No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 225 



apart from the top of one bed to the bottom of the next. The beds 

 are made about six feet wide; that is about as long as a man's arm 

 is usually able to reach, and he reaches half way across the bed, 

 goes up one aisle and picks what he can reach and then goes down 

 the other aisle and picks from that. The building should be so 

 arranged that an even temperature can be maintained. It should be 

 heated uniformly. My building is heated with hot water, which I 

 believe to furnish a rather more uniform temperature than any other 

 process of heating. You do not want a dry heat like a fire would 

 make; you want a damp, moist atmosphere. You want your room as 

 near absolutely dark as you can have it. The mushroom is a plant 

 or a fungi, or whatever you call it, that prefers to grow in the dark. 



The matter of ventilation is an open question, a very decidedly 

 open question. When I built my house, they told me that I should 

 provide for thorough ventilation. Once when we had the dumps 

 pretty badly — mushrooms have a lot of diseases that you have to 

 look out for and take care of — one of my neighbors rather laughed 

 at me and told me I hadn't ventilated enough and yet in this upright 

 arch that I have there is not a bit of ventilation. There is an open- 

 ing at the top that I could open and ventilate but it hasn't been open 

 and ventilated since away last fall, when it froze up. I patched 

 the door up until it was practically air tight. The rest of it is solid 

 stone wall, and absolutely there has not been a bit of ventilation 

 and yet I have grown the finest mushrooms I have had right in 

 there. I know of another grower of mushrooms who has his beds 

 entirely under ground, absolutely under ground and covered over, so 

 that the sod and grass are growing on the top of them. He don't 

 ventilate at all, and yet he grows exceptionally fine mushrooms 

 and ships them all to the New York market, so that the question of 

 ventilation, I say, is an open one. I do not know myself which is 

 right, and which is not, although I provided for ventilation in my 

 building, and whenever I could I have thrown the windows open; and 

 it is provided with draft windows, and whenever I could I have 

 thrown the windows wide open and I rather expect it is probably 

 the right thing to do, because cold don't hurt the mushrooms even 

 in winter weather. I am pretty well satisfied that you may freeze 

 them solid because my experience has been that they will stand 

 freezing without injury, in fact they will freeze as hard as frost can 

 freeze them and yet when they thawed out they came right along 

 and produced quite a fine crop afterwards. 



Now I suppose that some of you would like to ask some questions, 

 and I have but little more to say except that as soon as you have 

 extracted all the nitrogen of the manure, that is one of the consid- 

 erations, you have practically nothing left save what phosphoric 

 15—6—1905 



