an investigation of the effects of ruffling of the casing soil in the production of cultivated mushroom (agaricus bisporus l.)

ruffling is a practice through which the mycelia containing casing soil will be thoroughly mixed. to evaluate the effects of ruffling of different casing soils in button mushroom production, an experiment was conducted comprised of three levels of ruffling; no ruffling, deep ruffling vs. superficial scratch and eight different types of casing soils, namely: holland peat (c1), north peat (c2), south peat (c3), spent mushroom compost (c4), a mixture of clay and sand (65% & 35%) (c5), tea waste and loam soil (50 %& 50%) (c6), decomposed manure (c7) and finally a mixture of clay and north peat (65% & 35%) (c8). the research was conducted in 2010, in a commercial button mushroom production unit in shahriar located in tehran province. the experiment was a factorial one based on a completely randomized design of three replications. results indicated that the effects of ruffling were significant on most of the characteristics determined (with 1% level of probability). a comparison of means through duncan,s new multiple range test (dnmrt) indicated that depth ruffling increased total yield in holland peat (16.65%) and as well in north peat (14.11%), significantly. the results also indicated that ruffling significantly increased the number of large size (cap greater than 4cm( harvested mushrooms. in the treatment of casing soil through ruffling, the primordial formation (pin heads) occurred in a longer lapse of time.