What Is A Puffball?

A puffball is a ball-shaped mushroom that gives off a puff of powdery spores when pinched.  It is a kind of mushroom growing in a field that looks very much like a round ball.

Anyone who has kicked a ripe puffball and watched the cloud of “smoke” puff out knows how the puffball gets its name.

Puffballs love sunlight and are often found in pastures on warm spring or summer days.  Most puffballs are only a few inches high.

The giant puffball, however, may grow to be 2 feet or more in diameter.  It is the largest of all mushrooms.

Puffball

The puffs or “smoke” that burst out when the ripe puffball is touched or squeezed is really a cloud of powdery spores being cast off.

Spores are tiny cells something like seeds.  They are so tiny that they look like dust.  A single puffball produces so many spores that it is not possible to count them.

Each spore may grow into a new puffballs plant if it lands on warm, damp ground ideal for its growth into another puffball.–Dick Rogers

Where Does Dust Come From?

Dust

Housekeepers spend a good deal of time dusting.  Dust settles from the air and makes a gray coating over everything around us.  

Dust is more that just specks of dirt.  In the ordinary dust you could collect from a windowsill, you would find tiny chips of rock, bits of dead wood and dried leaves.  

Dust may also have in it spores from plants, pollen from the powder in flowers, spot from smoke, cinders left from meteors burning up on their way to earth, and other bits of matter that float in the air.  Dust may drift hundreds of miles before finally setting because of gravity.-Dick Rogers

Where does mold come from?

Patch of Tiny Plants

Mold is really a patch of tiny plants.  Tiny molds “seeds” called spores are carried away by currents of air.  When they land on a material they can use as food, the spores grow into new mold plants.

If you leave a piece of damp bread in the kitchen, in a few days it will be enclosed with a fuzzy bluish – or greenish-gray - patch of mold.  Mold comes from tiny specks in the air, called spores, the “seeds” of the mold.  It is really a tiny, simple plant which belongs to the fungi group.  If you look with a microscope, you will see a tangle of threadlike growth.  The thread serve much the same purpose as roots.

Small rods tapped with little dark knobs grow upward from the threads.  The knobs contain the spores.  When the spores are ripe they burst from the knobs and are carried away by air currents. 

When a spore lands on material that it can use as good, the spore grows into a new mold plant.  Mold cannot make their own food as green plants do.  They must live on food made by  other plants or animals. – Dick Rogers