50 
MUSHROOMS, HOW TO GROW THEM, 
flat, seven to eight inches deep, with a casing of a ten- 
inch-wide hemlock hoard 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-lasting 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 
