aking 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
mushrooms 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 eight inches wide at top, and there
is a foot alley between them. Here, again, no shelf beds are used.

One of the chief troubles with flat-roofed mushroom cellars is the drip
from the condensed moisture rising from the beds, and this is more
apparent in unheated than in heated cellars,--the wet gathers upon the
ceiling and, having no slope to run off, drips down again. Oiled paper
or calico strung along [Symbol: Inverted V] wise above the upper beds
protects them perfectly; whatever falls upon the passage-ways upon the
floor does no harm.

In any other outhouse cellar, 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 any one 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 good opinion of it.

=In Dwelling House.=--The cellar of a dwelling house is a capital place
for mushroom beds, and can be used in whole or part for this purpose. In
the case of private families who wish to grow a few mushrooms only for
their own use it is not necessary to devote a whole cellar to it; but
partition off a part of it with boards a