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.

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.

Provision should also be made for the artificial heating of these cellars, and room given for the heating pipes wherever they are to run. But wherever fire heat is used in heating these cellars, if practicable, the furnace itself should be boxed off, by a thin brick wall, from the main cellar, and the pipes only introduced. This does away with the dust and noxious gas, and modifies the parching heat.

But in a snug, warm cellar, artificial heat is not absolutely necessary. We can grow capital crops of mushrooms in such a cellar without any furnace heat, simply by using a larger body of material in making the beds, enough to maintain a steady warmth for a long time. But this, observe, is a waste of material, for no more mushrooms can be grown in a bed two feet thick than in one a foot thick. In an unheated cellar the mushrooms grow large and solid, but they do not come so quickly nor in such large numbers as in a heated one. And a little artificial warmth has the effect of dispelling that cold, raw, damp air peculiar to a pent-up cellar in winter, and purifies the atmosphere by assisting ventilation.

Instead of using box beds, some growers spread the bed all over the floor of the cellar, and leave no pathway whatever, stepping-boards or raised pathways being used instead. Of course, in these instances, no shelf beds are used. Others make ridge beds all over the cellar floor, as the Parisians do in the caves. The ridges are two feet wide at bottom, two feet high, and six or eight inches wide at top, and there is a foot alley between them. Here, again, no shelf beds are used.

One of the chief troubles with flat-roofed mushroom cellars is the drip from the condensed moisture rising from the beds, and this is more apparent in unheated than in heated cellars, the wet gathers upon the ceiling and, having no slope to run off, drips down again. Oiled paper or calico strung along [Symbol: Inverted V] wise above the upper beds protects them perfectly; whatever falls upon the passage-ways upon the floor does no harm.

In any other outhouse cellar, as well as in one completely given over to this use, we can make up beds and grow good mushrooms. Mr. James Vick told me that at his seed farm near Rochester he raises many mushrooms in winter in his potato cellars; and so can any one in similar places. Mr. John Cullen, of South Bethlehem, Pa., a very successful cultivator, tells me that his present mushroom cellar used to be a large underground cistern, but with a little fixing, and opening a passage-way to it from a neighboring cellar, he has converted it into an excellent cellar for mushrooms, and surely the immense crops that I have seen in that cave of total darkness justify his good opinion of it.

In Dwelling House.- The cellar of a dwelling house is a capital place for mushroom beds, and can be used in whole or part for this purpose. In the case of private families who wish to grow a few mushrooms only for their own use it is not necessary to devote a whole cellar to it; but partition off a part of it with boards and make the beds in this. Or make a bed alongside of the wall anywhere and box it in to protect it from cold and draughts, and mice and rats. You can have shelves above it for domestic purposes, just as you would in any other part of the cellar. Bear in mind that mushrooms thrive best in an atmospheric temperature of from 50 deg. to 60 deg., and if you can give them this in your house-cellar you ought to get plenty of good mushrooms. But if such a high temperature can not be maintained without impairing the usefulness of the cellar for other purposes, box up the beds tightly, and from the heat of the bed itself, when thus confined, there usually will be warmth enough for the mushrooms, but if not spread a piece of old carpet or matting over the boxing.

The beds may be made upon the floor, and flat, or ridged, or banked against the wall, ten or twelve inches deep in a warm cellar, and fifteen to twenty inches or more deep in a cool cellar, and about three feet wide and any length to suit.

The boxing may consist of any kind of boards for sides and ends, and be built about six or ten inches higher than the top of the beds, so as to give the mushrooms plenty headroom; the top of the boxing may be a lid hung on hinges or straps, or otherwise arranged, to admit of being easily raised or removed at will, and made of light lumber, say one-half inch thick boards. In this way, by opening the lid, the mushrooms are under observation and can be gathered without any trouble. When the lid is shut they are secure from cold and vermin. Thus protected the cellars can be ventilated without interfering with the welfare of the mushrooms. A light wooden frame covered with calico or oiled paper would also make a good top for the boxing, only it would not be proof against much cold, or rats or mice. If desirable, in warm cellars, shelf beds could be built above the floor beds, but in cool, airy cellars this would not be advisable.

Manure beds in the dwelling-house cellar may seem highly improper to many people, but in truth, when rightly handled, these beds emit no bad odor. The manure should be prepared away from the house, and when ready for making into beds it can be spread out thin, so as to become perfectly cool and free from steam. When it has lain for two days in this condition it may be brought into the cellar and made into beds. Having been well sweetened by previous preparation, it is now cool and free from steam, and almost odorless; after a few days it will warm up a little, and may then be spawned and earthed over at once. Do not bury the spawn in the manure, merely set it in the surface of the manure; this saves the spawn from being destroyed by too great a heat, should the bed become unduly warm. This, if the manure has been well prepared, is not likely to occur. The coating of loam prevents the escape of any further steam or odor from the manure.

