No the Smurfs haven’t moved into your neighborhood. It’s just July has been so wet mushrooms have been popping up everywhere and in a lot more colors than blue.

Usually the mushrooms you see when hiking a trail deep into the woods, have been showing up in Central New York lawns, even the well maintained ones. Matt Steecker, a writer with the Ithaca Journal, was seeing so many pictures shared on social media he decided to investigate why it was happening.

Turns out mushrooms, are similar to icebergs, only in the ground compared to in the ocean. What you see above ground, pales in comparison to what's going on underneath. Apparently, the ones currently showing up are, Symbiotic Mushrooms and connected to a tree's root system and aides in helping it get nutrients.

As a guy who grew up in the Midwest searching for the edible Morel Mushroom (pictured below) during spring, there weren't any hard and fast times or conditions guaranteeing you would find them in any abundance.

Morel Mushroom
Photo by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash
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The Symbiotic Mushroom, seems similar in no one really knows when or why they appear. Most often they weren't there yesterday but they are today. Mushroom experts from Rochester Area Mycological Association to Cornell University can only theorize that some how the organisms know when it's wet enough to pop above ground and release their spores to make more mushrooms.

The mushrooms cause no harm unless consumed by people or pets and knowing an edible one from an inedible one is pretty much a gamble not worth taking. Read more on the colorful mushrooms and why we're seeing so many at the Ithaca Journal's website.

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