82 DREER’S VEGETABLES UNDER GLASS. 
as the trade is a fancy one, and prices depend largely on 
success in pleasing a class of rather particular buyers. 
The five requisites of success in mushroom culture are: 
A proper bed, right moisture, good spawn, uniform tempera- 
ture (near 57 degrees), and good management. 
We may at once dismiss two of these requisites by 
saying that good spawn can be had of any reliable seedsman 
who knows what he is selling, and by emphasizing the fact 
that a steady temperature of 55 to 60 degrees is the best 
that is known.” We have three points remaining for con- 
sideration : the bed, the moisture, and the management. 
The common commercial mushroom is grown in a bed 
made of horse manure and loam. A wet, soggy bed is to be 
avoided, as it will rot the spawn. A perfectly dry bed is 
also to be shunned, as the spawn will no more grow in such 
a place than seeds will start in a box of dry dust. 
The ideal mushroom bed is one in which there is a slow, 
steady, gradually decreasing fermentation; a fermentation 
which by its warmth and vapor quickens the spawn, en- 
courages it to ‘‘run’’ or send out web-like filaments, and 
which finally puts the bed in the condition of an autumn 
meadow—a medium filled with a mass or network of spawn. 
The whole bed ought to become just what the mush- 
room ‘‘brick’’ was when it came from the seedsman, except 
with more moisture. A handful of the material applied to 
the nose will give an unmistakable odor of mushrooms. 
If a heavy shower falls upon a meadow when the 
mushroom spawn is in a feeble state, only partly ‘‘run,’’ the 
spawn will perish and there will be no crop there in the 
fall; and if the impatient gardener applies water to his 
mushroom bed when the spawn is in its early, weak con- 
dition the crop will be wholly ruined. 
If nature (in a good mushroom year) be studied and 
imitated the secret of growing mushrooms will be learned. 
When the spawn has filled the bed, and the little buttons 
