I think the two biggest suspects would be salt, if you've used steer manure or composted steer manure without mixing it in well, and perhaps fungus, indicated by you seeing spore bodies growing up top and "white" stuff on the roots.

Salt does mechanical damage and the fungus probably does no damage.

Thanks so much for sharing! I will look into both of those!

Was that soil quite moist or dry? Fungi usually do not do well in dry soils.

It was dry actually. It was in a raised bed that has good drainage.

Is the white 'stuff' something new? Is it widespread or just in one area? Is the white stuff plant or mineral?

It is new. It is in one of my raised garden beds but not in the others. It is in sort of clumps and not evenly throughout the entire bed. It looks a little like sand.

I think I know ... it's what happens to cat and dog poop after the soil fungi get through with it. Cat buried poop, and it decayed.

Don't worry about odd things you see in soil - they are usually harmless.

Thanks to everyone trying to help me out! So if it is a fungus will it cause any harm or health concerns with the vegetables that are in that garden bed?

Very doubtful. Fungi are actually an important part of the soil ecosystem and perform many necessary functions. You just don't normally see them.

If it's cat poop - and I have some doubts, manure should really just turn into dark brown to black organic matter - it should be safe to grow in after a few months from the last 'deposit'. Unless you have pregnant females in the household, in which case it would be good to bone up on toxoplasmosis.

I would just turn over this bed and mix everything well, add some compost while you're at it, and plant away.

Hey! I just came over here to post about this at the suggestion of a poster on the Hot Peppers board!

Its not cat poop, it's seems to be a crazy overgrowth of mycelium or some kind of fungus. I've included my pic. It strangled 6 of my pepper plants- they acted like they couldn't uptake nutrients, dying a slow death of yellowing and wilting before all of the peppers (regardless of size,) ripened and then the plant died.

I've included a pic of it in my garden. As I wrote in my post on Hot Peppers, I'm wondering if I should replace that section of mix, "dilute" it by adding more of something else or if I simply need to wait it out (in case it is just breaking something down- I wonder if something not completely composted was in the mix the plants originally came in since it was a 6 pack of starter plants.)

It's prime real estate for pepper growing in my garden (full sun,) so I do want to use that section as soon as I safely can.

Wow! I'm glad I'm not alone in this! Do you have a link to your other board post? If you get any more info there please share it with me! :)

It's funny because I have peppers on the other side of this bed. It hasn't directly affected them yet. There were onions where the grey stuff is but the onions seem to be missing since the grey stuff showed up!

I'm doing some reading about using Hydrogen Peroxide to control soil fungus but I'm still in the research stage... I don't want to kill all the good I've tried to put in the soil over the years, just control the overgrowth.

As with many other things there will be good fungi and bad fungi, disease causing, and it can be very difficult to tell the difference. Mushrooms are one of the fungi and they do send out "roots", mycelium, that looks like a whiteish film in the soil. For the most these mycelium are not harmful.
The picture VedaBeeps posted looks like what is called a slime mold, a distant relative of fungi. Pouring Hydrogen Peroxide around the garden is not a very good idea.

for vegetables, virtually all fungi are beneficial. In fact, for most vegetables they are very beneficial. People go out of their way to bury wood in their garden (hugelkultur) precisely to have fungi in there.

Hydrogen Peroxide causes cancer. Look online stuff about people who used hair dye and hair dressing getting way more cancer then the general population. Google hair dye and cancer together.

kimmsr, I appreciate the response but I have looked and thousands of pictures of slime mold and not one of them looks like this. Also, none of the descriptions really match. I called my local nursery and asked them if it could be it and the guy said "Who told you that?" Apparently we lack the humidity that slime mold needs. Being in the desert, in a drought, and watering judiciously, slime mold would be highly unlikely. What we're seeing is dry and powdery and not bubbly looking.

There are many of valid applications for hydrogen peroxide in the garden and I can assure you no one here is randomly "pouring hydrogen peroxide around the garden" so there is no need to be melodramatic. :)

BTW, isn't there a way of flagging off topic posts for removal on this board? I'm not too familiar with it yet.

This post was edited by VedaBeeps on Thu, Jul 31, 14 at 11:35

I cleaned up under my 30 year old Magnolia and found the exact same sludgy grey clay like consistency clumps in my soil. It was in the last 2 feet wide area beside by driveway edge, where years ago I made a shallow bed for flowers (long since dead now). I bordered the soil bed on the sides with that 4 inch deep black plastic bed border, as sold at Home Depot/etc. What a mistake that was! It took a lot of work, but I dug it all up and turned the soil to expose all that sludge to the air and sunlight! I too thought the sludge was an outdoor cat box, but after reading all of the comments, I now believe it is some type of fungus. I believe water continually trapped in the bed and the soil became "spoiled" over and over for years!