On the 14th of January last, Mr. W. Robinson, editor of the London Garden, in writing to me, mentioned the following very interesting case of growing mushrooms in the cellar of a dwelling house: “I went out the other day to see Mr. Horace Cox, the manager of the Field newspaper, who lives at Harrow, near the famous school. His house is heated by a hot-water system called Keith’s, and the boiler is in a chamber in the house in the basement. The system interested me and I went down to see the boiler, which is a very simple one worked with coke refuse. However, I was pleased to see all the floor of the room not occupied by the boiler covered with little flat mushroom beds and bearing a very good crop. Truth to tell, I used to fear growing mushrooms in dwelling houses might be objectionable in various ways; but this instance is very interesting, as there is not even the slightest unpleasant smell in the chamber itself. The beds are small, scarcely a foot high, and perfectly odorless; so that it is quite clear that one may cultivate mushrooms in one’s house, in such a case as this, without the slightest offence.”

Mr. Gardner’s Method.- Mr. J. G. Gardner, of Jobstown, N. J., uses an ordinary cellar, such as any farmer in the country has, and the little that has been done to it to darken the windows and make them tight, so as to render them better for mushrooms, any farmer with a hand-saw, an ax, a hammer and a few nails and some boards can do. Mr. Gardner is a market gardener, and has not the amount of fresh manure upon his own place that he needs for mushroom-growing, but he buys it, common horse manure, in New York, and it is shipped to him, over seventy miles, by rail. And this pays; and if it will pay a man to get manure at such a cost for mushroom-growing, how much more will mushroom-growing pay the farmer who has the cellar and the manure as well? Mr. Gardner raises mushrooms, and lots of them. When I visited him last November, instead of trying to hide anything in their cultivation from me, he took particular pains to show and explain to me everything about his way of growing them. And he assures me that by adopting simple means of preparing the manure and “fixing” for the crop, and avoiding all complicated methods, one can get good crops and make fair profits.

His cellar is sixty feet long, twenty-four feet wide, and nine feet high from floor to ceiling. The floor is an earthen one, but perfectly dry. It is well supplied with window ventilators and doors, and in the ceiling in the middle of the cellar opens a tall shaft or chimney-like ventilator that passes straight up through the roof above. While the beds are being made full ventilation by doors, windows and shaft is given, but as soon as there is any sign of the mushrooms appearing all ventilators except the shaft in the middle are shut and kept closed.

The bed occupies the whole surface of the cellar floor and was all made up in one day. As a pathway, a single row of boards is laid on the top of the bed, running lengthwise along the middle of the cellar from the door to the farther end, and here and there between this narrow path and the walls on either side a few pieces of slate are laid down on the bed to step upon when gathering the mushrooms. Here is the oddest thing about Mr. Gardner’s mushroom-growing. He does not give the manure any preparatory treatment for the beds. He hauls it from the cars to the cellar, at once spreads it upon the floor and packs it solid into a bed. For example, on one occasion the manure arrived at Jobstown, July 8th; it was hauled home and the bed made up the same day, and the first mushrooms were gathered from this bed the second week in September, just two months from the time the manure left the New York or Jersey City stables. The bed was fifteen inches thick. In making it the manure was first shaken up loosely to admit of its being more evenly spread than if pitched out in heavy forkfuls, and it was then tramped down firmly with the feet. The bed was then marked off into halves. On one half (N a layer of a little over three inches of loam was at once placed over the manure; on the other half (N no loam was used at this time, but the manure on the surface of the bed about three inches deep was forked over loosely. Twelve days after having been put in the temperature of the bed N, three inches deep, was 90 deg., and then it was spawned. On the next day the soil from bed N, spawned four days earlier, was thrown upon bed N, and then part of the soil that was thrown on N was thrown back again on N, so that now a coating of loam an inch and a half deep covered the whole surface of the bed. When finished the surface was tamped gently with a tamper with a face of pine plank sixteen inches long by twelve inches wide. Mr. Gardner does not believe in the alleged advantages of a hard-packed surface on the mushroom bed, but is inclined to favor a moderately firm one.

He uses the English brick spawn, which is sold by our seedsmen. He has tried making his own spawn, but owing to not having proper means for drying it, he has had rather indifferent success.

