A DALE campsite owner admits he has become a “little obsessed” with the collection of giant puffballs he found on his land, hoping one of them would be a record-breaker.
Anthony Hobson, 52, who owns and runs the Old Armoury Campsite on the outskirts of Bowes, said he has taken to checking in on his giant puffballs every day to chart their progress.
Mr Hobson discovered the puffballs several months ago among patches of nettles on land he owns adjacent to the campsite. He said: “At first I didn’t really think anything of them and I gave several of them away. But then I thought what if one of them is a record-breaker and I decided to keep these just to see how big they grow.”
He measured the largest of his puffballs at 46.5 inches and he credits chemical free soil for the sizable growth.
Mr Hobson, who has single-handedly converted the disused RAF maintenance base into a campsite over the past three years, said: “I cleared one of the air raid shelters out last year which hadn’t been touched for 70 years. It was about one foot deep with soil and animal droppings so was probably really rich in nutrients.”
Despite the daily measuring, which he says was up to two inches per day, Mr Hobson admits his impressive fungi are shy of the largest found in the UK by 20 inches.
The largest puffball on record was found by Finlay O’Neill, 13, from Slaithwaite, in Yorkshire, and measured a whopping 66.5 inches.
And even that didn’t make it to the Guinness Book of World Records as they only record the weight of a puffball.
Mr Hobson said: “I had hoped the rain we’ve just had would have helped it grow, but it seems to have reached it’s limit.
“I’m going to keep checking on them all just in case.”
Giant puffball fungi is something of a delicacy but Mr Hobson won’t be tucking into any of his as he doesn’t actually like mushrooms.
They are called puffballs because brown, dust-like spores are emitted when the mature body bursts.
