GKO WING MUSHROOMS 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, 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 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 thej^ 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 
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