112 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



"Today I paid a visit to the gardener I told you about, to 

 obtain from him the secret of his success. He laughed at the 

 word ' secret ' and said he had no secret about it. The only thing 

 was the hint I gave him about putting it in his warmest house. 

 He made up his bed about one foot deep under the hot water pipes 

 but concluded to box it in, as he thought the heat from the 

 pipes would dry out the bed too much ; otherwise the bed was 

 made up and spawned exactly as for A. campestris. ' A great 

 cropper!' was his exclamation. He said he was never without 

 mushrooms from that bed for eleven weeks. The manure in the 

 bed was only at 75° when he planted the spawn, but it kept at that 

 heat a good while. He estimates that although it takes a greater 

 bulk of the new mushroom to weigh a pound than it does of the 

 old one, he gets more than three pounds of the new mushroom to 

 one of the old sort, from the same space of bed. Now he declares 

 that while be can get spawn of A. subrufescens he will never go 

 back to A. campestris. 



One thing which he especially likes about this new variety is, that 

 if the bed is dry on the top, a light watering with a rose-pot does 

 not injure the young mushrooms, but rather benefits them, whereas 

 with the old variety it is generally injurious to the young pin 

 beads. 



In the fall of 1892 I gave a barrel of this natural spawn to Mr. 

 GrifHn of Westbury, who cultivates mushrooms extensively for 

 market, in capacious cellai's under his barns, heating with hot 

 water. In the winter of 1892-93 he planted some beds with this 

 spawn, but did not get any mushrooms from them. The beds, 

 however, were a complete mass of spawn, so he took them out and 

 dried the spawn for future use. Last fall he again made up and 

 planted some beds with this spawn. He has had immense success, 

 the nmshrooms coming up in great clumps or basketfuls. He 

 wrote to me about them and I sent Mr. Lendel Hallock, of Queens, 

 to try to get a photograph of them, but on account of the narrow- 

 ness of the pathways in the cellar, with the beds placed one above 

 another, and other complications, he could not get a photograph 

 either by flash-light or otherwise. Messrs. Griffin and Hallock 

 took a clump, growing in a space of two feet by one foot, slipped 

 it into a flat, and carried it out of doors to have its picture taken. 

 It contained ninety-one mushrooms, large and small, which weighed 

 six and onc-lialf pounds. The nmshrooms were two days too old, 



