Unripened fruit burdens berry bush

My thornless blackberry bush was slow to bloom, and then hot weather came and now it is loaded. But the problem is that most of the berries are not turning color. I watered them well with a drip hose. Is there anything I can do to get them to ripen? This is the first year I have had trouble.

Bev Swanson by e-mail

This has been a strange year for weather. The alternating cool and warm weather in the spring and then the July heat were hard on a lot of things. First, I’d dig down around the plants and see if that drip hose was really working. It was so hot and dry in July, that we lost a lot of deep soil moisture just when the plants were setting themselves up for August fruit. My raspberries literally dried on the bush before I had a chance to pick them. There is a possibility that it could be something called dry berry syndrome. The cause is unknown, but the individual berries dry up on the plant. It can be spotty or in patches throughout the plant. There is no treatment recommended. I’d clean under the plants thoroughly this fall when you cut the old canes just to remove any hiding places for fungi and disease. You might want to bring some berries into the Master Gardener Clinic at 222 N. Havana St. in Spokane Valley for more information.

Mushrooms on the lawn

We’re being overwhelmed by mushrooms that keep appearing in our lawn, especially where we previously had fairy rings. These were dug out to about six inches, replaced with good, freshtop soil and seeded with a quality grass. How do we get rid of the mushrooms?

Frank R. Schoonover

If the mushrooms are randomly scattered and not in organized rings, you do not have fairy ring. What you probably have is rotting wood from an old tree or buried construction debris that has the fungi growing in it underground. What you see is just the fruiting body from the underground fungus. The cool weather in late August, and the rain we got, was perfect mushroom-growing weather. Just pull them up. They will go away in a few weeks. There isn’t anything to treat them effectively anyway.

If they are in an organized ring, you’ve got fairy rings. To get rid of them, take a digging fork and poke at least four inch holes all around and through the circle. Using buckets of water with a wetting agent (purchased at the garden center) wet the entire area until there is standing water. Now comes the hard part – repeat this every three days for a month. You are poking holes in a dense mat of mycelium (mushroom roots) so the water can get in and drown them. It takes persistence, and there are no shortcuts. If you have a lot of the rings, try working on a few this fall and more next spring. They are likely living on some buried wood from an old tree root or construction material.