas?
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Honey fungus. What a nightmare! It was in my previous garden. A very knowlegable person gave me a list of plants that are more resilient to it, and gave me the advice to disturb the soil as little as possible so I had some success. Here are some plants from th list:
Ash, beech, catalpa, chaenomles, clamatis, cottinus, eleagnus, hawthorn, Kerria, mahonia, pieris, tamarisk, laurel, larch, rhus,
These plants could be affected by it. I also uased to go out armed with disposable gloves and a plastic bag and try to catch the fungus early, then dispose of it -.
Garden organic web site was very helpful as well,
Good luck
Christine, you have my sympathy. I once thought I had it in my garden and went into a blind panic, googling for images to compare, peeling back bark to look for mycelium, digging yo see if I could find bootlaces, though I doubt I'd have recognised one if I'd seen it. In the end it turned out to be just a lot of golden capped toadstools that are quite common in woodlands round the base of trees.
At least your honey fungus has been dealt with, and hopefully it is no longer lurking in your soil.
This list of resistant plants may be of some help:
http://www.thegardeneronline.co.uk/documents/Honey_Fungus_Resistant_Plants.pdf
Thanks for the suggestions - and sympethy! I shall have a good look through and see what is suitable...and what I fancy putting in!
I think I had honey fungus in my garden, something was killing my privet hedge off. I had a diseased cherry tree nearby which I understand is prone to honey fungus. I also had a few old tree stumps still rooted in the ground which again can be the cause of HF.
Heres a photo of my privet hedge that was gradually dying off from the far end, spreading along the hedge each year...
I dug out all the affected privet hedge, and reluctantly decided to cut the cherry tree down and remove as much of its roots as possible. I also dug out the tree stumps. Ive since replanted with new privet hedge which is growing healthily.
Armillatox is supposed to treat areas suffering from HF, but it was recently banned as a pesticide (along with many others) and is now relabled as a path cleaning product to bypass legistlation. See here http://www.armillatox.com/
can honey fungus kill weeping willows as I think one of my other tress were killed by it and only realised today by reading the RHS magazine and will it continue to spread if we don't cut down the dead tree?
hi Tracey, willows can be killed by honey fungus, it's in the roots so it's getting out the root that takes away the problem. It's distressing when something dies of it but it may not happen. we lost 2 big willows in a very short time, from perfectly ok to dead within a season. but nothing else has gone except perhaps one viticella clematis. The roots are still there, it would be a mammoth task to remove them. Other trees are around, some conifers, hazel, laurel, various shrubs. There's are ashes, about 6 years old, growing up against the stump of both.
The deaths were aboput 6 years ago, fruiting bodies of honey fungus appear every year, across the grass and at the base of the stumps. Nothing else has died though. I'm not complacent about it, I know it hasn't gone but I don't expect to lose all my garden to it.
In the sticks near Peterborough
I also have to live with honey fungus and regularly find the odd 'bootlace' running just under the soil, almost anywhere in the garden (you get to recognise them after a while.) Although I lost an acer to it last year, overall losses are few and it doesn't stop me growing anything. I used to have a lot of felled tree trunk arranged around the sides of raised beds but have now gotten rid of most of that as dead wood in contact with the soil is essential to honey fungus as it acts as a home for it. I would say getting rid of all dead stumps and tree roots is the best thing anyone can do to try and combat this fungus.
Called "chiodini" in Italy they are blanched in boiling water for one minute, drained, have their stalks removed and are then fried in olive oil with garlic, chili flakes, parsley, salt and pepper. Served with spaghetti. Delicious.
But they smell awful, especially when they're going over
In the sticks near Peterborough
Interestingly, the mass of tangled threads they can produce which are sometimes found in compost heaps or piles of leaves are bioluminescent and were (allegedly) used as a form of lighting in times of old. The mushrooms themselves apparently glow weakly in the dark too (although I've never noticed as my garden is polluted with light from streetlamps.
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