can do the work, which consists of turning the manure once every
day or two for about three weeks, then building it into a bed and
spawning and molding it. Nearly all the labor for the next ten or twelve
weeks consists in maintaining an even temperature and gathering and
marketing the crop.

Many women are searching for remunerative and pleasant employment upon
the farm, and what can be more interesting, pleasant and profitable work
for them than mushroom-growing? After the farmer makes up the mushroom
bed his wife or daughter can attend to its management, with scarcely any
tax upon her time, and without interfering with her other domestic
duties. And it is clean work; there is nothing menial about it. No lady
in the land would hesitate to pick the mushrooms in the open fields, how
much less, then, should she hesitate to gather the fresh mushrooms from
the clean beds in her own clean cellar? Mushrooms are a winter crop;
they come when we need them most. The supply of eggs in the winter
season is limited enough, and pin-money often proportionately short; but
with an insatiable market demand for mushrooms all winter long, at good
prices, no farmer's wife need care whether the hens lay eggs at
Christmas or not. When mushroom-growing is intelligently conducted there
is more money in it than in hens, and with less trouble.

CHAPTER II.

GROWING MUSHROOMS IN CELLARS.

=Underground Cellars.=--Mushrooms require a uniform moderately low
temperature and moist atmosphere, and will not thrive where draughts, or
sudden fluctuations of temperature or moisture prevail. Therefore an
underground cellar is the best of all structures in which to grow
mushrooms. The cellar is everybody's mushroom house.

Cellars are under dwellings, barns, and often under other out-buildings.
These cellars are imperative for domestic purposes, for storing apples,
potatoes and other root crops and perishable produce; and for these uses
we need to make them frost proof and dry. These cellars are ideal
mushroom houses, and any one who has a good cellar can grow mushrooms in
it. In fact, our market gardeners who are making money out of mushrooms
find it pays them to excavate and build cellars expressly for growing
mushrooms. Indeed, some of our market gardeners who have never grown a
mushroom or seen one grown, but who know well that some of their
neighbors are making money out of this business, instinctively feel that
the first step in mushroom-