Walking out front yesterday, I saw that someone had left a golf ball in the yard. Scanning further, I also saw a ping-pong ball and a softball. Of course, these were all puffball mushrooms, the fruiting bodies of fungi; in our case, they are likely marking the location of decaying roots from a tree that had to be removed several years ago.
Not an expert on fungi, I am not inclined to snack on these mushrooms though most true puffballs are edible. False puffballs, which generally have a short stem, are too tough to eat and some members of both groups are poisonous.
Unlike mushrooms that bear their spores on the gills of "umbrella-like" structures, the spores of puffballs are within the globular fruit and are released when it is disturbed by animals (including curious humans) or simply as the outer skin decays. I'll just leave them alone.
