GROWING MUSHK00M8 IN CELLARS. 17 



height of the cellar, may be formed, always leaving a 

 space of two and one-half or three feet between the bot- 

 tom of one bed and the bottom of the next. This is 

 very necessary, iu 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 abso- 

 lutely'necessary. We can grow capital crops of mush- 

 rooms 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 mush- 

 rooms 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 

 2 



