Mushrooms: how to grow them, William Falconer [best novels to read to improve english TXT] 📗
- Author: William Falconer
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The interior arrangement of the mushroom house may resemble that of the mushroom cellar. Beds may be made alongside of the walls and, if there is room, also along the middle of the house, and shelves erected in the same way as in the cellar. But in the case of cold, thin outside walls, the shelf-beds should not be built close against them, but instead boxed off about two inches from the walls, so as to remove the beds from the chilling touch of the wall in winter. Economy may suggest the advisability of high mushroom houses, so that one may be able to build one shelf above another, until the shelves are two, three, or four deep. But this is a mistake. The artificial heat required to maintain a temperature of 55° in midwinter in a house built high above ground would be too parching and unsteady for the good of the mushrooms; besides, a second shelf is inconvenient enough, and when it comes to a third or a fourth the inconvenience would be too great, and overreach any advantage hoped for in economy of space. An unheated mushroom house must be regarded as a shed, and treated similarly, as described in the following chapter.
In large, well appointed, private gardens, a mushroom house is considered an almost indispensable adjunct to the glasshouse establishment, and is generally built against the north-facing wall of a greenhouse. In this way it gets the benefit of the warm wall, and may be easily heated by introducing one or two hot-water pipes from the greenhouse system; besides, in winter the house may be entered from the glass house or adjacent shed, and in this way be exempted from the inclement breath of the frosty air that would be admitted in opening the outside door.
Mr. Samuel Henshaw's Mushroom House.—Mr. Henshaw has raised mushrooms several years at his place on Staten Island. His mushroom house is nine feet wide and sixty feet long. One side is a brick wall and the other is double boarded. The roof is of tin, in which there are three sashes each two by five feet, supplying ample light. At each end is a door giving convenient access to the interior, for carrying in and removing material without disturbing the bearing beds. In winter the roof is covered with a coating of salt hay, to preserve an equable temperature and prevent the moisture from condensing on the ceiling and falling in drops on the beds. The floor is of earth, which, when well drained, he thinks preferable to either brick or lumber. The floor is entirely covered with beds, no shelves or walks being used. This makes it necessary to step on the beds, but as no covering is employed it is always easy to avoid stepping on the clusters of young mushrooms, and so long as they are left uninjured the bed is seldom, if ever, impaired by the compacting effect of the treading. In order to maintain a necessary winter temperature of 60° a four-inch hot-water pipe extends the whole length of the house about two feet from the floor. On the other side of the brick wall is a greenhouse which, by keeping the wall warm, helps to keep the mushroom house warm. Mr. Henshaw divides this house into three equal beds. The part at the further end of the house is made up in the fall and comes into bearing in December; the middle part a month later to come in a month later, and the near end still a month later, to follow as another succession. Then, if need be, and he wishes to renew the bed at the further end of the house, he clears it out and supplies fresh material for the new bed.
CHAPTER IV.GROWING MUSHROOMS IN SHEDS.
Any one who has a snug, warm shed, may have a good mushroom house, but it is imperative that the floor should be dry, and the roof water-tight. Of course a close shed, as a tool-house or a carriage-house, is better than an open shed, but even a shed that is open on the south side, if closely walled on the other sides, can also be made of good use for mushroom beds. While open sheds are good enough for beds that yield their crop before Christmas, they are ill-adapted for midwinter beds. The temperature of the interior of a mushroom bed should be about 60° during the bearing period, and the temperature of the surface of the bed 45° to 50° at least; if lower than that the mycelium has a tendency to rest, and the crop stagnates. Now this temperature can not be maintained in an open shed, in hard frosty weather, without more trouble than the crop is worth. The beds would have to be boxed up and mulched very heavily. And even in a close, warm shed, protection in this way would have to be given, but the bed should not be under the penetrating influence of piercing winds and draughts. The mushroom beds should therefore be made in the warmest parts of the warmest sheds.
The beds should be made upon the floor and as much to one side as possible, so as to be out of the way, and in form flat on the ground, or rounded up against the sides of the shed; in the latter case the house should be well banked around on the outside with litter or tree leaves or earth, so as to exclude frost from the lower part of the walls, and thereby prevent the manure in the beds from getting badly chilled. The beds should be made deeper in a cool shed than in a cellar or warm mushroom house, so that they may retain their heat for a long time.
