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    Mushroom Growing
    Mushroom Growing
    Mushroom Growing
    Ebook138 pages2 hours

    Mushroom Growing

    By Arthur J. Simons

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    About this ebook

    Mushroom growing is a fascinating hobby and many gardeners take it up seriously, as others do orchid growing, solely because of its absorbing interest. There is a general impression that is difficult but that is hardly true; it would be more apt to say that it is different in the sense that few, if any, of the ordinary rules of gardening apply to the cultivation of mushrooms.

    This early work by Arthur J. Simons is now republished with a brand new introduction.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateApr 10, 2014
    ISBN9781473393318
    Mushroom Growing

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      Book preview

      Mushroom Growing - Arthur J. Simons

      PART I

      WILD MUSHROOMS

      1

      WHAT MUSHROOMS ARE AND HOW THEY GROW

      THE mushroom is a fungus, and, like other fungi, it passes direct from the seed to the fruiting stage, omitting all such developments as stems, leaves and flowers. It possesses no green colouring matter, is independent of the aid of sunlight and employs partly decayed plant and animal refuse to build up its own tissues. Most of its growth is made underground in the dark and there can be little doubt that it appears above the surface of the soil only when this becomes necessary to enable it to reproduce itself.

      Its life cycle begins with the dust-like, almost invisible, seeds which we call spores: they are similar to, though much smaller than, the spores of ferns. Unlike ordinary seeds, these spores cannot germinate and grow in plain soil: they require a special medium which, when artificially produced, we call compost, though a similar medium can occur naturally. When, in a suitable environment, the spores do germinate, they send out fine grey cobweb-like strands which are known as mycelium. This mycelium increases rapidly until it permeates the whole of the adjacent area of growing medium, which then becomes known as spawn. You had better memorise these technical terms because I shall have to use them pretty frequently later on.

      In due course the mycelium becomes very matted: then it thickens in places where many threads intertwine, bulges and sends to the surface a tiny white round pinhead. This rapidly develops into a spherical object from half-an-inch to about two-and-a-half inches across with a squat stalk and a caul or membrane (known as the ‘veil’) closing in the underpart: this is the immature button mushroom. As it grows larger, the veil breaks to disclose the gills or folds of pink tissue in which millions of spores are resting: the stalk lengthens and the mushroom is known as a cup. The final stage is when the cap of the mushroom opens out completely and it becomes a flat with a still longer stalk.

      FIG. 1. The three final stages in the development of a mushroom.

      Unless the wild mushroom has already been eaten by an animal, through whose digestive system the spores will pass unchanged, it is when the veil breaks that the spores fall out and are blown away by the wind to settle, perhaps, on blades of grass in a meadow that is used for pasture, or it may be that they adhere to the hairy legs of insects or to the slimy bodies of slugs which in turn are eaten by birds. One thing is perfectly clear and that is that Nature intends these spores to be associated with animal droppings because that association gives them the best prospect of surviving to reproduce their kind.

      Frankly we do not know nearly as much as we should like to know about the natural requirements of the mushroom. Obviously, since it grows underground, it cannot carry out those chemical changes for which daylight is indispensable: in particular, it must have its nitrogen in an easily available form such as is provided by animal urine and droppings washed by rain through the turf on which they fall, thus stimulating the decay of the roots and stems of the grass. But these things alone are not enough. Even supposing the spores have fallen upon suitable ground, they will germinate only under certain conditions of temperature and moisture which appear to occur in this country most frequently about the beginning of autumn. Since, moreover, even after germination of the spores, the mushroom is a prey at all stages of its growth to various pests and diseases, it is hardly to be wondered at that the countryside is not by any means over-run with wild mushrooms and that, as mechanisation increases, they become fewer and fewer.

      Nevertheless, despite its finicality and the odds against its finding conditions in which it can survive, the wild mushroom is known to have existed on the Continent of Europe, and probably also in Great Britain, continuously for a period of at least two thousand years. It is less easy to determine whether it has been regarded as an article of food for all that time. Claudius, the stepfather of the emperor Nero, is reputed to have died as a result of eating a poisonous fungus and it may well be argued that, when it was served to him, his cooks honestly thought that it was an edible mushroom. So far as this country is concerned, however, it is curious that the word ‘mushroom’ (from the French mousseron) was unknown prior to the beginning of the fifteenth century and even then was applied generally to wild fungi and not specifically to the edible sorts.

