440 QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. [1 Jun, 1898. 
light of a Jamp he earries, all is darkness in this moist warm den. ‘The mush- 
rooms are not picked by hand. This often results in the top breaking 
away from the stem, and thus the market value is lessened. Mushrooms 
should be snipped off about half-an-inch below the head. A long stick witha — 
sharp brad in the end is used to harpoon each button or formed mushroom. 
The area of earth space in the boxes under notice is one and a-half acres. 
Every morning 50 |b. of fresh, crisp mushrooms are taken from the beds 
and sold down town. The business is 2 very profitable one, and the crop 
never ceases. The expenses after the first outlay are not heavy. Mushroom 
spawn in America is worth from £1 to £1 10s. per 100 lb. It can be 
purchased in Queensland in small quantities for 1s. per lb. brick. But the 
intending grower can produce the spawn artificially in this way :— 
Mix two or three kinds of dung—horse and sheep or horse, sheep, and cow 
dung—and heap up under cover, treading it down as the heap grows. Then 
cover the lot with fermenting horse-dung or with bags. Ina month or six 
weeks, if the compost heap has not been overheated, you will find on taking 
out a handful of it that there are small white threads running through the 
dung. This is the mushroom nucleus. It will not keep, however, and should 
be used at once. In a stable which hud not been cleaned out for some time I 
have found the white mushroom fibres on breaking a piece of the trampled 
dung. Seeing that 1nushrooms can be raised in any odd dark, damp shed with 
very little labour, and that there is always a ready sale for them in the cities, 
the business should be a profitable one. 
MALTING BARLEY. 
HINTS ON ITS SUCCESSFUL CULTIVATION. 
Mr. E. F. Srts, manager of the Warwick Malting Company, Limited, writes 
as follows on the subject of malting barley to the Warwick Examiner :— 
In placing before the farmers of the Southern Downs the following hints 
on the proper production of barley for malting purposes, I may state I am 
indebted for my information to the observations of iny late father, Mr. J. G. 
Sims (who may in one sense be aptly called the pioneer of the malting 
industry in Queensland), and other Australian maltsters; to the experiences 
of local growers ; and to my own experiences both before and since I have 
been amongst you. As so many farmers are this year making their first 
attempt at growing this cereel, I would strongly advise all to carefully peruse 
this article, on which great attention has been bestowed, and which has been 
revised by some of the leading and most successful barley-growers in this 
district. The first requirement I will treat upon is the 
SEED, E 
To grow good barley it naturally requires good seed to start with. It may 
be either full-sized grain or the gradings of first-class grain, the latter being 
preferred by many farmers, as it takes less to plant an acre than with the 
larger article; but cleanliness of grain is absolutely necessary to attain best 
results. ‘The seed should be short and plump, and of the Chevalier variety. 
It is only waste of time and labour planting the long thin grain, as the chances 
are 100 to 1 that you will not grow acrop that a maltster can successfully 
treat. There should be no admixture of Cape barley, wheat, oats, or other 
cereal, as is too often the case in local-grown stuff. While on this subject I 
would like to advise farmers against purchasing, for seed, barley that has not 
the foregoing qualifications. Many persons think any grain good enough for 
seed ; but this isa great mistake and cannot be allowed to go uncorrected. 
Numerous orders have been received for seed barley this year, and to meet the 
demand the directors of the Warwick Malting Company, Limited, have had to 
purchase grain from South Australia, and they will offer it to farmers on 
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