An Underground Vegetable Garden.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 11 September 1914, Page 2

An Underground Vegetable Garden.

In Springfield, America, is a wonderful cave garden where mushrooms, rhubarb, and other vegetables are grown at a depth of 75ft. underground. The cave can only lie reached by boat. For this purpose a special boat has been built, and at the mouth of the river is a wharf where the boat can be moored when not in use.

No one believed that rhubarb, an outdoor vegetable, could be grown in" the dark so many feet underground, but the rapidity of the plant's growth is remarkable. The rhubarb is in the first instance planted outside, beinff transplanted to the cave when the roots have had a fair start. Mushrooms are produced in the proportions of 21b. to a square foot in each crop, and there are three crops every year. The cave is also utilised as a storage place for all kinds of vegetables, the farmers for twenty miles around bringing their potatoes for storag* there. Celery is also bleached in .large

quantities

'One advantage of this underground garden lies in the fact that throughout the -year an even temperature is preserved, th« extremes of heat and cold prevailing above ground not being felt that distance below the surface.