50 MUSHBOOMS, HOW TO GROW THEM. 



flat, seven to eight inches deep, with a casing of a teii- 

 inch-wide hemlock board set on edge at the back, and 

 another of same size against the front. The bed was 

 made of horse droppings, six inches deep, and molded 

 over with fresh loam one and one-half inch deep. 

 Over the whole, and resting on the edges of the hemlock 

 boards, was a light covering of other boards, with a 

 sprinkling of hay on top of them to arrest and shed drip, 

 and maintain an equable temperature in the bed. 



Mr. Abram Van Siclen, of Jamaica, Long Island, is 

 one of the largest mushroom growers for market in the 

 country, as well as one of the most extensive growers of 

 market-garden truck under glass around New York. 

 He devotes an immense area under his lettuce-house 

 benches to the cultivation of mushrooms. The beds are 

 made upon the floor in the usual way, only for conven- 

 ience' sake, to admit of plenty of room in making up 

 the beds and gathering the crop, besides avoiding the 

 necessity for building higher structures than the ordinary 

 lettuce greenhouses, the mushroom beds are sunken 

 about eighteen to twenty-four inches under the level of 

 the pathways. As the lettuces are planted out upon the 

 benches there is very little drip from them, hence the 

 sunken beds are well enough. And the temperature of a 

 lettuce house is about right for a long-lusting mushroom 

 bed. Light is excluded by a simple covering of salt hay 

 laid over the beds, and sometimes by light wooden shut- 

 ters set up against the aperture between the lettuce 

 benches and the floor, in this way boxing in the mush- 

 rooms in total darkness. 



Mr. William Wilson, of Astoria, has an immense 

 greenhouse establishment near New York. In his green- 

 houses, under both the side and middle benches, he 

 grows mushrooms, and when I saw them in January 

 there were about 300 square yards of beds. The beds 

 were flat, about nine inches thick, built upon the 