Almost all growers insert the pieces of spawn about two to three inches under the surface of the manure, one piece at a time, and at regular intervals of nine inches or thereabouts apart each way lengthwise and crosswise. But here, again, Mr. Gardner displays his individuality. He breaks up the spawn in the usual way, in pieces one or two inches square. Of course, in breaking it up there is a good deal of fine particles besides the lumps. With an angular-pointed hoe he draws drills eighteen inches apart and two and one-half to three inches deep lengthwise along the bed, and in the rows he sows the spawn, as if he were sowing peach stones, or walnuts, or snap beans, and covers it in as if it were seeds.

Mr. Gardner regards 57 deg. as the most suitable temperature for a mushroom house or cellar, and, if possible, maintains that without the aid of fire-heat. He has hot-water pipes connected with the contiguous greenhouse heating arrangement in his cellar, but he never uses them for heating the mushroom cellar except when obliged to. By mulching his bed with straw he gets along without any fire-heat, but this is very awkward when gathering the mushrooms.

After the bed has borne a little while it is top-dressed all over with a half-inch layer of fine soil. Before using, this soil has been kept in a close place pit, frame, shed, or large box in which there was, at the same time, a lot of steaming-hot manure, so that it might become thoroughly charged with mushroom food absorbed from the steam from the fermenting material.

Should any portion of the bed get very dry, water of a temperature of 90 deg. is given gently and somewhat sparingly through a fine-spraying water-pot rose, or syringe. Enough water is never given at any one time to penetrate through the casing into the manure below or the spawn in the manure. But rather than make a practice of watering the beds, Mr. Gardner finds it is better to maintain a moist atmosphere, and thus lessen the necessity for watering.

Mr. Gardner firmly believes that the mushrooms derive much nourishment from the “steam” of fermenting fresh horse manure, and by using this “steam” in our mushroom houses we can maintain an atmosphere almost moist enough to be able to dispense with the use of the syringe, and the mushrooms are fatter and heavier for it. And he practices what he preaches. In one end of his mushroom cellar he has a very large, deep, open box, half filled with steaming fresh horse-droppings, and once or twice a day he tosses these over with a dung-fork, in order to raise a “steam,” which it certainly does. It is also for this purpose that he introduces the loam so soon when making the beds, so that it may become charged with food that otherwise would be dissipated in the atmosphere.

There is a marked difference between the mushrooms raised from the French flake spawn and those from the English brick spawn, but he has never observed any distinct varieties from the same kind of spawn. Sometimes a few mushrooms will appear that are somewhat differently formed from those of the general crop, but this he regards as the result of cultural conditions rather than of true varietal differences.

His last year’s bed began bearing early in November, and continued to bear a good crop until the first of May. After that time, no matter what the crop may be, the mushrooms become so infested with maggots as to be perfectly worthless, and they are cleared out. It is on account of the large body of manure in the bed, and the low, genial, and equable temperature of the cellar that the beds in this house always continue so long in good cropping condition.

Some years ago the mushrooms were not gathered till their heads had opened out flat, but nowadays the marketmen like to get them when they are quite young and before the skin of the frill between the cup and the stem has broken apart. A good market is found in New York, Philadelphia and Boston.

Mr. Denton’s Method.- Mr. W. H. Denton, of Woodhaven, L. I., is an extensive market gardener about ten miles from New York. During the summer months he grows outdoor vegetables for the New York and Brooklyn markets, and in winter mushrooms in cellars. He has no greenhouses. Under his barns he has two large cellars which he devotes entirely to mushroom-growing in winter. The cellars are seven and one-half feet high inside; the beds five feet wide, nine inches deep, two feet apart, and run parallel to one another the whole length of the cellar. The beds are three deep, that is, one bed is made upon the floor, and the other two, rack or shelf fashion, are made above the floor bed, and two and one-half feet apart from the bottom of the one bed to the bottom of the one above it. The shelves altogether are temporary structures built of ordinary rough scantling and hemlock boards, and the beds are all one board deep.

A common iron stove and string of sheet iron smoke pipes are used for heating the cellars. But he tells me the parching effect is very visible on the beds, it dries them up on the surface very much, and he has to sprinkle them frequently with water to keep them moist enough. During the late summer and fall months, on his return trips from the Brooklyn markets, Mr. Denton hauls home fresh horse manure from the City stables. All that he can put on a wagon costs him about twenty-five cents; and this is what he uses for mushrooms. He prepares it in a large open shed just above the cellar, and when it is fit for use he adds about one-third of its bulk of loam. The loam is the ordinary field soil from his market garden. He tells me he has better success with beds made up in this way than when manure alone is used. We all know how very heavily market gardeners manure their land, also how vigorously most writers on mushroom culture denounce the use of manure-fatted loam in mushroom beds, but here is Mr. Denton, the most successful grower of mushrooms for market in the neighborhood of New York, practicing the very thing that is denounced! While he likes good lively manure to begin with he is very careful not to use it soon enough to run any risk of overheating in the beds. The loam in the manure counteracts this strong heating tendency, also with the loam mixture the shelf-beds can be built much more firmly than with plain manure on the springy boards. When the temperature falls to 90 deg. he spawns the beds.

