dried enough, add dry loam, dry sand, dry
half-rotted leaves, dry peat moss, dry chaff, or dry finely cut hay or
straw, and mix together.

The proper condition of the manure, as regards dryness or moistness, can
readily be known by handling it. Take a handful of the manure and
squeeze it tight; it should be unctuous enough to hold together in a
lump, and so dry that you can not squeeze a drop of water out of it.

Some private gardeners in England lay particular stress upon collecting
the fresh droppings at the stables every day, and spreading them out
upon a shed or barn floor to dry, and in this way keeping them dry and
from heating until enough has accumulated for a bed, when the bed is
made up entirely of this material, or of part of this and part of loam.
But market gardeners, the ones whose bread and butter depend upon the
crops they raise, never practice this method, and that patriarch in the
business, Richard Gilbert, denounces the practice unstintedly.

Different growers have different ideas of preparing manure for mushroom
beds, but the aim of all is to get it into the best possible condition
with the least labor and expense, and to guard against depriving it of
any more ammonia than can be helped. See Mr. Gardner's method of
preparing manure, p. 22.

=Loam and Manure Mixed.=--Mushroom beds are often formed of loam and
manure mixed together, say one-third or one-fourth part of the whole
being loam, and the other two-thirds or three-fourths manure; if a
larger proportion of loam is used it will render the beds rather cold
unless they are made unusually deep. I am not prepared to affirm or deny
that this mixed material has any advantages over plain manure; I use it
considerably every year and with good results; at the same time, I get
as good crops from the plain manure beds. But it has many warm friends
who are excellent growers.

In preparing this mixed material I use fresh sod loam well chopped up,
and add it to the manure in this way: First select the manure and throw
it into a heap to ferment, as before explained; then after the first
turning cover the heap with a layer of this loam about three or four
inches thick, enough to arrest the steam; at the next turning mix this
casing of loam with the manure, and when the heap is squared off add
another coating of loam of the same thickness in the same way as before,
and so on at each turning until the whole mass is fit for use, and the
full complement of loa