Is a puffball poisonous?

Mushrooms and toadstools do their very best when the weather is warm and wet. On a dewy morning, a fairy ring of mushrooms pops up in a grassy meadow. Showers bring toadstools peeping up on the forest floor and the shady tree trunks are decked with toadstools that look like half eaten sandwiches. But no sensible young person ever, ever eats a wild mushroom or toadstool   not even a nibble to sample it,

The puffball is a giant cousin of the mushrooms and all the little toadstools. It is a fungus plant and of all the many fungi in the world, you never find one that is green. This is because fungi have no chlorophyll, the magic stuff that green plants use to make their food from air and water. The puffball and the other fungi must live in super rich soil where they can get ready made food from decaying green plants.

Many fungi are good to eat and some of them are delicious. But they are very tricky foods. Some contain deadly poisons. Other are safe for some people but make some .,ogle sick. A few fungi aye safe only for a while, then they change and become poisonous. It takes an expert to tell which fungi are safe to eat, which is why no sensible young person dares to eat a tempting looking mushroom found growing in the wild.

Many of the fungi are not poisonous, but they are not good for food either. The puffball is not a poisonous fungi and when it is young it is very good to eat. A young giant puffball is big enough to garnish the hamburgers for an entire class picnic. But when the puffball gets old it has no more flavor than a slab of cork.

Naturally, a young person does not eat even puffballs found in the wild. In the first place, they may be full of insects or insect eggs. In the second place, the wild fungi may not really be a puffballs at all. It may be one of the poisonous fungi in disguise, ,just waiting to trap you.

The puffball, however, is very different from its mushroom and toadstool cousins and most people can recognize it. Instead of being a stubby little umbrella, the puffball is a roundish lump, somewhat like a stone. It may be the size of a small pebble or big as a sizeable boulder, If you happen to tap it on Oust the right day, the pasty looking lump will puff out a dusty cloud of tiny spores.

A sizeable puffball will send forth some 7,000 billion spores, each light enough to float on the breezes. But only one little spore in a trillion will land on the right kind of moist, rich soil. There it will start to grow and next year, perhaps, it will be poking up pasty round puffballs of its own.