Artillery Fungus, also known as Shotgun Fungus
Some knowledge to share with your customer helps you in your professional business.
The artillery fungus, or shotgun fungus, is a wood-decay fungus that likes to live on moist landscape mulch. The worst thing about this fungus is that it shoots spores up to 20 feet, which often land on siding, cars and anything else that surrounds the mulch.
Unfortunately no natural mulch can resist the artillery fungus The only way to ensure that artillery fungus never comes back is to take out the mulch completely and replace it with stone, artificial mulch or ground-cover plants. However, if you dislike stone and still want to replace the fungus infested mulch with organic mulch, the best way to keep the shotgun fungus away is to use a course ground of wood chips. The larger pieces of wood will stay mostly dry and the artillery fungus won’t like it as much as moist, finely ground mulch. Generally, the key to preventing the artillery spores from ever sprouting is refreshing your mulch regularly.
As far as getting rid of the spores on your siding – that’s not a fun job. The most important part is to get them quick, as they are covered in sticky substance that will stay on the siding for good if not taken care of in a timely fashion. New vinyl siding that still has an oily residue on it can be power-washed within the first week. In other cases power-washing will be fruitless. Scraping the spores off one-by-one with a scraper or steel wool is tedious but effective. After that there will still be a stain left, which can be taken care of with an ink eraser or possibly bleach.
The bottom line is that no organic mulch is completely safe from the artillery fungus. If you know that shotgun fungus has been attacking your neighborhood, switching to stone in the areas surrounding the house would be the safest choice. If you simply can’t stand stone, then refreshing the mulch every year would be the second best thing to do.
