ey were before, so that the additional expense in
connection with the crop is the labor in making the beds and the price
of the spawn. Mushrooms are not a bulky crop; they require no space or
care in summer, are easily grown, handled, and marketed, and there is
always a demand for them at a good price. If the crop turns out well it
is nearly all profit; if it is a complete failure very little is lost,
and it must be a bad failure that will not yield enough to pay for its
cost. Why should the florist confine himself to one crop at a time in
the greenhouse when he may equally well have two crops in it at the same
time, and both of them profitable? He can have his roses on the benches
and mushrooms under the benches, and neither interferes with the other.
Let us take a very low estimate: In a greenhouse a hundred feet long
make a five foot wide mushroom bed under the main bench; this will give
500 square feet of bed, and half a pound to the foot will give 250
pounds of mushrooms, which, sold at fifty cents a pound net, brings
$125. This amount the florist would not have realized without growing
the mushrooms.

=Private Gardeners.=--It is a part of their routine duty, and success in
mushroom growing is as satisfactory to themselves as it is gratifying to
their employers. Fresh mushrooms, like good fruit and handsome flowers,
are a product of the garden that is always acceptable. One of the
principal pleasures in having a large garden and keeping a gardener
consists in being able to give to others a part of the choicest garden
products.

In most pretentious gardens there is a regular mushroom house, and the
growing of mushrooms is an easy matter; in others there is no such
convenience, and the gardener has to trust to his own ingenuity where
and how he is to grow the mushrooms. But so long as he has an abundance
of fresh manure he can usually find a place in which to make the beds.
In the tool-shed, the potting-shed, the wood-shed, the stoke-hole, the
fruit-room, the vegetable-cellar, or in some other out-building he can
surely find a corner; or, handier still, convenient room under the
greenhouse benches, where he can make some beds. Failing all of these he
can start in August or September and make beds outside, as the London
market gardeners do.

In fruit-forcing houses, especially early graperies, gardeners have a
prejudice against growing any other plants than the grapevines lest red
spiders, thrips, or mealy bugs are