He uses both French and brick spawn, but leans with most favor to the latter, of which in the fall 1889 he used 400 lbs. He markets from 1700 to 2500 lbs. of mushrooms a year from these two cellars. Mr. Denton believes emphatically in cleanliness in the mushroom cellar, and ascribes his best successes to his most thorough cleaning. Every summer he cleans out his cellars and limewashes all over.

Mr. Van Siclen’s Method.- Mr. Abram Van Siclen, of Jamaica, L. I., also grows mushrooms very extensively in underground cellars, whose arrangements do not differ materially from those of Mr. Denton’s, except in his manner of heating. He runs an immense greenhouse vegetable-growing establishment, as well as a summer truck farm, and uses hot water heating apparatus, also smoke flues as employed ordinarily in greenhouses, especially lettuce houses. The sheet iron pipes, except in squash houses, he does not hold in much favor.

The Dosoris Mushroom Cellar.- This is a subterranean tunnel or cellar that was excavated and arched some ten years ago, expressly for the cultivation of mushrooms. It is situated in an open, sunny part of the garden, and its extreme length from outside of end walls is eighty-three feet; but of this space nine feet at either end are given up to entrance pits and a heating apparatus; and the full length of the mushroom cellar proper inside the inner walls is sixty-three feet. The walls and arch are of brick, and the top of the arch is two and one-half feet below the surface of the soil. This tunnel or arch is seven feet high in the middle and eight feet wide within, but a raised two-feet-wide pathway along the middle lessens the height to six and one-half feet. Between this pathway and the sides of the building there is only an earthen floor, but it is quite dry, as the cellar is perfectly drained. Three ventilators sixteen feet apart had been built in the top of the arch, but this was a mistake, as the condensation in the cellar in winter from these ventilators always keeps the place under them cold and wet and rather unproductive. One tall wooden chimney-like shaft would have been a better ventilator than the three ventilating holes now there, which are covered over with an iron and glass grating.

At one end of the house and behind the stairs descending into the pit is the heating apparatus, from which a four-inch hot-water pipe passes around inside the house near the wall and only four inches above ground. A three-feet wide hemlock flooring for the bed to rest on is laid along each side and about four inches above the pipe, leaving the aperture between the earth floor and the bottom of the bed along the pathway open for the escape of the artificial heat. One might think that the hot water pipe under, and so near the bed, would dry it up and destroy it, but such is not the case. In a cellar of this kind very little fire heat is needed to maintain the required temperature, and I do not know where else the pipes could be put where they would do the work any better and be more out of the way.

These beds, for convenience in building them, spawning them, molding them over, gathering the crop and watering the beds, and removing the manure after the beds are exhausted, are built against the wall and with a rounded face, thus giving a three and one-half feet wide surface of bed in place of one three feet wide, were it built flat. This gain in superficial area is not so important as it might seem, for the part immediately next to the edge of the pathway seldom yields very much. Above these beds a string of shelf beds is arranged which runs the full length of both sides of the cellar. From the floor of the under bed to the floor of the top bed is three feet, and the upper beds are just as wide as the lower ones. The shelves for the beds are temporary affairs, put up and taken down every year. The cross-bars rest in sockets in the wall made by cutting out half a brick every four feet along the wall, and on upright strips or feet one and one-fourth by four inches wide, or two by three inches, set under the inside ends of the cross-bars and resting on the cement floor close up against the lower bed. By having this foot end a quarter of an inch higher than the wall end the heavy weight of the bed is thrown toward the wall. Loose hemlock boards set close together form the flooring, for there is no need of nailing any of them except the one next to the upright face board, which is ten inches wide, and nailed along the front, by the pathway, to the posts and shelf board. By tilting the weight to the wall the upright board is firm enough to hold its place against any pressing out in building the beds. The supporting legs of the shelves are also nailed to the face board of the lower bed, and this holds them perfectly solid in place. The shelf beds are eight inches deep at front, but can be made of any depth desired against the walls at the back. The cold wall has no injurious effect upon the bearing of the bed, and many fine mushrooms grow close against the walls.

