How long can I leave there's a big mushroom growing out of my tree before it becomes dangerous?
This is where homeowners get frightened into paying after-hours rates they never needed. A conk on a tree that is straight and full, with no crack, no soil movement, and no crown thinning, is a get-it-looked-at-this-month item, not a tonight item — decay advances over seasons and years. What changes the answer immediately is a second symptom stacking onto the first: a conk plus a lean, a conk plus a stem crack, a conk plus heaved or cracked soil at the base, or a conk plus a crown that thinned this year. Any of those pairings moves it to same-week. Absent that, the correct response is an inspection now and a scheduled re-inspection.
Whether it can still be saved
Sometimes, and this deserves patience rather than panic. Nothing removes decay from a standing tree — no injection, no spray, no cutting it out. What is possible is reducing the load the compromised stem has to carry: weight-reduction pruning, shortening overextended limbs, and in selected cases a support system, which can buy years on a tree worth keeping. That call depends on how much sound wall thickness is left, which requires a hands-on inspection and sometimes a drill-resistance or sonic tomography reading. A conk at the base of a mature tree standing over a house usually ends in removal; a conk in an old pruning stub twenty feet up often does not.
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