Mushrooms: how to grow them a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure. William Falconer

it in a large open shed just above the cellar, and when it is fit for use he adds about one-third of its bulk of loam. The loam is the ordinary field soil from his market garden. He tells me he has better success with beds made up in this way than when manure alone is used. We all know how very heavily market gardeners manure their land, also how vigorously most writers on mushroom culture denounce the use of manure-fatted loam in mushroom beds, but here is Mr. Denton, the most successful grower of mushrooms for market in the neighborhood of New York, practicing the very thing that is denounced! While he likes good lively manure to begin with he is very careful not to use it soon enough to run any risk of overheating in the beds. The loam in the manure counteracts this strong heating tendency, also with the loam mixture the shelf-beds can be built much more firmly than with plain manure on the springy boards. When the temperature falls to 90° he spawns the beds.

      He uses both French and brick spawn, but leans with most favor to the latter, of which in the fall 1889 he used 400 lbs. He markets from 1700 to 2500 lbs. of mushrooms a year from these two cellars. Mr. Denton believes emphatically in cleanliness in the mushroom cellar, and ascribes his best successes to his most thorough cleaning. Every summer he cleans out his cellars and limewashes all over.

      Mr. Van Siclen's Method.—Mr. Abram Van Siclen, of Jamaica, L. I., also grows mushrooms very extensively in underground cellars, whose arrangements do not differ materially from those of Mr. Denton's, except in his manner of heating. He runs an immense greenhouse vegetable-growing establishment, as well as a summer truck farm, and uses hot water heating apparatus, also smoke flues as employed ordinarily in greenhouses, especially lettuce houses. The sheet iron pipes, except in squash houses, he does not hold in much favor.