mlock 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 convenience' 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 shutters set
up against the aperture between the lettuce benches and the floor, in
this way boxing in the mushrooms in total darkness.

Mr. William Wilson, of Astoria, has an immense greenhouse establishment
near New York. In his greenhouses, 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 ground, and protected from strong light by having
muslin tacked over the openings between the benches and the beds
alongside the pathways. But his crop was suffering from drip. Mr. Wilson
told me he could not begin to supply the demand. He says whatever he
makes on mushrooms is mostly clear gain. They occupy space that
otherwise would remain unoccupied, and he needs the manure and the loam
in his florist business, and it is in better condition for potting after
it has been rotted in the mushroom beds than it was before it was used
for this purpose.

[Illustration: FIG. 15. MR. WM. WILSON'S MUSHROOM BEDS.]

=Drip from the Benches.=--This must be prevented from the beds above,
else it will soak or chill, and in a large measure kill the spawn. I
have seen many examples of this evil. The beds would be full of drip
holes all over their surface, and although a good many mushrooms her