Just wanted to reinforce the comment made previously that virtually all soil fungus is beneficial and does not need to be removed. Fungal organisms make up a huge percentage of the soil microbiology and are important in that they consume OM and release nutrients to the plants as well as creating mycelial pathways that work in symbiosis with plant roots to increase their ability to take up soil moisture and nutrients.

Those few fungal organisms that are not beneficial tend to produce mushrooms or other fruiting bodies directly on the plant or at its base.

btw, a plastic border or edging will not "trap water" unless the soil in that area is poorly draining to begin with!! Water should drain down, not out :-))

Well maybe this not a fungus because after all, as it is a very thick sludgy goo! It sticks like a clay to my shovel and I have to scrap it off manually! Whatever it is, it is ugly and looks deadly to me. I want it gone! UGH is the best word to describe it!

The gray color reminds me of clay-based cat litter, which is really just roasted clay, and when it gets wet, it turns to a slimy sticky gray mess. But you'd know if you had put cat litter there, I would think.

If it's truly a fungus, if left in the sun it should shrink away to almost nothing as fungi are mostly water and/or air. If it's some sort of clay or mineral, it will get dry but still be identifiable.

Although this is an old thread, I can't help commenting on hydrogen peroxide as a carcinogen, just for the benefit of future readers. First, there are a lot of chemicals in hair dyes (and other products) besides peroxide (which is actually a bleach rather than a dye), so if cancer rates are higher amongst hair stylists, there are multiple possible culprits. True, peroxide is an oxidizer, which would not be particularly good in your cells. This is about the only hook one could use to suggest it could play a role in cancer. But it is typically used on the outside of you (skin). It is very reactive, and does not persist, so putting it on soil would not result in any exposure to it later on from eating vegetables. Finally, it is interesting to note that the ATSDR, an authority on toxicity, lists hydrogen peroxide in NONE of its toxicity categories - not a carcinogen, possible carcinogen, mutagen, teratogen, or anything else. It simply says: "Affected Organ Systems: None. Cancer Classification: None." https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/substances/toxsubstance.asp?toxid=55

Having said all that, I see very little reason to use it in the garden, as it is an indiscriminate killer of microbes which make up the soil food web and give soil its fertility. It would have to be an extreme case of soil borne disease to warrant the nuclear approach, and there are better ways of dealing with virtually any soil problem.

This has been a public service announcement. Carry on!

I’ve got a similar grey, firmer soil mass in sections of my raised garden bed. I think I see fungal mycelium in it, so I’m reassured by everyone posting that fungal growth is usually beneficial.

Just to add to the conversation, I think it’s coming from ants. I had a huge ant problem this summer, around my peppers & especially in a potato bag. It’s cool enough now they’re gone for my winter garden, but when I dug up the potatoes a few were surrounded by the grey soil. I think it was likely part of the ant colony, maybe an ant fungal garden, which I know some ants create.

Thanks for the help!

I know this is an old thread but this looks to me from the pictures like actinomycetes, which look a lot like fungi but are actually a bacteria (not that it matters much). Anyway I've seen them go rather wild on drier-than-usual soil and compost (which corresponds to the ants which also tend to not like too-wet conditions). Although someone above also described something that sounds like a slime mold - the actinomycetes tend to have what looks like mycellium and don't get lumpy as far as I'm aware.

Anyway as I said, doesn't make much difference if it's a fungi or actinomycete, almost all harmless in soil conditions, just another decomposer. There are some fungi that grow in drier conditions too, of course.

So I think mostly the 'white soil' is just remnants or active bits of some decomposer and nothing to worry about. If someone wants to experiment, try getting/keeping the soil moister than it has been.

Hydrogen peroxide is useful in variety of plants raised under hydroponic gardens, raised beds,or greenhouses. It releases oxygen and acts as an oxygen supplement for plants. ...Hydrogen peroxide can also help with soil fungus. it aerates the soil, and it is anti-fungal.

Hi folk. I have just dug up my raised garden as all the vegetables were really struggling. Now I find the soil...or whatever this very dry powdery stuff is?!with some mushroom looking plants is throughout the bed. I can't see anything growing it as it's crumbling dry with tiny earwig looking insects! Any help would be very much appreciated.

If the plants were struggling, it may be a symptom, or it might be an incidental of things coming in to decay the dead plant material. It's hard to tell without seeing photos of everything. Usually, mushrooms aren't a cause of plant decline, they're a symptom of it and appear later, though, when there's already dead matter for them to eat.

If there are some tiny mushroomy things in there, it's probably a natural fungus--and nothing to worry about. Just something living on rotting plant material, like mushrooms do. And the little earwig-looking things are quite possibly doing exactly the same thing.

It's not necessarily a bad place to be. Healthy soils contain tons of fungi and insects, doing their thing, and returning dead plant material back into organic matter and plant food.

In my gardens, at their healthiest, there are always tons of small insects going about their business, eating the dead leaves that fall away, blossoms that are pulled off and discarded, and the dog's...leavings...that are deposited several times a day in the lawn. Not to mention the stuff I pour on to feed the gardens.