      The conclusion to which I have come is that, although peasants may have eaten mushrooms throughout the ages, because they knew how to distinguish them from poisonous fungi, and although it is certain that wild mushrooms were esteemed a delicacy in France at the beginning of the seventeenth century, it was not until about a hundred and fifty years later that the English accepted mushrooms as an article of diet and they did so then largely because the French had by that time discovered a method of growing them artificially and thus producing an article that could be guaranteed safe to eat.

      Some support for this theory comes from my recollections of the grave suspicion with which my parents and grandparents regarded any mushroom picked from the field. All manner of old wives’ tales were in circulation. It was said that a genuine mushroom would blacken silver: but no fungus of this type, whether harmless or poisonous, will blacken silver! Ease of peeling was supposed to provide another test: but some of the best mushrooms are the most difficult to peel.

      Then there was the mediæval belief, which died hard, that there was something supernatural about mushrooms, which were supposed to grow in a single night and wither away at the close of the following day, after the fashion of the biblical manna. This is all nonsense of course. A mushroom takes months to complete its growth cycle and takes several days to complete its development above ground. The simple truth is that, as it grows wild in meadow grass, you do not see it in the pinhead stage and probably do not notice it until the stalk has lengthened and the cap has opened out flat, supposing it to have got so far without being trampled upon or eaten by grazing animals.

      It is perhaps inevitable that superstition should connect mushrooms with fairies: and so we get Fairy Rings. These have their origin in a clump of mushroom-like fungus which, having escaped interference, has exhausted the stock of food materials in the central area, so that the mycelium has been forced to spread outwards in all directions in search of more food. Now such fungi are not merely saprophytes, living in manure and leaf-refuse: they are also parasites living on grass roots from which they extract starch and cellulose in exchange for carbonic acid gas. This gas temporarily stimulates the growth of the grass and we get a bright green ring of lush verdure. Inside this ring the ravenous fungus causes much of the grass to die: but inside the ring of impoverished turf is a circle of mycelium which has died of old age and is now revitalizing the grass. Thus we get the familiar circles, or segments of circles, of bright green grass studded with toadstools, which may persist for centuries, expanding every year to form circles of greater and greater diameter.

      There are three species of edible mushroom, properly so called. The one most people pick wild in meadows, when they are lucky enough to find it, is Agaricus (Psalliota) campestris, the Mushroom of the Field. Its flesh goes brown when cut and, if it is kept too long, the gills go slimy. The much larger Horse Mushroom, which may have a cap as much as six inches across, is Agaricus (Psalliota) arvensis and it is probably from this species that our present cultivated mushroom has been developed. When cut, the flesh goes slightly yellowish and, as it ages, the gills become dry and hard. The third species, Psalliota xanthoderma, looks very like a Horse Mushroom but, if you scratch it, the flesh turns bright yellow and the base of the stem is also yellowish: it is probably this species which is responsible for the mild form of poisoning which causes certain susceptible persons to come out in a form of nettle-rash after they have eaten it.

      Many other species of fungi can be eaten and about a dozen, if eaten, will finish you off. Some of these might be mistaken for mushrooms. So, if you want to go mushrooming in addition to trying to grow the things, you should arm yourself before you sally forth with the two King Penguin books, Edible Fungi and Poisonous Fungi by John Ramsbottom. Then it will be entirely your own fault if you fail to survive.

      Until quite recently many learned authorities, who should have known better, have persisted in spreading the legend that mushrooms are devoid of food value and are merely a luxury vegetable eaten because of their agreeable flavour and because they add variety to other foods. This has now been proved to be untrue and both in Britain and in the U.S.A. mushrooms are now officially recognised as a valuable food crop. They contain more protein than any comparable vegetable and are rich in the protective vitamins B1 and B2 (riboflavin) as well as in all the essential body-building acids, especially folic acid which was previously thought to exist only in spinach, kidney and raw liver and is invaluable in cases of pernicious anaemia.

      Mushrooms can be eaten by diabetics as a substitute for beetroot, carrots, onions and turnips. A rat can live and thrive on a diet of mushrooms alone. Incidentally, it has been stated that all the mushrooms produced in Germany between 1939 and 1945 were reserved for the crews of U-boats. A pound of mushrooms contains 160 calories.

      2

      NATURAL OR HIT-AND-MISS METHODS OF GROWING MUSHROOMS

      WHEN you consider that a mushroom produces a million spores a minute for several days, each spore so light that it will float for about fifty seconds, airborne, before it touches the ground, and yet very few, if any, mushrooms appear in the meadows as a result of all these self-sown spores, it is reasonable to ask whether better results might not be achieved by sowing the spores ourselves. After all, this is what we do in the case of ordinary plants, collecting and sowing the seed in a suitable medium and getting far more seedlings

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