I'm a neophyte organic gardener and I've been experimenting with organically improving my soil -- which was essentially dead -- with wood chip mulch. Preliminary results have been quite encouraging. I have a rather large area I've sectioned off of my small acreage and over the last three years I've been dumping pickup truck loads of mulch onto this area -- probably about 35 loads so far. The wood chips are coming from a community pile from the city closest to me, the big key for me is that the wood chips are FREE. This past month we've received a lot of snow then rain. After one of the rains I walked out into my garden and found this:
I've never seen anything like it before and all sorts of crazy stuff started flowing through my mind. I literally thought that this was some sort of toxic ooze that some knucklehead dumped into the community wood chip pile! So I went to my gardening mentor and told him that it looked like some animal came and "blew its lunch" in my garden, told him that it was a pale yellow color and that it came out of nowhere. His eyes got big and he smiled and said...
"Dog Vomit Fungus is what you got there."
I laughed and said something like,
"No, I'm serious." and asked what he really thought.
He was insistent and said it was also called more accurately, "Slime Mold". And it's harmless -- that's what I really what I needed to hear because my peas and peppers are growing witin inches of that pile!!! Here's what the stuff looks like after a few days:
Looks like dried dog puke to me.
I looked it up and sure enough my mentor was correct. The stuff springs out of nowhere, it's harmless and often occurs where there is rotting wood. It's actually good news for me. My soil was dead, now that there is mold growing, it's alive!
What a relief!