Mushrooms require a uniform moderately low temperature and moist atmosphere, and will not thrive where draughts, 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 other out buildings. Cellars are imperative for domestic purposes such as storage, and for these reasons they are made frost proof and dry. Cellars are ideal mushroom houses, and anyone who has a good cellar can grow mushrooms.
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 (if the entrance is from another building, a single door will suffice). A chimney like shaft or shafts rising from the ceiling should be used as ventilators in winter, when we cannot ventilate from doors or windows; side ventilation at any time 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. You, also need 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 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 necessary to make and tending the beds, gather the crop, and empty the beds when they are exhausted.
Instead of using box beds, some growers spread the bed all over the floor of the cellar, and leave no pathway. (Stepping boards or raised pathways are used instead) Others make ridge beds all over the cellar floor. 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.
In any other outhouse cellars, 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 anyone 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 opinion of it.
Author Resource:
Jackson Forrest is a mushroom growing enthusiast and runs the popular http://www.MushroomGrowingSecrets.com website where he offers the best-selling ebook "How to Grow Mushrooms for Fun and Profit". Get your copy today!
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