Hello and welcome back to the Curious Kid podcast. It's April, and where we live in New Jersey, April is usually very rainy and wet. Sometimes, after a soaking rain, Olivia will go into the yard to play and notice something growing out of the ground. It's something

interesting and unique, and we're going to learn all about it today. Double mail bag. Double mail bag.

Hello Olivia and her daddy. My name is Juniper, and I'm almost seven years old. I love your show and I listen to it all the time in the car with Mommy and little brother Lawson. My favorite episode is the one about rocks. Could you get curious about mushrooms and volcanoes for me? Love Juniper and Lawson from Sacramento, California.

Hi, Olivia and Jacob, we love your show. Thank you for teaching us so many new things. My daughter,

Nina, is 10 years old, and her favorite episodes are diapers and glass. Nina wants to study mushrooms when she grows up, and she would

appreciate if you could do a show about mushrooms. Thanks and take care, Nina and her mom,

Shelly from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Mushrooms are awesome, and we can't wait to learn more about mushrooms for Juniper, Lawson, and Nina.

I think we are going to learn some things today that may surprise you about mushrooms.

Let's kick it off with an amazing fact for our question of the week.

The question of the week is, how big is the largest living organism in the world?

You may be wondering why we are asking about the largest living organism in an episode about mushrooms.

Well, it's because the largest living organism is a mushroom.

That's right. Mushrooms are living organisms, and the largest one is located in Oregon.

It's a giant honey mushroom. Can you guess how big it is?

Mushrooms are not a fruit, and they are also not a vegetable.

They are often classified as a vegetable, but they are definitely not a vegetable. A mushroom is a fungus.

Fungi are living things. They aren't plants, and they're not animals. Like me, mushrooms are fungi.

Nice dad joke, Daddy. Because mushrooms grow from the ground, they are often mistaken for plants, but they

are actually different because mushrooms don't need any sunlight to grow. Many mushrooms are actually

grown indoors for that reason. If you listen to episode 157 curious about plants,

you may remember that plants make their own food from

sunlight in a neat process called photosynthesis.

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