d in winter mushrooms in cellars. He has no greenhouses.
Under his barns he has two large cellars which he devotes entirely to
mushroom-growing in winter. The cellars are seven and one-half feet high
inside; the beds five feet wide, nine inches deep, two feet apart, and
run parallel to one another the whole length of the cellar. The beds are
three deep, that is, one bed is made upon the floor, and the other two,
rack or shelf fashion, are made above the floor bed, and two and
one-half feet apart from the bottom of the one bed to the bottom of the
one above it. The shelves altogether are temporary structures built of
ordinary rough scantling and hemlock boards, and the beds are all one
board deep.

A common iron stove and string of sheet iron smoke pipes are used for
heating the cellars. But he tells me the parching effect is very visible
on the beds, it dries them up on the surface very much, and he has to
sprinkle them frequently with water to keep them moist enough. During
the late summer and fall months, on his return trips from the Brooklyn
markets, Mr. Denton hauls home fresh horse manure from the City stables.
All that he can put on a wagon costs him about twenty-five cents; and
this is what he uses for mushrooms. He prepares 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 deg. 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 emphatica