CHAPTER II.
GROWING MUSHROOMS IN CELLARS.
Underground Cellars.—Mushrooms require a uniform moderately low temperature and moist atmosphere, and will not thrive where draughts, or sudden fluctuations of temperature or moisture prevail. Therefore an underground cellar is the best of all structures in which to grow mushrooms. The cellar is everybody's mushroom house.
Cellars are under dwellings, barns, and often under other out-buildings. These cellars are imperative for domestic purposes, for storing apples, potatoes and other root crops and perishable produce; and for these uses we need to make them frost proof and dry. These cellars are ideal mushroom houses, and any one who has a good cellar can grow mushrooms in it. In fact, our market gardeners who are making money out of mushrooms find it pays them to excavate and build cellars expressly for growing mushrooms. Indeed, some of our market gardeners who have never grown a mushroom or seen one grown, but who know well that some of their neighbors are making money out of this business, instinctively feel that the first step in mushroom-growing is a cellar. It is almost incredible how secretly the market growers guard everything in connection with mushroom-growing from the outside world, and even from one another; in fact, in some cases their next-door neighbors and life-long intimate friends have never been inside their mushroom cellars.
If a cellar is to be wholly devoted to mushroom-growing it should be made as warm as possible with double windows, and double doors, where the entrance is from the outside, but if from another building single doors will suffice. A chimney-like shaft or shafts rising from the ceiling should be used as ventilators in winter, when we can not ventilate from doors or windows; indeed, side ventilation at anytime when the beds are in bearing condition is rather precarious. There should be some indoor way of getting into the cellar, as by a stairway from the building above it. Also an easy way of getting in fresh materials for the beds, and removing the exhausted material. This is, perhaps, best obtained by having a door that opens to the outside, or a moderately large one from the building above.
Fig. 1. Mushroom Cellar under a Barn.
The interior arrangement of the cellar is a matter of choice with the grower, but the simplest way is to have beds three or four feet wide around the inside of the walls, and beds six feet wide, with pathways two, or two and one-half feet wide between them running parallel along the middle of the cellar. Above these floor-beds, shelf-beds in tiers of one, two, or three, according to the height of the cellar, may be formed, always leaving a space of two and one-half or three feet between the bottom of one bed and the bottom of the next. This is very necessary, in order to admit of making and tending the beds and gathering the crop, and emptying the beds when they are exhausted.