Fairies, aliens or mushrooms?

One interesting thing about living in the present day, is that there are so few unsolved mysteries. In the world of crime, DNA continues to catch out the most clever of killers, and when it comes to the less scintillating business of lawn care mysteries, well, there’s the internet. (It’s worth noting that on the perennial question of “What are our weird neighbors up to now?” well, we may never know the answer.)

This week we were faced with an X Files style mystery of the lawn care sort when we were puzzled by these green rings that had appeared in our lawn:

They looked a bit like small crop circles, but seemed to be these perfect circle shapes where the grass was a bit greener. We don’t invest in any sort of fancy yard maintenance or use any fertilizers or chemicals to treat the grass. We mainly rely on the deer for that, and so our first thought was that maybe deer poop or possibly deer pee might have something to do with the circles.

In another day and age, the mystery might have remained unsolved, but through the miracles of modern technology and Google. I learned that these rings are known as fairy circles, and naturally they’re caused by fairies having wild parties in the grass . . . just kidding.

They are really called fairy circles, but this phenomenon with the fanciful name has a perfectly rational scientific explanation. Fairy circles are actually caused by mushrooms, apparently. It has something to do with how mushroom spores spread underground. This makes sense given that this summer has been decidedly wetter and more mushroom-friendly than last summer. As proof of this I offer this photo of a mushroom that sprouted in one of our patio planters:

In reading about fairy circles on the internet, I learned that researchers have found that rabbits seem to contribute to the fairy circle phenomenon because they don’t care for mushroom-flavored grass and so avoid the grass with mushroom spores and eat around it leaving that grass to grow longer and lusher in the mushroomy spots. In the past rabbits resided under our shed. I haven’t seen any this year, but I do wonder if our backyard deer prefer the mushroom-free grass too and thus their eating habits have helped these rings to form.

Of course, before Google solved the mystery we jokingly speculated that it was aliens who caused the mysterious lawn phenomenon. With the congressional hearings into UFOs and talk of some spherical craft that had been spotted by military pilots, it didn’t seem like that far fetched an idea.

Sometimes having so many answers at our fingertips takes a little bit of the wonder out of the world. That’s why even thought I’m about 99 percent positive that our mystery rings are the work of mushrooms, I will allow that there’s the slim possibility they were caused by flying saucers.

— Alissa