Mushrooms

Question from Christine:

This morning I found these in my planter box in amongst some spinach plants. It’s a new wooden box 15 inches deep with wheels on the bottom so there is air space underneath and drainage holes in the bottom and is filled with Kellogg’s Patio Plus. I mixed in commercial bagged worm castings, Stone’s organic granular vegetable fertilizer, and some mychorrizal fungi before planting the nursery starts. I live in South Carlsbad about 5 miles from the ocean. My question is whether or not the spinach is safe to eat now since there is so much direct contact with the mushrooms. Thanks for your help.

Answer from Pat:

What an amazing proliferation of fungi, toadstools or mushrooms. These look like some kind of Mycena, perhaps Mycena abramsii. Mycena are a large group of saprotrophic—which means living or feeding on dead matter—mushrooms with a thin, fragile stem and most have a striate cap, like the ones you found in your garden. Some of them are edible, most are poisonous and a few are psychogenic. They grow on rotting tree trunks, or woody remains of trees. Your moist soil combined with recent temperatures, moist conditions and lots of dead organic matter provided an excellent habitat.

Since you do not know whether these mushrooms are poisonous, I would wear gloves while weeding them out and wash your hands afterwards. If these fungi are indeed poisonous—which we do not know—, one would need to ingest a portion of these mushrooms or toadstools in order to be killed by them. Some Mycena become slimy, but these do not appear to be. I am not aware of one plant being able to absorb poison from another simply by touching it. When poisonous weeds, like scarlet pimpernel grow among our vegetables, we simply weed them out. Chances are the spinach is perfectly safe to eat as long as you wash it well and make sure no broken piece of fungi is in with it. But if this makes you nervous, why cause yourself all that worry, just for a bunch of spinach?