24 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ILLINOIS 



valuable yet that things need be crowded. Then plant your rows of 

 vegetables two feet apart, cultivate with a horse harrow, and make 

 fragment plantings of such things as lettuce, radishes, beans, peas, 

 sweetcorn, etc. Plant along one side of your garden a row of grape 

 vines and keep them thoroughly cultivated; next beside that put a 

 row of red raspberries, then of black raspberries, then gooseberries 

 and currants, then three or four rows of strawberries. The straw- 

 berries, of course, are not to be cultivated after the first season for 

 they must be mulched to keep them clean, and it hardly pays \,o 

 cultivate an old patch. 



If a frame could be made in some corner and covered with glass 

 or oiled cloth, such as gardener's use, some things that are nearly 

 hardy might be planted in theiji much earlier than could be done in 

 the open ground. In this way peas and some other things could be 

 had two or three weeks earlier than if planted at the usual time. 

 Lettuce is nearly a hardy plant and by sowing late, say August, 

 could be had until in November. Bv covering snap beans that were 

 planted late with some old cloth, gfeen beans could be had in many 

 cases for at least a month after the first killing frost. It is hard to 

 coax tomatoes to come early, but by picking off the green ones that 

 nearly have their full size and laying them away in a dry cellar, 

 they will ripen gradually and may be had until Christmas, though 

 they are hardly as good as those that ripen naturally on the vine. 



Do not try all the new varieties of vegetables that are offered by 

 seedraen. Many of them will never be heard of after two or three 

 years. The novelties in tomatoes that ripen ten days earlier than 

 any other tomato are sure to be disappointing. Because a variety 

 of corn has "extra" prefixed to its name is no guarantee that it is 

 any earlier than the same variety without the extra, and adding the 

 word "sugar" to the name will not make it any sweeter or better in 

 any way. There have been many changes in names of watermelons, 

 but have never seen any larger than my father raised twenty years 

 ago in his cornfield, or any better than our neighbors raised in 

 theirs. 



Do not try to raise too many varieties of vegetables. If you 

 have two varieties of sweetcorn or tomatoes, or most of the other 

 things, you are better off and will be better satisfied than if you 

 tried to raise a dozen. 



Mr. Pearson — I know but little about the theory of gardening, 

 but claim to have some practical knowledge of it. I claim that we 

 do have better melons, and sweet corn, and peas than our grand- 

 fathers had, and that we have made some very gratifying progress in 

 this direction. We cannot name a fruit that has been so much im- 

 proved as some of these vegetables. To make a success of gardening 



