We now have an organic mushroom farm in our home.

Kept inside by cold weather and icy sidewalks, my wife, Nancy, and I spent some time on Amazon, where we stumbled across the Organic Mushroom Farm from Back to the Roots, a company in Oakland, California.

The price was about $19, and because the product has mostly positive reviews and we were getting desperate to plant anything (that’s what winter does to us), we ordered one.

The farm comes in a pasteboard box with a plastic bag that contains mushroom spores and an organic growing compound made from used coffee grounds. Instructions say to pop out a serrated rectangle from the back of the box, cut a cross into the plastic bag through the hole in the box, scrape the white mushroom spores to stimulate growth and put the plastic bag open-side-down in a pail of water for at least eight hours.

After that time has elapsed, you return the plastic bag back to the box, place it inside your house in an area that’s bright but not in direct sunlight, water twice a day for about 14 days and then harvest your pearl oyster mushrooms – assuming they are about an inch in diameter and perhaps turning brown at the edges.

After the first harvest, you can get a second crop by removing the cardboard panel on the other side of the box, cutting the other side of the bag and starting the process over.

Even if this entire process succeeds, I wonder whether we will get $19 worth of mushrooms. But it is winter, and the project is entertaining. That means a lot.