The entrance pits are nine and one-half feet deep from ground level, three feet eight inches wide, nine feet long, and are covered over with folding doors on strong hinges, and descended into by means of wooden movable stairs. These dimensions are needed at the end where the heating apparatus is placed, but at the other end, although it is convenient in handling the manure, a space two or three feet less would have answered just as well. A close door at either end of the mushroom cellar proper separates it from the end pits. The cellar is divided in the middle by a partition. This gives, when it is in full working order, eight beds, each thirty-one and one-half feet long, or a continuous run of 252 feet or 756 square feet of surface, and as the beds are renewed twice a year this gives 504 running feet of bed, or 1512 square feet of surface. A common average crop is three-fifths of a pound of mushrooms to the square foot of bed, and a good fair average is four-fifths of a pound. This would give over a thousand pounds of mushrooms a season from this cellar when it is in full running capacity. But as the aim is to have a steady supply of mushrooms from October until May, and not a flush at any one time and a scarcity at another, only two beds are made at a time, allowing a month to intervene between every two.

For the two beds, N, preparing the manure begins in July, the beds are made up in August, and gathering of the crop commences in October; work on the two beds, N, begins in August, the beds are made up in September, and the mushrooms gathered in November; preparing for the two beds, N, begins in September, the beds are made up in October, gathering commences in December; for the two beds, N, work begins in October, the beds are made up in November, and the crop is gathered in January; for the two beds, N (N renewed), work begins in November, the beds are made up in December, and the crop is gathered in February; for the two beds, N (N renewed), work begins in December, the beds are made up in January, and the crop is gathered in March; for the two beds, N (N renewed), work begins in January, the beds are made up in February, and the crop is gathered in April; for the two beds, N (N renewed), work begins in February, the beds are made up in March, and the mushrooms gathered in May. After this time of year the summer heat renders mushroom-growing uncertain, and the maggots destroy the mushrooms. This system allows each bed a bearing period of two months. After yielding a crop for some seven to nine weeks the beds are pretty well exhausted and hardly worth retaining longer. They might drag along in a desultory way for weeks, but as soon as they stop yielding a paying crop we clear them out and start afresh.

And when the mushroom season is closed we lift out and remove the manure, clean the boards used in shelving, and give the cellar a thorough cleaning, whitewash its walls and paint its woodwork with kerosene to destroy noxious insects and fungi.

The heating apparatus consists of one of Hitchings’ base-burner boilers with a four-inch hot-water pipe that passes around inside the cellar, and it deserves special mention because of its economy, efficiency, and the satisfaction it gives generally. This boiler needs no deep or spacious stoke-hole. Here it is set under the stairway in a pit four and one-half feet long, by three feet wide, by eighteen inches deep; it is not in the way, and there is plenty of room to attend to it. The heater, like a common parlor stove, has a magazine for the supply of coal. It has a double casing with the water space between and down to the bottom of it, so that when set in a shallow pit there is no difficulty whatever about the circulation of the water in the pipes. The hot water passes from the boiler to an open iron tank placed two feet above it, as shown in the engraving, and thence down through a perpendicular pipe till it reaches and enters the horizontal pipes that pass around the cellar and, returning, enters the boiler again near its base. The boiler and pipes are filled from this tank, which should always be kept at least half full of water, and looked into every day when in use, so that when the water gets lower than half full it may be filled up again. About 134 running feet of four-inch pipe are included inside the cellar (sixty-four feet on each side and six feet across at further end); this gives 134 square feet of heating surface, or a proportion of about a square foot of heating surface for every fifteen cubic feet of air space in the cellar. This proportion is more than ample in the coldest weather, but beneficial in so far that there is no need to fire hard to maintain the proper temperature. A three-inch pipe would have given heat enough, but the heat would not have been so steady. Both nut and stove coal is used in this heater, and in the severest winter weather it burns not more than a common hodful in twenty-four hours. It is so easily regulated that the temperature of the cellar day or night, or in mild or severe weather, never varies more than three degrees, namely from 57 deg. to 60 deg..

In a close underground cellar where the temperature in midwinter without any artificial heat does not fall below 40 deg. or 45 deg. it is an easy matter, with such a heater as this is, to maintain any desired temperature. If the grates are renewed now and then, the heater should last in good condition for twenty years. With the ordinary stove there is danger of fire, of escaping gas and of sudden changes of temperature, and the evil influence of a dry, parching heat just what mushrooms most dislike is ever present. The first cost of a hot water apparatus may be more than that of an old stove and sheet iron pipes, but where mushrooms are grown extensively, as a matter of economy, efficiency, and convenience, the advantages are altogether on the side of the hot water apparatus. Furthermore, hot water pipes can be run where it would be unsafe to put smoke pipes.