Snow Apples

Hollywood legend has it that when Director Ernst Lubitsch went there he could think of no better use for the many drawers of his huge, flat-top desk than to grow mushrooms in them. So he interlarded bricks of mushroom spawn and fresh horse manure in the drawers, drew many an inquisitive sniff from visitors but never produced a mushroom.

Director Lubitsch's legendary experiment is not so fantastic as it sounds. Mushrooms, which sprout overnight, sprout erratically. Until an Irish Quaker from West Chester, Pa. took a hand in the procedure 33 years ago, mushroom growing was a matter of almost pure chance. Last week the industry Edward Henry Jacob built up from, a six-foot plot in his cellar was the largest mushroom business in the U. S., and it was busy reaping the harvest from history's most important single improvement in mushroom growing.

From the point of view of the mushroom business, Philadelphia (of which West Chester is a suburb) has three advantages--temperate climate, propinquity to a sophisticated market and to a big supply of horse manure. Just after the Revolution, when Philadelphia was the U. S. capital, local high livers discovered the mushrooms that had grown wild locally for years. Farmers thereupon tried to grow them artificially. Sometimes they got good crops, sometimes none. Then in 1904 Edward Henry Jacob, an accountant in a cream separator plant, began experimenting with mushrooms.

Mushrooms, he learned, are fungi developed from spores which float in the air, too small to be seen by the naked eye. By a process still kept secret, he isolated mushroom spores in little bottles where they developed into spawn in a mixture of sifted manure. Nowadays the Jacob laboratories sell these whitish-brown lumps for 50-c- a quart ready for planting. The Jacob plant gets most of its manure which must be from "horses which are working hard and fed with grain and mixed feeds only," from Philadelphia and Baltimore, pays about $6.50 per ton, uses 20,000 tons a year. Buying the manure is a serious problem, for the supply is decreasing and dealers are notorious for mixing in straw, water and "stale" or mule manure.

Jacob mushrooms grow in concrete, aluminum-painted "houses" which are filled with beds of manure compost and kept pitch-dark. Lumps of spawn are pushed into the compost about eight inches apart. In three weeks fine, white, hairlike mycelia extend from top to bottom. Then a "casing" of loam is put on top and in three weeks more the first white pinheads pop out. Each bed bears well for two or three months. Then the tired manure is stripped off, sold to golf courses as a top dressing for $1.50 a ton. The mushrooms themselves, fat, firm and thick as barnacles on a ship, are tended by gloved workmen who wear miners' head lamps to see in the dark.

Because mushrooms require cool temperature, the 700 growers in southeastern Pennsylvania, where 70% of U. S. mushrooms are grown, have always knocked off from June to October. Summer mushrooms have been grown only in natural caves or abandoned mines. Two years ago the Jacob plant tried air conditioning in four mushroom houses. The experiment worked and last June Jacob installed air conditioning in 30 other houses, will air condition the whole plant next year. Total cost: $250,000. Henceforth there will be mushroom crops all year long. Last week the Jacob mushroom beds were at the peak of their first air-conditioned August harvest, yielding 2,000 to 3,000 three-pound baskets a day. Total yield will be about 250 tons with an average value of $750 a ton, none of which could have been grown without air conditioning.

Founder Jacob, white-haired, white-mustached, lean and 70, sold his business years ago for a reputed $750,000, now putters only occasionally with mushroom spawn, spends more time in his garden or golfing. His company, first just Edward H. Jacob (1904). then Edward H. Jacob, Inc. (1929), in 1935. "for tax purposes'' became Jacob Mushroom Division of Grocery Store Products Co., which also makes noodles and spaghetti. The mushrooms are the biggest dollar item, are marketed in cans under three trade names (Edward H. Jacob, Kennett, Green Hill) and three grades (Fancy Buttons, Sliced, Stems & Pieces). An eight-ounce can of Fancy Buttons sells for about 50-c-". Fresh mushrooms sell for about 30-c- a Ib. Biggest sale impetus of all time are the recent luscious Campbell and Heinz mushroom soup advertisements. Founder Jacob likes to think of mushrooms as "snow apples of the earth."

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