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ng peach stones, or walnuts, or snap beans, and covers it in as if it were seeds.
Mr. Gardner regards 57° as the most suitable temperature for a mushroom house or cellar, and, if possible, maintains that without the aid of fire-heat. He has hot-water pipes connected with the contiguous greenhouse heating arrangement in his cellar, but he never uses them for heating the mushroom cellar except when obliged to. By mulching his bed with straw he gets along without any fire-heat, but this is very awkward when gathering the mushrooms.
After the bed has borne a little while it is top-dressed all over with a half-inch layer of fine soil. Before using, this soil has been kept in a close place--pit, frame, shed, or large box--in which there was, at the same time, a lot of steaming-hot manure, so that it might become thoroughly charged with mushroom food absorbed from the steam from the fermenting material.
Should any portion of the bed get very dry, water of a temperature of 90° is given gently and somewhat sparingly through a fine-spraying water-pot rose, or syringe. Enough water is never given at any one time to penetrate through the casing into the manure below or the spawn in the manure. But rather than make a practice of watering the beds, Mr. Gardner finds it is better to maintain a moist atmosphere, and thus lessen the necessity for watering.
Mr. Gardner firmly believes that the mushrooms derive much nourishment from the "steam" of fermenting fresh horse manure, and by using this "steam" in our mushroom houses we can maintain an atmosphere almost moist enough to be able to dispense with the use of the syringe, and the mushrooms are fatter and heavier for it. And he practices what he preaches. In one end of his mushroom cellar he has a very large, deep, open box, half filled with steaming fresh horse-droppings, and once or twice a day he tosses these over with a dung-fork, in order to raise a "steam," which it certainly does. It is also for this purpose that he introduces the loam