Shelf beds should not be used in unheated sheds, because of the difficulty in keeping them warm in winter. As a rule, shelf beds are not made as deep as are those upon the floor; hence they do not hold their heat so long. When cold weather sets in it is easy to box up and cover over the lower beds to keep them warm, but in the case of shelf beds, that are exposed above and below, it is more trouble to protect them sufficiently against cold than they are worth.
Generally speaking, the term shed is applied to unheated, simple wooden structures; for instance, the wood-shed, the tool-shed, a carriage-house, or a hay-barn. But we often use the name shed to designate heated buildings, as the potting and packing sheds of florists. Were it not that these heated sheds are simply workrooms, and where there is a great deal of going out and in, and, consequently, draughts and sudden and frequent fluctuations of temperature, the treatment of mushroom beds made in them would be the same as that advised for regular mushroom houses; but as the circumstances are somewhat different the treatment, too, should not be the same. A warm potting shed is an excellent place for mushroom beds. Here they should be made under the benches and covered up in front with thick calico, plant-protecting cloth, or light wooden shutters, to exclude cold currents and sudden atmospheric changes, and guard against the beds drying too quickly.
CHAPTER V.GROWING MUSHROOMS IN GREENHOUSES.
Any one who has a greenhouse can grow mushrooms in it. And it does not matter what kind of greenhouse it is, whether a fruit house, a flower house, or a vegetable house, it is available for mushrooms. One of the advantages of raising mushrooms in a greenhouse is that they grow to perfection in parts of the greenhouse that are nearly worthless for other purposes; for instance, under the stages, where nothing else grows well, although rhubarb and asparagus might be forced there, and a little chicory and dandelion blanched.
Cool greenhouses, in all cases, are better for mushrooms than hothouses. Cool houses are seldom kept at a lower temperature than 45° or 50° in winter, while hothouses run from 60° to 70° at night, with a rise of ten to twenty degrees by day, and this is too hot for mushrooms. It is a very easy matter, by means of covering with hay or boxing over and covering the boxing with hay or matting, to keep a mushroom bed in a cool house warm and free from marked changes in temperature; but it is a difficult matter to keep a mushroom bed in a hothouse cool enough and prevent sudden rises in temperature.
On Greenhouse Benches.—It sometimes happens that the beds are formed on the greenhouse benches, and the mushrooms occupy the same place that might be assigned to roses or any other planted-out crop. The beds on the benches are made one board deep, that is, eight to ten inches of short, fresh manure, and otherwise as in the case of beds anywhere else. After the beds are spawned and cased with soil, by covering them over with a layer of straw litter or hay, sudden drying out of the surface is prevented, and in order to further prevent this drying it is a good plan to sprinkle some water over the mulching every day or two, but not enough to soak through into the bed. About the time the young mushrooms commence to show themselves, remove the mulching and replace it with a covering of shutters raised another board's height above the bed, or with strong calico or plant-protecting cloth hung curtain-fashion over the beds. The accompanying illustration, Fig. 12, for which I am indebted to Henry A. Dreer, of Philadelphia, gives an excellent idea of how mushrooms may be grown and cared for on greenhouse benches. This illustration, Mr. Dreer writes: "is made from a photograph of a crop grown on the greenhouse benches at the Model Farm, by Mr. McCaffrey, gardener to J. E. Kingsley, Esq., of the Continental Hotel.... No covering of litter is used, but the requisite shading on sunny days is secured by the use of cotton cloth stretched over the top of the bed, as shown in the engraving."
My principal objection to mushroom beds on greenhouse benches is their liability to frequent and marked changes of atmospheric temperature and moisture, and to drying out. In midwinter they may be all right, but as spring advances and the sun's brightness and heat increase, the susceptibility of the beds to become dry also increases.
In Frames in the Greenhouses.—Mr. J. G. Gardner has a range of greenhouses some 900 feet long—the longest unbroken string of glasshouses that I know of—for the forcing of fruit and vegetables in winter; grapes, peaches, nectarines, figs, tomatoes, cucumbers, snap beans, peas, lettuce. This range is divided into several compartments, to accommodate the different varieties of crops, also so that some can be run as succession houses. In order to make the most of everything, market-gardener-like, he doubles up his
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